Sometimes I want to see all the user-defined functions that are in memory when a page loads. Maybe the page doesn’t need certain functions and I can realize performance improvements by removing them. And sometimes — I’m being candid here — I copy functions from one application into a library file for another and don’t need any of them for the current application. This function, offering some diagnostic PHP, helps.
Articles Archive
Diagnostic PHP: Get All Included Files
Sometimes when developing, it’s helpful to echo some diagnostic information to the screen. Here’s some simple diagnostic PHP I use for displaying all included files.
Hayes Shutters Online Ordering System
Word-of-mouth referrals are still our favorite source of new business. One day no so long ago, I called a fellow (actually lady) Web developer after reading her humorous and all-too-familiar account of a “sales call from hell” on her Facebook timeline. After some commiserating, we shared highlights of recent projects and agreed to think of each other if and when opportunities to collaborate arise. Before we hung up (a soon-to-be-obsolete metaphor, I imagine), I had contact information for two prospects who might need my services. A little more than a month later, one of those prospects became a client. This article describes my first project with that client.
CSS Descendant Selectors
CSS descendant selectors (also known as contextual selectors) allow you to write lean, clean, semantic html and CSS markup with a minimum number of class and ID names, making your code easier to understand and maintain, and maybe even giving you a sense of harmonious calm. In this article, I explain this claim with an example.
Custom Web Form: Contract Generator in PHP & MySQL
Forms are the engine that drive user interactivity on the Web. We see them everywhere — they are the meat of eCommerce Web sites and online surveys, and simple versions of forms are common on “Contact Us” pages. Some forms are easy to make, using basic HTML, online form builders, or plugins for platforms like WordPress. But there are other applications for Web forms — including some applications for which you might not initially think a form is the answer — that require a custom solution with custom programming. This article describes a project in which we created a form-based system for generating contracts for a private school’s Independent Study Program. This system, housed within the existing password-protected Intranet/Administrative area of the school’s Web site, automates and streamlines the process of generating contracts, minimizing the need for manual calculations and eliminating most, if not all, of the opportunities for user error.
BlueHost Implements Auto-Updating of WordPress. WTF?
This is crazy. I’m not talking about managed sites here. BlueHost decided on their own to implement auto-updating of WordPress for all their shared hosting accounts using WordPress. And not just minor/security releases. I just discovered four sites I manage were updated to WordPress 4.3 without my knowledge or approval. I had good reasons for […]
How to Create Tooltips with CSS (Only)
CSS is so big that unless we work with it diligently on a day-to-day basis — and live long enough, we’re likely to be dealing with just the tip of the iceberg. In this article, I show a simple technique for creating tooltips with nothing more than CSS (no JavaScript). Hat-tip to Travis Neilson, whose DevTips YouTube channel is very informative and a real hoot.
Side Effects of Rebuilding Web Sites to be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly
What drives many to rebuild their existing Web sites to be responsive and mobile-friendly are justifiable concerns about user experience and search engine placement. After all, the need to make Web pages look and act right on small mobile devices has only intensified as more and more people spend proportionately more of their Internet time on those devices. And then there’s Google, who, on April 21, 2015, started boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Yet it is a side effect of this rebuild process that may turn out to be the best reason of all to undertake it. In this article I share the insightful and unsolicited comments of a client with whom I am rebuilding his Web site to be responsive and mobile-friendly.
Traffic Does Not Equal Audience
Making coffee this morning with one of the network news shows on in the background, I caught the tail end of an interview with Michael Wolff. Wolff, the provocative essayist, author, and columnist, was promoting his latest book, "Television Is the New Television". Something he said reminded me of Pamela Anderson.
Sort Multidimensional Arrays with PHP array_multisort
Without question, the most common operation in the Web applications I build is retrieving gobs of structured data and displaying that data in some order. In most cases, the data comes from database tables. But not always. In this article, I share what I’ve found out about how one can use the array_multisort function to sort multidimensional arrays.