Web Cash

A few weeks ago, I installed the “Per Post CSS and JS” plugin for Wordpress. This allows you to add a custom field to your post and include extra .css or .js files to link to that individual page.

I only realized today – while testing something else – that the plugin had been firing off warning messages because of an oversight in the code. Warning messages annoy me, so I decided to fix it up.
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I read about the Digg API the other day, and I thought it was about time I played around with it.

There is a ton of cool stuff you can do with this. Basically, you send a request to the Digg server and it sends back whatever kind of information you want – category names, recent diggs, recent stories, archived stories, etc. You can read through the API to see everything you can do.

For now, we’ll focus on one nifty little trick – grabbing a random story from a given topic.
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I was looking for a project to tackle today, and I decided to make a script that would convert lengths from one unit or system to another.

It doesn’t sound all that complicated – and it’s not. I had a working script in a few minutes, but I didn’t like it. It had too many functions to do conversions for individual units. I wanted this script to be pretty well abstracted so that I could easily add new unit types – and so that the source code for the class would be very short.
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote a short article about how to create a multi-page form.

The simple solution I suggested involved a foreach loop that cycled through the $_POST array and sent every value along in a hidden input element. After a bit of reflection (and some useful comments), I realized there’s a teeny tiny security hole in that approach – so I’ve slightly modified it to close the loophole.
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While browsing some forums the other day, I came across this question – “How do I find a random date in PHP?”

This is a pretty simple operation, if we make use of a few built-in PHP functions – time(), strtotime(), and date(). In this article, we’ll see how these three can work together to find a random date within a given range.
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This question comes up a lot in forums – how do you send e-mail in PHP?

There are plenty of reasons you’d want to do this. Perhaps you want to send a newsletter to your users. Or you want people to be able to leave feedback through e-mail. Or you just want your users to be able to e-mail the page (or a link to it) to a friend.

How do we do this? The mail() function.
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If you’re working on a user-management system, you may find it useful to be able to create a random password for users.

Some systems generate these initially and have the user log in to set a permanent password. You might also have a “Reset” button, where the script generates a random password and e-mails it to the user.

This quick tutorial will show you how to create an 8 character random password containing a mix of letters and numbers. Or, if you’re impatient, jump straight to the function’s source code
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One of the most annoying things about working with images is getting them into the right size. Screenshots start out huge – and you need to resize them to an appropriate size for your website.

Some blogs automatically resize the pictures for you into a thumbnail – like the image to the right. What if you want the image a different size, though? You could allow the browser to resize it for you, or – better yet – write your own php script to resize the image dynamically.
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Sometimes forms get long, unsightly, and intimidating. It’d be great if you could cut them up into three or four parts – with a few fields on each page.

In order to do that, you need to figure out some way of storing or passing along the information from the first pages. I’ve heard a bunch of crazy ideas – from storing the information in session variables to writing each part to the database.

The easiest thing to do is attach a very brief php function to the bottom of each page. It’ll do all the work for you and continue to post every item the user has entered. (more…)