Web Cash

Practically every site today has an RSS feed. Now, you could be like everyone else and simply use this as a way to read information as it’s published.

Or, you could use RSS for what’s intended for - content syndication. With Simple XML, it’s a piece of cake to use an RSS feed to add a list of links to relevant articles on your page.
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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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Something I struggled with recently was assigning individual style sheets to posts on this Wordpress blog. For example, if I was writing a CSS tutorial I didn’t want to muck up my general stylesheet with a bunch of styles - it’d be nice to write a small stylesheet and attach it only to the specific post that needs it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a built in function of Wordpress. Fortunately, you can add this functionality with a plugin.
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While browsing through dZone the other day, I stumbled on this article - 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmer.

While I don’t agree with all of the author’s points, it’s an interesting list of php coding habits to avoid - but that most of us tend to pick up anyway. Here’s a list of my five biggest pet peeves.
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If you’re working with a user-management system in PHP (or any scripting language), than you’re likely using either the md5() or crypt() function to encode and store the user’s password.

An oft-asked question - and oft-misunderstood - is what is the difference? Is one better than the other?
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Browsing through DZone, I stumbled on an interesting illustration - the Programmer’s Food Pyramid.

The Pyramid illustrates the different activities that someone generally engages in while learning to program. While looking at the pyramid, I thought, “Do I do all these things?”
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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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