From the category archives:

Development

Desert Code Camp

Here, finally is the post for Desert Code Camp that I promised to make available. First off, thanks to everyone who attended my session on Integrating Facebook Connect. Secondly, please feel free to ask me questions via email, Twitter, or by commenting here.
Please feel free to download the source code. For each file in the [...]

Read the full article → November 6, 2009

Signing AWS requests in PHP

Recently Amazon added the requirement that all requests must be signed. The process of signing requests is documented on this product advertising API page. Based on the steps listed there, and with a lot of help from @giltotherescue, I was able to create a PHP function to create a signed request URI based on a [...]

Read the full article → August 19, 2009

SCP for Komodo IDE

I have just finished developing my first Komodo IDE plugin. I love Komodo. It’s the first IDE for PHP that I’ve been very, very happy using. I’ve run it on Windows, Linux and now on a MacBook. The only frustration I’ve had is that Komodo doesn’t support basic integrated file uploading via SCP. While it [...]

Read the full article → August 17, 2009

Facebook Connect comments as WordPress plugin

My article Integrating Facebook Connect using the Thesis theme has generated a great deal of interest and several requests for a WordPress plugin. I personally haven’t had the time or inclination to create a plugin, but my friend and colleague Aaron Collegeman has. He was interested in the concept for one of his projects and [...]

Read the full article → August 14, 2009

Doing more at once

I’ve been doing a lot of work with curl_multi in PHP lately because it just makes sense to do as much work in parallel as possible (in most cases). I’ll be writing up my experiences with curl_multi later.
So, yesterday’s announcement by the Facebook development team about fql.multiquery couldn’t have come at a better time for [...]

Read the full article → June 17, 2009

Poor programmer’s website monitor

If you manage your own web site, it’s critical to know when there are problems, and hopefully you’ll know before your users do. There are several enterprise-grade server monitors and website monitors available ranging from free to expensive, but if you need something right now that’s simple and free, you might consider the solution I [...]

Read the full article → May 26, 2009

Amazon web services change for associates

Although I haven’t written about it yet, for me the most important set of web services and APIs for my work are provided by Amazon. Without a doubt I use these services more than any others. Today I received this message:

Effective immediately, we are renaming the Amazon Associates Web Service as the “Product Advertising API.” [...]

Read the full article → May 8, 2009

Building an Ajax content proxy in PHP

Last week I wanted to write an article about using Google docs as a data store for use in Javascript, but in order to do so, I first need to provide a basic article about content proxies.
For security reasons, Ajax requests are only allowed to domains from which the code originates. For example, if your [...]

Read the full article → May 5, 2009

Twitter, OAuth vulnerability, and service interconnectedness

It’s ironic that the day that my post on integrating Twitter OAuth (and other third-party authentication) appeared that a vulnerability in OAuth would be identified.
I didn’t write about the potential hassle that site owners will endure when third-party services become unavailable due to bugs or other problems, but it’s a huge consideration for web developers. [...]

Read the full article → April 23, 2009

Use Twitter, Facebook, OAuth or OpenID for login?

Now that OAuth is officially available for accessing the Twitter API, it’s technically possible to use Twitter’s services as an authentication method for logging into your web site. In fact, when setting up a new Twitter OAuth application, there’s an option suggesting that very use.

This is not a new concept, but with the recent proliferation [...]

Read the full article → April 22, 2009

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