Posts tagged as:

PHP

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

Another way to cache

Obviously, I’m a big fan of the performance increases that can be achieved by using memcache. Another potential cache-based tool for enhancing your server-side PHP code is to use an opcode compiler and caching tool such as APC.
In addition to being a fantastic piece of technology by itself, APC also provides meaningful tuning options and [...]

Read the full article → June 11, 2009

Memcache, memcache, memcache!

Possibly the single-most important piece of advice I give to every software developer right now is to use memcache (or memcached to be specific). I’ve become an evangelist of the software since working for Squidoo.
Memcache is just exactly what it says it is — a memory cache daemon (service). It’s lightweight and very fast and [...]

Read the full article → May 20, 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

jQuery autocomplete

Autocompletion of web-based forms has become so common that it has reached the point of being an expectation. Fortunately (again), there is a jQuery solution that makes this a simple addition to any form.
The first step is to download the jQuery Autocomplete plugin and check out the documentation. Make sure that you include the script [...]

Read the full article → April 28, 2009

Geeking out

I’ve enjoyed geeking out the past few days, but the example I wanted to show today is taking longer than I had expected, so I have to delay that one. I’m going to do more mini-tutorials and examples over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
If you’re new to this site, please take a look [...]

Read the full article → March 26, 2009

Tracking events with Google Analytics

If you have any type of web site at all, you’ve heard about Google Analytics by now. It’s the Google solution to analyzing your web traffic. One of the more recent features in Analytics is the ability to track events that occur on your page that aren’t traditional page views. For example, if you have [...]

Read the full article → March 24, 2009

Integrating Facebook Connect using the Thesis theme

Propeller-head alert! This is a very technical article.
I’ve received a number of questions about how I integrated Facebook Connect with my blog, so I thought I’d go ahead and explain exactly how I did it. I’m still working on making a very simple open-source Wordpress plugin that does the same thing, but you should be [...]

Read the full article → March 16, 2009

Improve my eBook

In 2003, I needed to build a custom PHP extension for an email tool I was writing in PHP. I found the online documentation to be available but sparse and difficult to grok as it lacked context and examples.
After working through a trial extension and then the actual production extension that we needed, I decided [...]

Read the full article → February 17, 2009