Abdullah Yahya

Recently, I needed to develop a mass emailing application using Coldfusion. I decided to use MySQL this time because it had a web-based management system and I didn’t feel like downloading and installing SQL Server Management Studio. Normally, when developing Coldfusion Apps locally, I would installed the Coldfusion Developer Edition. But, it’s so big and the installation process is kinda long, I decided to Railo. Railo is an open-source CFML processor. It’s compatible with almost all of the original Adobe Coldfusion tags and functions. It’s also very small (8 MB) and the Express version is super simple to install. Just double-click on a batch file and your web server is running. That’s pretty much the installation process. You could even put the whole thing on a USB drive. Continue reading Railo: Open-Source Coldfusion Application Server

Recently, I installed WordPress and a theme that used an image resizer extension called “TimThumb“. It turns out it’s actually pretty fast and useful. For example, if you have an image on your server called “castle1.jpg”, you can display it in your website as usual using

[cc lang=”html”][/cc]

and, if you want to resize it without having to go into Photoshop, resizing it, uploading it to your server, using TimThumb, you can just do this: Continue reading Simple, On-The-Fly Image Resizing in PHP

Here are a couple of different ways to improve website performance using 3rd party services:

• Google PageSpeed Service
  Page Speed Service New! is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites by applying web performance best practices and serves it to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.
  This is a paid service
•  Amazon CloudFront CDN
  Upload and deliver website components such as images, videos, audio, javascript, etc from Amazon’s cheap CDN
  This is a pay-per-use service
•  Yotta Site Speed Optimizer
  Similar to Google PageSpeed Service
  This is a paid service
• CloudFare
  Free to paid

PHP provides the header( ) function for redirecting users to another page, e.g.

[cc lang=”php”]header(“Location: http://www.google.com”);[/cc]

but, in case that doesn’t work, here’s a custom method that will attempt to redirect your users in 3 different ways:

[cc lang=”html”]
function redirect($target) {
if (!headers_sent()) {
header(“Location: $target”);
}

echo “n”;
echo “document.location = ‘” . $target . “‘;n”;
echo “

If you are not automatically redirected, please click here“;
exit;
}
[/cc]

then, you can redirect using this new function like this

[cc lang=”php”]redirect(“http://www.google.com”);[/cc]

Having an error log in PHP is great because it allows you to see errors without showing them to your users. But, it’s often very difficult to fix errors without knowing what page a user was viewing that generated the error. Here’s some code that you can add to your PHP website to include the server request URI in your error log.

[cc lang=”php”]/* *************************/
/* HANDLE NON-FATAL ERRORS */
/* *************************/
function debugErrorHandler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline)
{
if (error_reporting()!==0) {
switch ($errno) {
default:
error_log(“PHP Warning Debug: Server Request URI: ” . print_r($_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”], true));
break;
}

return false; // false -> Execute PHP internal error handler
}
}

set_error_handler(‘debugErrorHandler’);

/* *************************/
/* HANDLE FATAL ERRORS */
/* *************************/
function shutDownFunction() {
# Using error_get_last is the “right” way, but it requires PHP 5.2+. The back-up is a hack.
if (function_exists(‘error_get_last’)) {
$lastPHPError = error_get_last();
$phpFatalError = isset($lastPHPError) && $lastPHPError[‘type’] === E_ERROR;
} else {
$phpFatalError = strstr($output, ‘<b>Fatal error</b>:’) && ! strstr($output, ‘</html>’);
}

if ($phpFatalError)
error_log(“PHP FATAL Debug: Server Request URI: ” . print_r($_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”], true));
}

register_shutdown_function(‘shutDownFunction’);[/cc]

Add this to the top of your PHP pages (by including it) and you’ll see the server request URI in your error logs.

Recently, I needed to create a new line in a containing multiple lines of text using PHP. I thought I could just do

[cc lang=”php”]$message = ‘abcde n’;[/cc]

but, apparently PHP interprets that as a literal  slash followed by the letter n. The trick is you need to use double-quotes to get the new line to show up, as in

[cc lang=”php”]$message = “abcde n”;[/cc]

1. Redirect to a File Not Found page
If a file doesn’t exist, you can redirect your users to a page saying so.

2. Redirect to the correct location of a file
If, for example, your server treats file names with case sensitivity turned on, then a request to abc.php and Abc.php will be different. If all your file names are in lowercase, then a request to Abc.php will return file not found. Fix this Continue reading Different Ways to Use a 404 File-Not-Found Handler

I’m still using a PC but I do have an iPhone 🙂

Enjoy heaven! You’ll surely be missed.

Bye …