codedread

Despite my best intentions and my inner voice crying out “microblogging is stupid!”, I’ve been slowly sucked into it. It started innocently enough with the Facebook status. Then I joined the party over at Twitter just to see what all the hubbub was about. When I learned about identi.ca, I decided to check that out a couple days ago (more and more people are joining there now).

The problem, of course, is that not everyone is on the same social network. And you might not want to be on any of the social networks that I’m on. Or you might not trust any of those companies. Enter ping.fm. Click To Read More...

I recently made the switch from PHP4 to PHP5. Let me know if you see any breakages. Lots of hoopla about PHP4 being EOL‘d in 2007, effectively forcing everyone (including hosts) to upgrade to PHP5. Click To Read More...

I’ve been writing a bit of PHP, SVG and JavaScript. Creating nested XML nodes with a procedural language can be a pain, PHP is no exception here. I wrote a quick PHP function to help with my SVG node creation. Click To Read More...

After Rob called my code ugly, I decided to update my technique for embedding SVG into HTML and it finally crystallized into a nice solution for me. I hesitate to say “embedding” because that might imply that I condone the <embed> tag, when in fact I only use it at gunpoint. Rob came up with a suitable term for including SVG in a HTML document: inlaying (as opposed to inlining). Click To Read More...

I posted a week ago about how there are some blogs/sites out there that roll their own web statistics and display them SVG. After reading this challenge on the weekend, I decided to work on my own, roughly mimicking these designs. Click To Read More...

I’ve been pecking a way at this online chat program that I started as an excuse to learn some JavaScript and enhance my PHP skills (as well as get around a certain corporate firewall). It’s coming along nicely. Tonight I added a RSS feed for it so that users can monitor the most recent conversation without having to be constantly logged in. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to manage the deployment of the web application. Click To Read More...

After I wrote this entry, I knew I had forgotten one “gotcha” from my little Remote Scripting experience. I remembered it today. It involves PHP and the annoying aspect of having to declare within a function when you want to use a global variable:

The above will not produce “5″. Without explicitly telling PHP that gSomeVariable is a global variable, it will assume it is a local variable and currently undefined.

Do you know how many time this has tripped me up? The correct PHP code is:

For all the times I made this mistake: AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!