PHP Trivandrum

A reader once asked me if I could build a command line tool which takes title from one file, and content from another file to create wordpress post. I tried, which finally gave an outline to this script. I dont think that this is very high fly, but for those whom the xmlrpc is mumbo, this might be somthing worth looking into.
Read more…

Code Snippets, PHP, Tips php cli, wordpress, xml rpc

A php script to dump database as sql from MS SQL

We started porting (provide dual support) one of our application from MySQL to MSSQL, sorry, actually we were trying to run the same code base on either MSSQL or MySQL as the client wishes. And those who knows both, will agree to the level of toughness and agony when considers the fact that all of us are on MySQL and are new to MSSQL. In this context, we wanted to provide backup and restore to the application administrator through the system itself, and was not contented with the .bak files provided by MSSQL backup.
Read more…

Code Snippets

In the previous post, I had specified that a code analysis would be presented later on, which is happening now. Though I am not permitted to abstract the whole database abstraction, which would otherwise divulge the core business logic of the system too, I do expect that the following would be enough to guide a MySQL PHP developer to port his application to MSSQL 2005. Mostly the compatablities are maintained. But for the database design, we had to let away some of the wonderful features from MySQL.

We started by a code auditing and reworked the system such that we did not use any group_concat through out the system. Also all timestamp and datetime fields were changed to varchar(19) since we were already feeding those fields with the php function date’s return value or ‘now()’. But there was quite a handful of areas where we were using STR_TO_DATE and with different formats. So this had to be handled in its own way. And it is here we started our regular expression war path.
Read more…

Code Snippets, General Articles, PHP, mysql MSSQL, mysql

At first I thought it should be a challenge, though I did not expect it to be too tough, since we were already using a custom db wrapper. Well it turned out to be well too heavy a nightmare. And there was situations where I even considered retiring from life. I pity those who are paying thousands of hard earned money to buy such filthy crap.
Read more…

Code Snippets MSSQL, mysql

For a cd based time limited working copy, of one of our products, I decided to port our mysql application to sqlite3. Since we had about 70 tables, and all with optimized indexes, and about 24 user defined function 3 triggers and 12 procedures, normally anyone would have thought of simply getting along with the mysql system itself. But I wanted to face the challenge. Thanks to Rob Cameron for the shell script published on his blog RidingTheClutch, Convert a MySQL database to a SQLite3 database, which sparked my thoughts.
Read more…

Code Snippets mysql, SQLite3

Recently I got fed up trying to convince the operators of a client, for whom we had implemented a wordpress site. The operators, even after we repeatedly asked to upload only relevant sizes for certian positions, were trying to make one size fit for all. Hell, places where thumbnails of 1 to 2K would suffice, were being used up by 30K images, resized by our theme constraints. We were running wordpress on lighttpd.
Read more…

Code Snippets php tips, wordpress

While strolling around I found some bits and pieces which I put together to get a short twitter counter in php.

<?php
ob_start();
 
$json = file_get_contents("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/php_trivandrum.json?count=1");
$data = json_decode($json, true);
ob_get_clean();
 
echo $data[0]['user']['followers_count']; 
?>


Nothing more to write now..

Code Snippets, PHP, Tips php twitter counter, twitter counter

After reading Using MySQL as a filesystem, by Ben Martin @ linux.com, I had been pondering over the idea for a long time. And a couple of sleepless nights, the base for phpmyfs, a mysql file storage engine using php at the front end is almost ready.  This is not yet production ready, though the image, or media management part is upto my expectations. Read more…

Code Snippets media sql storage, mysql file store, protected media store, store images in mysql

Recently while working for a wordpress plugin, though there are a lot of solutions for this, I could not find the exact thing which I needed, and thought about writing one of my own. Just writing it and using in the current project would be a waste, so thought I would slap it on here. It would help me in the long run.. Read more…

Code Snippets php pagination code, php snippets, php tips

Once we achieved 20K visits per day at asianetindia.com (maintained by Saturn SPL), we planned to hammer in and our target was 30k in three months. We have achived that view the stats. For this twitter and blog helped a lot. We had added auto blogging, and wordtwit both to the existing asianetindia.com. It means each post when published will be tweeted, as well as a post to blog, which contains the excerpt with a back link to the original.

We wanted to get maximum links back into the blog also, and thought that a track back would be the best method and choose that against auto commenting systems. And a full time tester was doing linking related news and posts from other sites to our blog posts. It started to turn tiring when thought of the volume that was getting posted in a day. At this point, we at saturn started to think of automating the linking drive. The out come is autolinker, which is run using the random cron.
Read more…

Code Snippets wordpress, wordpress xml rpc example