Writing this post and am getting ready to hide behind strong walls, since mostly lighttpd is meant to fly light, or serve faster without the bloat and dynamic flexibilities. But certain situations may occur where one may have to forget the religion and behave sensibly. For a major project which was collaborated by different teams of our spread out offices, one part was developed by a team who were more exposed to benefitting the furls (friendly urls), by using apache rewrites. The bang off was detected only at the last moment of roll out to the beta deployment at client environment.
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PHP, Tips
htaccess lighttpd, lighttpd rewrites for developer
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.
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Code Snippets, PHP, Tips
php cli, wordpress, xml rpc
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.
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Code Snippets, General Articles, PHP, mysql
MSSQL, mysql
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
Now a days script driven web applications are getting more and more complicated with background operations and triggered events. Debugging or event tracking is tough once the application is moved into production. Fresh and aspiring programmers are always too cautious to wade into deeper waters, and always go with line by line testing. Almost always in the course of debugging or code optimizations I see a lot of them using file_put_contents or echo to check variables at a particular point of execution.
I always gave the pressure to use a good logging system from the start itself, and to add level based message logging with debug_backtrace wherever needed. The most recent class abstraction for php programmers which is being used in our custom framework is attached to the downloads here. The file logging is being done after serializing, compressing and base64_encoding to keep logs in single lines, and to make sure they dont take up too much of the space.
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General Articles, PHP, Tips
php command line, php snippets, php wrapper, script logging
Recently on Kerala News by Asianet, though the wp-simple-tags was there, the posts were not being tagged automatically. And on a detailed check I found it was due to a misconfiguration, and once the same was done properly the tagging started smoothly. But already a set of 8K posts were there with no or unrelated tags mistakes and un awareness of the operators who were posting to the site. Now I wanted these to be tagged properly.
I had already used the word-twit plugin and done some mods to the same, so it was more eaiser for me. Just went through the original code of word-twit and salvaged a small script which is attached here with as download.
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );
The code above loads the wordpress system and initializes the wp variables and connects to the database.
global $wpdb;
Makesure we have the database abstraction object from wordpress, to select the posts, and do all the required manipulations on the same.
require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php' );
Include the inbuilt snoopy class, to mimic a web browser with the most simplicity.
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Code Snippets, PHP
php command line, tag the net, wordpress
This is not much to brag about, still we had a very large dataset as variable dimensional and variable depth, which we wanted to be sent to a custom function using prototype.js. For the data exchange we use JSON, but the varying depth and related tags, made us to do like hell in the javascript templating that we had to find a method to flatten the array in such a way that each of the associative keys would not be mangled.
The final out come is function array_flatten
function array_flatten($p, $ki = ''){
if($ki !== '') $ki .= '-';
$rv = array();
foreach($p as $k => $v){
if(is_array($v))
$rv = array_merge($rv, array_flatten($v, $ki.$k));
else
$rv[$ki . $k] = $v;
}
return $rv;
}
The flattened dataset, helped us to do rendering in less than half the iterations, and the application response was more better after using this.
PHP, Tips
No I am not insane, and after a long days search over the wide Internet, even google admitted defeat, there seemed to be no way to do this. Finally I had already dropped the idea or even let off the thing altogether. But recently for another project I needed to check in for an entirely different requirement and stumbled on the fact. And yes I checked it, voila the shell invoke from mysql trigger is possible.
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Code Snippets, PHP, mysql
mysql trigger shell, php snippets
Pseudostreaming is a protocol that can be installed on regular HTTP servers such as Apache, Tomcat, IIS or lighthttpd. It uses a server side script for Flash-to-server communication. The player sends a HTTP request to the server with a start time parameter in the request URL’s query string and the server script responds with the video stream so that its start position corresponds to the requested parameter. This start time parameter is usually named simply start. This same technique is used by the ultra-popular YouTube service which uses lighthttpd servers.
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Code Snippets, PHP, Tips
flowplayer, pseudostreaming
When you make a bug report or feature request to any sort of project please check you have all of the relevant information and if you can get someone else to check it through. Try searching Google first or ask in a mailing list.
For a performance issue check against an older version of PHP to see if you can work out when it was introduced, if you’re not currently testing the CVS version then check that as well. It may have been fixed already. Reports that language X is faster than PHP will also most likely be ignored, these really aren’t constructive and unless you can identify the issue within PHP it’s pointless to create a report.
Scott in his blog continues to write “Finally, don’t get aggressive or be an asshole when your bug reports get closed. PHP is an open source project and most contributors are volunteers. If you don’t like something then you are more than welcome to submit a patch.”
General Articles, PHP
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