Minifi.de – Another URL shortening service

Minifi.de is a URL shortening service like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, and is.gd. You enter a long URL and it returns a shorter one.

Broadway 2 + Lightbox: a Plogger theme

A dark Plogger theme that uses Lightbox 2.

PHP pages return a 404 error on IIS

I was installing PHP 5 on an IIS 6 server when I ran into what turns out to be a pretty common problem. PHP appeared to be installed correctly, but browsing to any page with a .php extension returned a 404 Page Not Found error. While the steps below fixed this for me, I had [...]

Interrupting a script.aculo.us event

A client wanted me to implement a drop down contact form that was triggered when the cursor hovered over a button in the site’s navigation. This was no problem, and I delivered some code using script.aculo.us‘s blind effect. A few hours later, the client contacted me and said that as he moved his cursor around [...]

Building an IIS web server on a home LAN

This post explains how to set up an IIS 5.1 server on your home network for serving web pages, and then add it to your Workgroup so you can edit those pages from a different PC without the need for an FTP server and client. You’ll need a PC running Windows 2000, XP Professional, or [...]

A PHP script for converting between different datetimes

This script converts a Unix timestamp (Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)) to the International Standard ISO 8601 date and time notation (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) and vice versa. I find it useful for verifying datetimes. Date Time Convert

Protecting a download using a unique URL

A PHP script to protect a download by generating a unique link. Each time you visit a page, a unique link is created that can be shared. The link will expire after a certain amount of time or number of uses. With some work, this could be integrated with your Paypal “thank you” page.

A PHP script for testing a MySQL database connection

A simple web page that you can upload to your web site for testing a MySQL database connection.

Resolving transaction concurrency issues in a PHP+MySQL multi-user environment

Here’s how I’m implementing my solution to the lost update concurrency issue by comparing timestamps generated when a record is saved and accessed.

How to Geolocate Visitors Using an IP-to-Country Database

In this post, I’ll illustrate how to use the IP-to-Country database available from http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ to identify the real-world geographic location of visitors to a web page (geolocate) based on their IP addresses. Once you know where a visitor is physically located, you can do all sorts of nifty things, such as send them location-aware content [...]