Lately I’ve been rediscovering the joy of PHP. Also been helping an MVP get off the ground which uses a lot of nocode/lowcode bits and pieces and miraculously puts them together. Anyway, I had to write to an Airtable table with PHP and some quick googling didn’t find an example to copy-paste so I’m writing […]

Originally published at http://phpadvent.org/ in 2009. The site is no more, but I found a copy on my hard drive. I’m not sure but I do hope it’s the final version because Sean Coates (@coates) and Chris Shiflett (@shiflett) did a really nice job editing the pice. Also hope it’s still funny… With the unemployment […]

Part 1 ended with todos. The first one was to couple the server-side generated code with the client-side React, so that any updates past the initial page load will be handled by React’s client JS, which is where React shines. Let’s see how you can do just that. PHP data fetch, gluing JS for v8 […]

Problem: Build web UIs Solution: React Problem: UI built in JS is anti-SEO (assuming search engines are still noscript) and bad for perceived performance (blank page till JS arrives) Solution: React page to render the first view Problem: Can’t host node.js apps / I have tons of PHP code Solution: Use PHP then! This post […]

Motivation? Run JS code inside PHP. Just… because 🙂 I struggled for a while with this installation, so leaving a trail here for anyone looking. What you need to accomplish? Goal: run JS code inside a PHP script running on a webserver. Already accomplished: Macs come with a webserver (Apache) and PHP. To get there: […]

The object literal notation in JavaScript looks like: var fido = {name: "Fido", barks: true}; or var fido = {}; fido.name = "Fido"; fido.barks = true; From assoc arrays to objects In PHP you would call that an associative array. $fido = array( ‘name’ => "Fido", ‘barks’ => true ); And you can easily make […]

The first part is here, the second is here. This third post is more about PHP and COM, rather than HTTPWatch or monitoring web performance, so feel free to skip if the title mislead you 🙂 Keep reading if you want to use and improve/update my HTTPWatch class in the future. The problem After running […]

In part 1 I demonstrated how you can use PHP to script and automate HTTPWatch. And how you can get data back, either reading the API docs or using a quick HAR hack to get a lot of data in one go. Now I want to share a little class I wrote to make all […]

HTTPWatch is a nice tool to inspect HTTP traffic in easy and convenient way and it works in both IE and FF now. Drawback – windows-only and paid. But the free version is good enough for many tasks. HTTPWatch can be automated and scripted which is pretty cool for a number of monitoring-like tasks. Their […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 11 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. After removing all the extra HTTP requests you possibly can from your waterfall, it’s time to make sure that those that are left are as small […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 8 This article is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. This is also the first ever guest post to this blog. Please welcome the world-famous Christian Heilmann! And stay tuned for the next articles. Chris Heilmann is a self confessed data junkie […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 7 This is the seventh in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. UPDATE: While this post is an interesting study, the problem it solves turns out to be much simpler. […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 2 This is the second in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. While theoretically you can speed up your site by just blindly following advice from this blog and other […]

This posts is one of those “note to self” kinda posts. I just finished installing PHP and Apache on my Mac OS 10.5.6 and though I should document the experience should I (or you) need to do it again. It could already be there The default OS install came with goodies like ruby and php […]

Was having fun today with idiff.php – a PHP shell script to tell you if two images are visually different by comparing them pixel by pixel. If there’s a difference, the script creates a third image – black background with the different pixels in green. Only after writing the script I found that there’s an […]

It’s that time of the year again. Time to cast my vote as part of the jury in Packt’s open-source awards, category “PHP CMS”. (for my last year’s rant, check the internet archive copy) How to judge a CMS? How to judge a CMS? Tough one. How do you judge any piece of software anyway? […]

I’ll be speaking at the php|works and pyWorks conferences in Atlanta, Georgia in November, they’ll be held together and there is a central track that has topics of interest to both phpiers and pythonistas, this is where I come in. The conference(s) schedule is here and this is me: “Image optimization for the web”

This is a sort of a catch-up post for listing what I’ve been up to lately. YUI Blog just published my first article, I’m so proud. It’s about loading JavaScript in non-blocking fashion, because JavaScripts, they, you know, like, block downloads. Luckily, there’s an easy fix – DOM includes, which I’ve previously discussed, discussed and […]

One of Yahoo’s performance rules says: Use cookie-free domains for static components. This is good because the server has no use for cookie information when serving a JPEG or another static component, so all this cookie information creates network traffic for no reason. One of the implications of following the rule is related to the […]

Philip “Bluesmoon” Tellis has posted a tiny (under 3K minified) JavaScript library to format dates, inspired by PHP’s strftime() Examples: d.strftime(‘%Y/%m/%d’) » en: 2008/04/25 » fr: 2008/04/25 » de: 2008/04/25 d.strftime(‘%A, %d %B’) » en: Friday, 25 April » fr: Vendredi, 25 Avril » de: Freitag, 25 April There’s also a demo to fiddle with. […]

The basic idea of a Web 2.0-style “mashup” is that you consume data from several services, often from different providers and combine them in interesting ways. This means you often need to do more than one HTTP request to a service or services. In PHP if you use something like file_get_contents() this means all the […]

Writing readable code means proper indentation. Usually you’d tab (or use 2 or 4 or 3 spaces) after every curly bracket. Something like this: if (true) { // indent if (false) { // another indent // and some more } } Same goes when you have a bigger hash/object sort of thing: var memememe = […]

This post is a demo of what the imagefilter() PHP function can do for you. The Original imagefilter() called with different filter constants Filter: IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESSCode to reproduce: <?php $image = imagecreatefrompng(‘nathalie.png’); imagefilter($image, IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESS, 5); imagepng($image, ‘img_filter_brightness_5.png’); imagedestroy($image); ?> Filter: IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESSCode to reproduce: <?php $image = imagecreatefrompng(‘nathalie.png’); imagefilter($image, IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESS, 50); imagepng($image, ‘img_filter_brightness_50.png’); imagedestroy($image); ?> Filter: IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESSCode to reproduce: <?php $image = imagecreatefrompng(‘nathalie.png’); imagefilter($image, IMG_FILTER_BRIGHTNESS, 100); imagepng($image, ‘img_filter_brightness_100.png’); imagedestroy($image); […]

Aloha, I’m back from a family vacation in Maui, HI, feeling rejuvenated after having fun on some nice beaches with crystal water, seen an ex-volcano, sunsets, etc. An email from PHP Quebec was in my inbox saying I’ll be speaking at the 2008 PHP Conference in Montreal. Isn’t that great?! I’ll have a chance to […]

Another one from the “this is not a syntax error” department. The front-end developer is a strange beast who has to jiggle to and fro and code in several languages literally at the same time – javascript, html, css, php or some other server side language, some SQL dialect… No wonder that sometimes we make […]