When working with PHP, it is very useful to have a “toolbox” of handy functions and code snippets that can save lots of time when needed. Today, I’m going to show you 10 super useful code snippets that you probably never heard of. Text messaging with PHP using the TextMagic APIIf for some reason, you need to send text messages to your clients cell phones, you should definitely have a look to TextMagic. They provide an easy API which allow you to send SMS to cell phones. Please note that the TextMagic service isn’t free.The example below shows how easy it is to ...

WE who love the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that skeptics once worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online. There is, however, an outdated brand of digital orthodoxy that ought to be retired. In this worldview, the Internet is a never-ending battle of good guys who love freedom against bad guys like old-fashioned Hollywood media moguls. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, and make it impossible to post anonymously copied videos and stories. The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or...

Following my article A String is not an Error, I want to bring attention to an issue that similarly applies to JavaScript in general, but has special relevance in the Node.JS environment.The problem boils down to the usage of {} as a data-structure where the keys are supplied by untrusted user input, and the mechanisms that are normally used to assert whether a key exists.Consider the example of a simple blog created with Express. We decide to store blog posts in memory in a {}, indexed by the blog post slug. For example, this blog post would be posts['an-object-is-not-a-hash'].We start writin...

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography (again). We learned to think about mobile first. We learned how to make responsive sites. And we stopped compin...

I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France. I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance. 1. Do not make any assumptions (JavaScript, the unreliable helper) Probably the most impo...

Lately the ideas for a parallel, shared memory JavaScript have begunto take shape. I’ve been discussing with variousJavaScript luminaries and it seems like adesign is starting to emerge. This post serves as a documentation ofthe basic ideas; I’m sure the details will change as we go along.User ModelThe model is that a JavaScript worker (the “parent”) may spawn anumber of child tasks (the “children”). The parent is suspended whilethe children execute, meaning that it will not process events or takeother actions. Once the children have completed the pare...

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence.In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different from Python‘s functions, they usually talk about anonymity, something that Ruby and JavaScript share...

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still things we can’t do, and there’s no specification to address them at the time of this writing and no way to do them with the APIs we already have (or if there is a way, it’s unreasonably complicated).We can’t do templating across pagesI don’t mean h...