Yearly Archives: 2012

Try Git: Learn Git in 15 Minutes with an Interactive Tutorial

Want to learn about Git and GitHub? It can save you hours of frustration by versioning your code and making it very easy to roll it back to an early date, or even create temporary branches where you can make major changes, and only merge them into the main code base once you’re sure nothing will break.

Despite its usefulness, however, the initial learning curve puts off some people. It can be a little difficult to wrap your head around if you’re not already familiar with the concept of version control.

That’s where Try Git comes in. It aims to teach you the basics of Git with an interactive tutorial that features an in-browser command prompt. The tutorial walks you through different commands, and helps you see how everything works.

If you’re not using Git yet, check it out! And keep in mind that there are alternatives to GitHub if you don’t want to host your code publicly. You can use Git locally, on your own server, or a service like BitBucket that doesn’t charge for private repositories.

Blogs are the Next Big Social Network

Why do people use Facebook? What does it offer, besides an enormous user base, that makes it such an attractive internet destination? At it’s core, it’s just a tool for sharing short posts. Twitter and Tumblr also accomplish the same thing, for the most…

File Upload

Handling File Uploads with PHP

So you want to add a file uploader to your site. It’s quite easy to do with PHP, but first you must understand the inherent risks. You’re going to allow just anyone to take a file and put it on your server. That file…

Find an Image’s Dimensions and MIME Type with PHP

What’s the easiest way to figure out the width and height of an image, as well as the format of the file, in PHP? Given that the existence of a core function for practically everything is one of the language’s strengths, it’s unsurprising that…

Minecraft Icon

Checking the Status of a Minecraft Server with PHP

Have you ever needed to have a script check whether a Minecraft server was online, or retrieve its listing information, like the “Message of the Day” (server description) or the number of active players? Maybe you run your own server, and want to display…

BlogBuzz June 30, 2012

Stripe

Accepting Credit Cards Online With Stripe

Historically, processing monetary transactions online has been a major pain. Conniving financial institutions would force you to pay tons of extra fees, requiring merchant accounts and other junk. Then Stripe came along, bringing some sanity to the e-commerce world. With Stripe, you get a…

An Apple

Commonly Misused Proverbs

It’s interesting how commonly-used aphorisms eventually become used in a context opposite to their actual meaning. One particularly egregious example is the phrase “it’s just a few bad apples,” frequently used to defend a group or organization from the actions of a few. Variations…

Proxying Web APIs with NGINX

Here’s a cool thing I bet you didn’t know could be done with the NGINX server: proxying APIs from web services. Why would you want to do that? Well, for starters, you can avoid running into cross-domain scripting issues. Your client-side JavaScript can query…

BlogBuzz June 16, 2012