Category Archives: Coding

Display Your Latest Tweet on Your Website

More and more bloggers are displaying their latest postings to Twitter on their sites, most frequently in the sidebar.

There are WordPress plugins that can accomplish this, such as Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Then there are the simple widgets offered by Twitter themselves. But with such an extensive API available, wouldn’t it be more fun to do it yourself?

Joost de Valk has an article that explains just how to Easily display your last Tweet.

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Post to Twitter From a PHP Script

If you’ve used Twitter for long, you’re probably aware of their impressive API. Nearly any day-to-day task that you can perform on Twitter.com can be done programmatically via the API. (This enables us to have useful applications like Twhirl.) Now, suppose you would like…

CodeIgniter – Open Source PHP Web Application Framework

CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that incorporates the MVC methodology. It’s fairly lightweight, doesn’t require messing around with the console, and once you get used to it, it might make it easier and faster to code. CodeIgniter simplifies many tasks, such as database I/O…

PHP Parse_URL()

The Parse_URL function can dice a URL into individual segments for later usage. Suppose you’ve just parsed a group of RSS feeds, and you’re looping through the results, displaying the ten most recent. You would like to put the items’ source domains under the…

PHP Parse_Str() Function

If you’ve ever worked with WordPress’s “template tag” functions, you may have noticed that some of them take arguments in a strange way. Instead of passing arguments like function($1, $2), they are handled much a URL query string, like function('exclude=this&order=asc'). This enables you to…

cURL From the Console

cURL is often used on the server end to pull web pages and RSS feeds for parsing, or for interacting with APIs. It’s a nifty tool, and one that I use quite frequently. cURL also can be used, in a command line environment, to…

PHP Filter_Var() – Sanitize Common Data Input

Filter_Var() is a PHP function intended to help validate and sanitize certain types of data. It can verify that an email address is in a correct format, remove harmful characters and tags, etc.. I discovered this interesting feature through Sanitize and Validate Data with…

Easy PHP Caching: Speed-Up Dynamic Content

Caching dynamic content can save a lot of proceesing power, potentially saving a server from total meltdown under extremely high traffic loads. The popular WP Super Cache plugin has demonstrated this, helping blogs on small shared hosts survive the “Digg Effect” longer. If a…

Open Links in New Windows or Tabs Without Target=”Blank”

Though it’s not considered good practice to go around opening new windows on people, it still is something that there are practical uses for. There are legitimate reasons to open new windows, other than trying to open all of your external links in new…

Why Does SimplePie Replace Some Characters With Gibberish?

Sometimes when you use SimplePie to load and output an RSS feed, some characters, like quote marks and apostrphes, are replaced with some gibberish like €‡™. You may wonder what’s wrong, and search to find a way to prevent the unsightly garbage from appearing.…