Gaya Design » php

Notifications: the other approach

Gaya — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:08:14 +0000

A normal problem: notifications or updates that have to be displayed on a website, but it's kind of overloading the backend. But as long as the page is open: please update the status dynamically (if necessary) without reloading the page. I can hear you think: AJAX! Yes, I'll use AJAX for sure. But there is a little problem when it comes to how up-to-date you want these notifications to be without overloading the backend of the website. In this article I'll approach pushing notifications from another perspective, regulating them in the backend rather than the frontend.

PHP ORM: Models and PHP Object Generator

Gaya — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:20:59 +0000

If you are a developer, especially in the object orientated parts, you must heard of the Model View Controller design pattern. This post will tell you a bit about models and how you can use them to lift your code to a higher level and safe a lot of time in the development process. I will also tell you about PHP Object Generator (POG) to use for implementing your models.

WordPress Plugin: Mark as Read

Gaya — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:20:24 +0000

For the first time ever I created my own plugin. Starting out as a hacking attempt, it quickly changed into a prototype plugin. What it basically does is list the articles that haven't been read yet by a logged in user. Whenever a change to the post is made or a new comment is posted, the post moves to the top of the unread list.

Caching external data in PHP

Gaya — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:14:40 +0000

Caching data. If you are a developer you must have heard about it somewhere. Is it really that important? There is only one thing I can say to that: yes! There are a lot of reasons why you should start caching data that has been calculated. The most common reason is to keep the owner of the data happy, saving him/her bandwidth and server capacity. In this article I will be telling you how to cache data given from an external service, but can also be used to save local results.

AjaxTwits – Load Tweets on your website with AJAX

Gaya — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:47:37 +0000

Twitter is an amazing service to keep in touch with everyone on the Internet. It's easy, fast and there are a lot of Twitter applications. I came up with the idea to Ajaxify (is that even a word?) the tweets on my website. As you can see, it's on the right, below the last.fm recently played. It's called AjaxTwits! This article will show you how to use AjaxTwits and how to install it on your website.

What to do with AJAX and what not to

Gaya — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:44:55 +0000

AJAX is one the nicest concept I've seen in web development. The basics are simple and quite easy to use. There are a lot of AJAX frameworks around like jQuery, Prototype and backbase. These frameworks help you create an AJAX application with ease. But is AJAX really that good? No, but if you use it correctly, it is! In this article I wish to share my view on AJAX and the possibilities it gives to web developers and designers, and why AJAX is wrong in several situations.

Download counter in PHP using .htaccess

Gaya — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:14:30 +0000

Ever had this thought: "I want to fire something extra up when somebody downloads a certain file."? This can be easily fixed by making all you download links link to a php page and output the download file for you. But what if the file is called directly in the browser, say http://www.gayadesign.com/scripts/photonav/photonav.zip? Apache will happily give the file to the user, without me noticing it. Luckily for us, .htaccess is a great place to mess around with Apache. This article will explain how to make pre-download conditions in php using .htaccess. I'll make a download counter in this one.

Fight the spammers

Gaya — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:55:06 +0000

In the first few weeks of my website's existence, the spam machine left my website alone. But as soon as my site got linked on various webpages around the world. The spam started to slip in. Online casinos, free slot machines and oh-so-hot girls. There had to be something to quickly protect my site against spam. I know captcha works quite well, but the problem with captcha is that users always have to read unreadable images. These impossible captchas annoy the hell out of me, so that was out of the question. I know Wordpress has a nice plugin called Akismet which is filtering spam quite good. I've been using it for some time on my DS article site, and it has been filtering a lot of spam.

Customize Eclipse to a webdeveloper’s IDE

Gaya — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:34:01 +0000

There are a lot of ways to become a better, or at least faster, webdeveloper. For instance the use of a framework like CakePHP to make the developing process rapid. One of the main things I found boosting my productivity is using a nice IDE. This article will describe how to create a PHP developer's IDE using Eclipse, Aptana and PDT.

Reading XML with PHP

Gaya — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:06:58 +0000

Since webservices and RESTful services are becoming more and more popular, XML is getting a common format to exchange information. XML is easy to read and has a nice tree structure, which can be easily interpreted.

This post will show you how easy it is to read XML in PHP.

In this tutorial I'll teach you how to read information which a simple webservice provides. The webservice I choose is Last.fm. It's quick, fun and has a lot of features. We'll use the Recent Tracks information of a user profile.