mrclay.rg

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins. On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of [...]

May this save you pain.

Our Ubuntu web host, hosted with OSG, was not able to send mail (using PHP mail) outside of UF. An OSG tech said our From: header should be a valid address at UF (check) and that the logs at smtp.ufl.edu showed those messages never made it there. The solution was to configure sendmail to use [...]

This is how I spend my time off? I squashed a few more bugs and got Minify 2.1.3 finally out the door. It fixes a few HTTP bugs, including working around a Safari/webkit bug that was preventing efficient cache usage. There’s also code to make it far easier to diagnose users’ URI rewriting problems when [...]

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot [...]

Interest in Minify seems to be picking up: Version 2.1.1 is approaching 51K downloads. This is almost 5x the total for all previous versions. More issues fixed. Several developers have cornered down bugs and submitted patches and we’re getting more experience on misconfigured servers (e.g. invalid DOCUMENT_ROOTs). There’s one particular bug I want fixed before [...]

Google’s free open source project hosting has been awesome for Minify, so when I was looking around for Subversion hosting for my personal code, I figured why not host it there? So here’s a bunch of my PHP and Javascript code. Hopefully some of it will be useful to people. A few PHP highlights: HashUtils [...]

While trying to run the initial test scripts included with phpQuery 0.9.4 RC1, I got the following warning: Warning: domdocument::domdocument() expects at least 1 parameter, 0 given in C:\xampp\htdocs\phpQuery-0.9.4-rc1\phpQuery\phpQuery.php on line 280 This is strange because DOMDocument’s constructor has only optional arguments. As it turns out, XAMPP for Windows ships PHP with the old PHP4 [...]

A new release of Minify is finally out, and among several new features is the “min” application that makes 2.1 a snap to integrate into most sites. This post walks through the installation of Minify 2.1 on this site.

(Sigh.) After applying recent upgrades to our Red Hat 5 server at work, suddenly PHP file locking blocks the script execution for exactly 30 seconds! Both a shared reading lock (LOCK_SH) and exclusive writing lock (LOCK_EX) do this. This was, shall we say, unpleasant to diagnose. Since we use Cache_Lite (which locks by default) to [...]

Update: Please read the new version of this article. It covers Minify 2.1, which is much easier to use. Minify v2 is coming along, but it’s time to start getting some real-world testing, so last night I started serving this site’s Javascript and CSS (at least the 6 files in my WordPress templates) via a [...]

Back in August I came across Ryan Grove‘s great Minify project, which is essentially a PHP client-optimizing file server for Javascript and CSS. I was in the design stage of a project with similar goals so I decided to try merging the two projects. Ryan thought the result had potential to be the base of [...]

I didn’t go, of course (next year hopefully), but I can live vicariously through slides! Ilia Alshanetsky had my favorites: Securing PHP Applications (.pdf) – Comprehensive with good examples. If you read Chris Shiflett, there won’t be a lot new covered, but still a good read. PHP & Performance (.pdf) – Again, covering all the [...]

Phalanger is a .NET compiler for PHP5. Yes, PHP code compiled into CLR running on .NET (or Mono), with access to .NET classes as PHP objects (!), and apparently running almost twice as fast as on the PHP CGI. And they’ve implemented enough native PHP functions identically enough to run fairly extensive apps (MediaWiki, WordPress, [...]

Bookmarklet authors have it tough. On top of the usual challenges of cross-browser Javascript testing, we’ve traditionally also had to workaround IE’s character limit and jump through hoops to embed code inside of javascript: links. Bookmarklet Server (source) eases testing and deployment by allowing you to keep code where it should be—in .js files. A [...]