This would make a nice weekend hack project! A website to report (PHP) tutorials that recommend insecure techniques, especially involving SQL injection (I just found another one, and have reported it via the comments). For novelty, render all the sites as labelled divs in a Masonry wall, and bonus points for a cheeky xkcd-style alt-text […]

I’ve been working since Christmas last year on an online PHP tutorial for beginners, which is now pretty much ready to try out. The working title during development has been “I ♥ PHP” and I still rather like that, so I’ll stick with that at least for the alpha period. The course is split over […]

Having fully switched from OS X to a proper Free operating system, I’m finding there’s a few things that the new environment doesn’t quite do as I’d like. One of them is the ability to name terminals per tab in gnome-terminal, but there’s no immediate provision for it. So, I’ve written a simple PHP script […]

When moderating comments in a WordPress blog, the usual practice on a standard install is to just replace the text with the moderator’s message. Unfortunately, this results in the offending comment being lost permanently, making it difficult to look at a particular poster’s history. So, it would be very useful to store this from within […]

WordPress is a pretty great piece of software, and the ecosystem around it is equally brilliant, but it’s probably fair to say that many a plugin is hacky and horrible inside. Everything modern programmers have learnt about separation of concerns, indentation, readability and object orientation seems to be lobbed out of the window where WordPress […]

Many moons ago, when Propel 1.2 was its most recent incarnation, I wrote a web-based program to convert simple bracketed WHERE clauses to equivalent Criteria statements in PHP. This works recursively to parse an expression and stores the resultant tree in a nested system of classes. The system is now of limited usefulness, since Propel’s […]