Stut.net

I know it’s been a while since posted anything on this blog, but I’ve had a lot going on and it hasn’t really been at the forefront of my mind. So, what’s been going on?

One of the pillars of a scalable website is ensuring that only activity which is required to build a page should be performed during the processing of a page request. Activities that fall under this category commonly include sending emails, recording statistics and general housekeeping such as removing temporary files.
Back when I started working on [...]

Not sure if I believe this is real or not, but either way it’s a pretty cool idea.

A couple of days ago I released a new TwitApps tool called Follows. I know I haven’t talked about TwitApps on this blog yet – that post is coming – but if you follow me on Twitter you should be aware of it.
The Follows service monitors your followers on Twitter and sends you a daily, [...]

Absolute genius!

Several templating systems exist for PHP, but since PHP was originally created as a templating language I’ve never understaood why more developers don’t use pure PHP in their view layer. The following snippet is a small function that facilitates precisely that.
The only setup required is to simply define TPL_DIR to point to the root directory [...]

Really short snippet today – a password generator. Not much to say about this one since it’s pretty simple. Pass it the length of password you want and optionally a string of valid characters it can use and it’ll give you a random string back.

function GeneratePassword($len, $allowedchars = false)
{
if ($allowedchars === false)
[...]

Today’s snippet describes the singleton pattern. The singleton pattern is a method of creating a class that statically maintains an instance of itself and ensures that no other instances can be created. This is useful for classes that implement app-wide services such as logging, DB access and other shared resources.
The basic requirements for a singleton [...]

Pretty boring snippet today, but I find it immensely useful. My time class provides representations of periods from OneMinute to OneYear. It only has one method which will calculate an absolute time by adding a given time period to the current time. You can optionally provide a format intended for use by the date function [...]

Today’s snippet is a complete class for normalising cookie usage. In addition to providing methods to set and get cookies you can also check to see if a cookie exists, is empty and delete them without needing to concern yourself with more detail than necessary. Features include…

Cookies Set during a request are immediately available via [...]