I find myself needing this often on different servers, you may find it useful too. This script creates a timestamped dump of a mysql database to the current directory. Assumes it runs as a user who can connect to the database. You can set those credentials using the -u and -p command line switches for mysqldump
Extract images from an HTML snippet
Use PHP's DOM and XPath libraries to do the hard work.
The function here will take an HTML fragment and return an array of useful images it finds.
Tags: PHP
Measuring Site Speed localy
Open Source tool puts data locally
This is a cool utility that uses YSlow! and PhantomJS to measure your site's speed across many pages. Should be good for identifying slow individual pages as well as practices that impact multiple pages.
Smelly PHP code
More tell tale signs that code needs refreshing
Adam Culp posted the 3rd article in his Clean Development Series this week, Dirty Code (how to spot/smell it). When you read it, you should keep in mind that he is pointing out practices which correlate with poorly written code not prescribing a list of things to avoid. It's a good list of things to look for and engendered quite a discussion in our internal Musketeers IRC.
Building CandiData
Thoughts from Election Hackathon 2012
This past weekend, my colleague and friend Sandy Smith participated in Election Hackathon 2012 (read his take of the hackathon). We built our first public Musketeers.me product, Candidata.me. This was my first hackathon, and it was exciting and exhausting to bring something to life in little more than 24 hours.
Drupal Workflow and Access control
A review of the current options
Large organizations want to, or may actually need, strict access control and content review workflows to manage the publishing process on their website. Drupal's default roles and permissions system is designed to handle the simplest of setups. However, there is a wide variety of modules that each address these needs. Many of them overlap, some complement each other, while others are abandonded and haven't been ported to Drupal 7. In this article, I'll look at some active modules for these requirements.
Tags: Drupal
A new venture: musketeers.me
This has been in the works for a bit now, and I'm excited to announce that along with Eli White, Kevin Bruce, and Sandy Smith, we've formed muskeeters.me. We worked well together at our previous venture, that we wanted to keep it going. The new venture will do the usual web consulting, from strategy and planning, systems architecture with an eye on scaling, through design and development.
Using bcrypt to store passwords
An example for PHP and MySQL
The linkedin password breach highlighted once again the risks associated with storing user passwords. I hope you are not still storing passwords in the clear and are using a one-way salted hash before storing them. But, the algorithm you choose to use is also important. If you don't know why, go read You're Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly.
Back to SQL it is
Sauce labs ditches NoSQL CouchDB
An honest write up with first hand details of the shortcomings of couchdb in production. There's a reason to stick with proven technologies and not simply chasing the latest shiny. Not saying sauce labs did that, just sayin'.
Tags: Programming
Are social referrals killing SEO?
Or is it just pining for the fjords?
I think this is an improvement to how we write for the web. Instead of optimizing for a machine algorithm that can bring traffic to an article, writers must concentrate on making the article interesting so that readers will share it with their friends. Curation is the key, which is also why I hated the "social reader" apps that want to post for me to see everything my friends read. I want to know what they recommend I read.
Tags: Digital Media
