PHP: Getting Last Changed Time of a File – File ctime

File ctime may be a little misleading in nature as many would think it as the creation time of the file, but actually it’s the meta data such as the ownership or permissions change time of the file in addition to content modification. To get the ctime of a file in PHP: $last = filectime(‘anyfile’); …

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WordPress: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable when Posting New Posts or Modifying Existing Posts

It’s weird that I encountered this problem that when you post new posts in WordPress, there’s a possibility that it may run into a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error without publishing the article at all. I did some split tests and in this post, the string ‘fopen‘ which is a php function seems to be …

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PHP: Read from Keyboard – Get User Input from Keyboard Console by Typing

As I said how to parse php program command line arguments in the previous post, reading from user keyboard or console is also a considerable part of making interactive command line programs. How to let user type in something and make the php script read from the keyboard so that it can identify the user …

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Dealing with PHP command line programs / scripts run on shell and the arguments

PHP is a lot more than just HTML rendering and outputting. It can also be run from shell command line like any legacy command line programs or tools we had in DOS and Linux shell. One of the major problem is to deal with arguments passed to such program and how to identify them inside …

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CSS: Styling WordPress Administration Control Panel Buttons

WordPress does a great job in smoothing the user experience of the blog administration control panel. Ever wonder how they have styled all those buttons with such touchy appearance? Well the originator is the man in blue: button { border-left: 3px double #CCCCCC; border-right: 3px double #999999; border-top: 3px double #CCCCCC; border-bottom: 3px double #999999; …

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The Secure Way to Store Passwords with PHP

Passwords are indisputably one of the most sensitive data types to deal with for web developers, especially back end developers who are in charge of PHP and MySQL. Storing passwords is not tricky considering you are just required to do a one-way conversion of them: $password = ‘ilovjenny84’; $salt = ‘SHAKY SHARKY 333’; // whatever …

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Pair.com Hosting Coupons and Promo Codes (Bonus: Pair.com Control Panel Screenshots)

Well the title may be a little misleading in that I got only one working hosting coupon of Pair.com. I haven’t personally purchased any service from this hosting company but almost all the reviews about them I came across are positive. To waive the setup fee and enjoy a 10% discount, use the coupon: THG …

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phpBB: Disabling User Registrations / Signup

There might be a possibility that you want the current users to keep engaging with each other in the phpBB forum and to disable further user registrations. To disable user registration, simply log in the phpBB administration panel and go to: ACP => General => User registration settings => Account activation => disable While it …

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jQuery: Protecting or hiding variables / functions in a specific local scope

As everyone who’s well trained in software engineering would agree, that one of the principle of writing predictable code is to separate and hide something within only the scope that it’s needed. Controlled access to and from the outside world brings predictability and accountability of your code thus better debugging. In jQuery, you need constantly …

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jQuery: Get the text and value of the selected option of HTML select element

For instance, there’s a HTML select element identified by the ID #title, and after the user has selected one of the options, you want to get the text and value of the selected option. <select id="title"> <option value="1">Mr</option> <option value="2">Mrs</option> <option value="3">Miss</option> </select> Now that the user has selected the 2nd option: Mrs. To get …

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jQuery: How to check if an element has a particular class

To know whether a class exists on an element with jQuery, you need a simple test method: is(). For example, to test if an element #elm has the class ‘first’: if ($(#elm).is(‘.first’)) { //#elm has the class } else { //#elm doesn’t have the class } jQuery is() is the function that checks if any …

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jQuery: How to test or check whether an element exists

.length property in JavaScript returns the length or number of elements inside an array or the string length. While jQuery selector mechanism $(“elm”) returns an array of DOM objects (such as elements), you can also get the number of the length of the returned objects array by: $("#some").length To check the existence of the element, …

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jQuery: Selecting elements with uncommon / special characters in ID or class name

HTML generated by some CMS or frameworks include elements with rather uncommon characters in ID or class names. For example, some may have special characters such as ‘.’ or ‘[..]’ in the ID or Class. To work around this, a selector in jQuery should be written this way: $(“$some.id”) // won’t work for ID: some.id …

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