Server side programming. LAMP Stack, NodeJS, CodeIgniter and more.
With all this load of smartphones and tablets, it is mandatory for us as developers to optimize our content as much as possible so everybody can see it, no matter what device they are using. This is why I wrote a small but powerful function to properly detect a wide range of mobile devices and redirect to an special content accordingly.
Yeah, it is a much discussed topic in every CI forum. I needed to set up a payment gateway and it was mandatory to receive the gateway response via $_GET, so I decided to do an investigation on the matter and this is what I came up with.
I needed to download some files from a remote FTP server and the store them in my website. The usual way would be to download all the files to my computer and then upload them to my website. In CodeIgniter 1.7.2 you would have to do this, however, the new CodeIgniter 2.0 has a new ‘download’ method that will make it real easy to transfer files between FTP servers.
We don’t like reading chopped sentences like “Star Wars Old Republic is be….”. It looks fugly. Usually, when trimming text you will go with substr(), but there is a much better way to do it, and believe me, you trimmed text will look so much better than before.
CodeIgniter 2.0 is coming out soon, so lets start studying the changes done to the HTML Table Class in the dev-release.
One of the most requested features was the ability to set tag attributes to individual cells. On CI 2.0 this is completely possible, however, since the documentation is not fully updated yet, I decided to make this short post to explain how it works.
It happened to me a lot of times, I had my connection set to UTF-8, my database was UTF-8, even my tables and every single field, however, for some reason, the information I updated in phpMyAdmin wasn’t being displayed correctly on my website and the information edited on my website wasn’t being displayed correctly in phpMyAdmin.
You know all those weird characters, those that very often come up when you write accented letters or words in another language like Portuguese or Spanish? That’s what I am talking about.
Here is the solution. A single line that can save you hours of research.
Pulling code from here and there, I gathered enough information to create a small function that allow you to pull your Twitter feed and display it in your website. What you do is basically call the function and pass a couple parameters. The styling can be done with CSS.
I know there are several ways to accomplish this, however, of all the ones I’ve tried, this is the shortest so far:
$i = 0;
while(true)
{
echo '<tr, td, div, row, whatever, here class="row'.$i.'">';
$i = 1 - $i;
}
So, if you make two classes, row1 and row2, each with a different background color, the result will be alternated row colors in whatever you’re doing. Very useful for long lists.
Update: you might be interested in how to alternate row colors with pure CSS.
Before explaining the solution, you should know creating thumbnails on the fly is server inefficient, eats a lot of resources and they should be generated as soon as the images are uploaded. However, there are some occasions when we absolutely need to generate thumbs on the fly. In this article we will learn how to do this in CodeIgniter.
Sometimes we need to add the www to our domain automatically, maybe for aesthetics or ajax issues across subdomains. Apache .htaccess is our friend here. You just need to add this to your existing .htaccess file or just make a new one with the following contents:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www\.your-domain.com/ [L,R=301]
Question of the million dollars. Those annoying image hot-linkers, eating our bandwidth, our food, our… nevermind. Anyway, if you want to give them hell and stop this behaviour, add the following to your .htaccess file (remember to edit your domain name):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://your-server-ip/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|png|PNG)$ - [F]
Bonus!: In the third line, you can optionally write your server IP for an extra layer of security. If you don’t know your server’s IP, just open an MS-DOS console (if you’re on Windows) or a Linux console and ping your domain. ie. “ping dannyherran.com”, would return 67.220.192.149 which is my server IP.
Piece of cake. If you need to prevent your files, images or anything else to be listed in those directories where an index file is not present, just add the following to your .htaccess file:
Options -Indexes
Piece of cake.