To load up a variable with the contents of a file with PHP, you can use this command: $filecontents=file_get_contents(“path to file”); One problem is that we had for this in our application was quotes. The text in the file had both ‘ and “. Magic quotes automatically convert quotes to escaped quotes so that when […]

We wrote about the XAMPP project in this article. This project is perfect for maintaining a cross platform dev environment for an application we are currently working on. Most of the work is done on OS X, but we also do some work on GNU/Linux. Further, the target audience for this may very well use […]

If you wish to search for a match within a field, rather than matching the entire field with a MySQL query, you can use LIKE. Here is an HTML page that will display an input box on a form: <html> <head> <title>Search</title> </head> <body bgcolor=”white”> <form method=”POST” action=”search.php”> <table> <col span=”1″ align=”right”> <tr> <td><font color=”blue”>Search […]

I was digging around, trying to find out, what, exactly, was needed to change a graphic on mouseover. I knew that this was a JavaScript function, and figured I could find some easy docs on how to do this. Perhaps I’m slow, but most of the scripts out there were a bit too convoluted. True, […]

Here is a way to capture text that is selected within a textarea box. As with this article, I have only included what is necessary for the script to function on a recent browser like IE or Mozilla/Firefox. For an example of how to do this outside a textarea box with even more stringent browser […]

You can’t use PHP to change the header information with the header function after HTML output has begun. If you do, you will get an error like: Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by … What you can do, midstream, though, is use a meta tag: echo “<meta http-equiv=’Refresh’ content=’0; URL=location.php?date=”.$date.”‘>”; This […]

Here is a single PHP/HTML script that will read a journal entry from a MySQL database, show the entry on the current web page, and add selected text from the displayed web page into the appropriate category choosen with buttons that have cool mouseover effects. The plum of this code is the use of the […]

For years we have run our own homebrew web stats application out of frustration with currently available tools. Well, web stats packages have certainly improved over the years, and we decided to implement AWStats on one of our servers. We are doing this on a Red Hat Enterprise 4 box with Apache 2, so some […]

Assuming that you have PHP installed, and the module available for Apache, these lines need to be in httpd.conf for PHP support: DirectoryIndex index.php index.html <Files *.php> SetOutputFilter PHP SetInputFilter PHP LimitRequestBody 10000000 </Files> AddType application/x-httpd-php .php Now, these lines are often in other files that are included; however, if .php pages just spew the […]

First, get the current Apache distribution from Apache.org, and extract it: [root@srv-3 src]# ls apache_1.3.19.tar.gz bind-9.1.2 bind-9.1.2.tar.gz webmin-0.85.tar.gz [root@srv-3 src]# tar -xzf ap*.gz [root@srv-3 src]# [root@srv-3 src]# ls apache_1.3.19 bind-9.1.2 webmin-0.85.tar.gz apache_1.3.19.tar.gz bind-9.1.2.tar.gz [root@srv-3 src]# cd ap* [root@srv-3 apache_1.3.19]# ls ABOUT_APACHE config.layout INSTALL Makefile.tmpl src Announcement configure KEYS README WARNING-WIN.TXT cgi-bin htdocs LICENSE README.configure conf […]

NetAdminTools used to use PHP-Nuke. For those of you who don’t know, PHP-Nuke is a fabulous Open Source project that gives you everything you need to bring up your own website with a database backend and other features. Now, one annoying thing with PHP-Nuke, and most web based interfaces is that it is quite difficult […]

In this series of articles, we will explore the fundamentals of PHP programming with MySQL. For a good reference, try this book. It helped us. In this installment of Programming With PHP, we will set up the Red Hat RPMs, configure our directories, and code a simple “Hello World” app. We are running Red Hat […]

In this article we will pass a parameter to a PHP script via a URL, and we will get a little more sophisticated in our conditionals and regular expressions. One problem with accepting parameters is that there are often security issues. It is very important to ensure that the parameters passed by the user conform […]

We aren’t quite happy with the web stats software we use. The information is not brief enough. Mostly, we want to see the last couple months, with the weekends visible, and the unique hosts and pages viewed. Also, we have a lot of content that gets snagged that isn’t really what we consider a valid […]

Like the needy stranger who tells us his or her entire life story on the occassion of our first meeting, Apache spews out way too much information in every HTTP header. And like the unscrupulous sharpies who take advantage of lonely folks they meet on buses, there are those who would use this information to […]

One thing that is quite prevalent in forums is sharing images as postings or as avatars. We saw that our RoboCoop was getting some hits, and wondered what was up. Well, there is a forum that has a daily discussion in Texas here that had put up a link to the image of our chicken […]

We often need to convert source code into html format. We use the pre tag; however, the default tab values are to wide. For instance: this is one tab this is another If we were to put some of our funner source code up, it would push the right margin over too far. Well, we […]

Grab the sdk from java.com. For us, we are going to install this on Lobstora, which is a GNU/Linux box. Just make the binary executable and run it: [root@srv-1 opt]# chmod 700 j2*.bin [root@srv-1 opt]# ./j2sdk-1_4_2_03-linux-i586.bin We like putting this in /opt with a symlink to j2sdk. [root@srv-1 opt]# ln -s j2sdk1.4.2_03 j2sdk [root@srv-1 opt]# […]