You may already know this, or you may not.  However Microsoft really wants you to develop your websites to run on Windows.  Especially if you are an amateur developer.  So much so that they are willing to give you versions of some of their most expensive software for free.  They must figure that if you use Microsoft software for your spare time projects you will need to use it professionally.
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Lately I have been trying to find cool PHP utilities that I can use to handle my day to day tasks.  Lately parsing CSV files in PHP has been something I have had to do over and over again.  Such a basic task can be such a pain considering all of the different formats that they can be in (mostly the quotes around some of the values). I would do find and replace on the file to remove all the extra stuff and hope that I did not corrupt the data. (more…)

I just ran into this awesome PHP class called dBug.  It works like print_r, but does so much more.  You can expand and collapse anything in the structure you use it with.  You know no idea how nice this will be to parse large data structures with.  So nice.  Check it out at: http://dbug.ospinto.com/

Here is the code we are using for today’s discussion on using jQuery to add Ajax to a website. You can download a copy of everything required to do this project here.
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The instructions for how to use the PHP Calendar class have been released. Take a look and contact me if you have any questions.

I have loaded the instructions for how to use the Authorize.net class.  You can access it on the right side of the site under Pages.  If anyone has questions about it make sure you ask them through the fancy new contact form that is also on the right.  Sorry about the CAPTCHA, but I just don’t want to try and shovel through the spam.

I am releasing a class that generates Calendars.  I plan on doing an example of how to do Ajax with this class so I figured I would release it a little early so that people can play with it before I begin the example.  You can download it here.

If you have never used the Ternary Operator, or ? operator, your life is about to change.  The ternary operator is used as a shorthand for if .. else structures that can really clean up your code.
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PHP5 Class Structure

Classes are a very important aspect of good code. Organizing your code in classes makes the code reusable (even in other applications) and helps clearly separate the model from the view of the site.

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cURL is a very useful tool used to progmatically connect and interact with other systems to do various tasks like download a Web Page or RSS feed.  It is also used to send information to another computer and get a response.
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