Site spam sucks, no doubt about it. I was getting tired of fighting it manually in hand-to-hand combat and decided to get some help. I'd heard about different techniques for thwarting comment, and other types of form, spam but none of them seemed to make a big enough dent in the problem for my liking. That is, until I tried Bad Behavior.
One of the most common threads that all programmers share is that of an ego. Some are much worse than others and some have found a way to control or manipulate their ego into a great benefit. Beyond skill-sets and other programming-specific talents I believe the greatest room for personal improvement in programmers as a whole is that of the ego.
A quote by GeraldWeinberg from The Psychology Of Computer Programming.
The idea is that programmers must fight the natural tendency to treat their programs as part of themselves, and therefore to reject all criticism. Rather, they should do their best to treat their designs & implementations as objects independent of themselves, and to view criticism dispassionately on its merits. It's a spiritual discipline that we all fall short of, but that's worth attempting.
I finally got around to installing xdebug on my development
environment and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread.Installation was a breeze and the information it provides when something has gone wrong is incredibly helpful during debugging. What I didn't know, and hope to help others by documenting it here, was the amount of configuration options Xdebug has. The base install has some irritating limitations that are easily addressed with a few simple lines in the php.ini file.
PHP makes file system manipulation easy with its variety of built-in functions. One thing I always knew, but never got the chance to try, is that many of those same functions worked over FTP instead of the local file system. I finally got my excuse to give it the ole' college try and I found a few things that may help others with the same task.
Every good programmer should constantly be looking for ways to
improve the look and readability of their code. One of my favorite ways
to reduce vertical length while maintaining readability is to use the
lesser-known ternary comparison operator.
The Ternary Operator is unique when it comes to PHP's available comparison options. Not in the sense that it does something that the other operators don't, but that the functionality it offers is not seen anywhere else.
<?php
$myvar = ($x == $y) ? TRUE : FALSE;
?>
Noticing your pages are loading slowly or just don't like using extra cpu
cycles when you don't have to? PHP makes caching very easy with their
variety of Output Control Functions. In this article I'll go over
complete page caching which is the easiest to implement and understand.