Andy's blog o' goodness – Page 5 – php, web stuff, raspberry pi… even blacksmithing!

October 18, 2014

Create video thumbnail previews for JW Player

JWPlayer is a fantastic video player for the web. One of the great features it provides is the ability to show thumbnail previews of the video as you slide along the toolbar timeline, much the same way that YouTube and the like allow. Generating the thumbnail images is not quite so easy unless you have ffmpeg installed and know a...

PHP Comment: 1

June 19, 2014

Effective, clean UI for viewing the PHP error log

Recently at work I found myself trawling through the PHP error log file and found that all the lines of text were starting to blur after a while. Thinking there had to be a better way over viewing the log file, and following on from my single-file opcache viewer gui, I decided to knock out something for viewing the error...

PHP Comments: 0

February 17, 2014

Counters in CSS: making a table of contents list

As I’m sure you know, you can create an ordered bullet point list but it has limitations. For example, if I wanted to have a table of contents so that the numbering goes 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, 1.2.3.1 and so on then the standard ordered list just isn’t going to cut it. Oh, sure, you could reset the...

Code snippets Comments: 0

November 28, 2013

Tweeting on a button press with the Raspberry Pi

A while ago my door bell broke. So I did what any sensible person would; I decided that instead of buying a new one I would hook up an old bell I had to a Raspberry Pi and have the bell ring when someone pushed a button on my door. But then I though, “well, that’s a bit boring. My...

Code snippets/Gadgets/Raspberry Pi Comments: 0

November 27, 2013

Book review: Instant simple botting with PHP

I had the chance recently to read the book Instant Simple Botting with PHP, written by Shay Anderson and published by Packt Publishing. The book is designed to be a very quick and easy (hence the title!) introduction in to creating bots to scan web pages and collect information from them. The book seems squarely aimed at beginners in PHP...

General Comments: 0

November 18, 2013

Easy page scraping with Zend\Dom (from Zend Framework 2)

The other day I was interested in getting some information from the sussex.academia.edu site, specifically I wanted a list of tags for each of the faculty members. Now, this sounds relatively easy except when you consider that initial page contains a list of links to various schools/departments people have listed, and then under each of those pages you have different fieldsets...

Code snippets/PHP/Zend Framework Comment: 1

November 13, 2013

Zend Studio and SVN 1.8

I use SVN for most of my projects at work and have diligently kept it up-to-date with the latest versions of the work copies. What happens when the working copy structure changes, as it did from 1.7.x to 1.8.x, is that Zend Studio gives error messages about the SVN connector client not being compatible. Annoying! However, if like me you’ve...

General Comments: 0

November 4, 2013

Same height for elements

A while ago I wrote a jquery plug-in that allows you to easily make selected elements all the same height. Well, it turns out that it could be a little better because it didn’t take in to consideration margins, padding and such. So here’s a slightly more robust version.

javascript/jQuery Comments: 0

April 8, 2013

Zend OPcache – some info and a GUI

I’ve just started to use Zend OPcache in place of APC in a few places and so far it’s great! Because documentation seems a little scarce right now, I’ve decided to jot down the methods available (mainly so I don’t forget). opcache_reset Should be pretty obvious given the name – resets the opcache opcache_get_configuration This will return an array with...

PHP Comment: 1

March 3, 2013

My CodeMagic fork (a TinyMCE plugin for code editing)

I’ve used TinyMCE for a while – it’s an excellent WYSIWYG editor for web applications. However, the code editor in it is really simplistic. Enter CodeMagic, a plugin that allows you to replace the standard code editor with one that used the excellent CodeMirror library for syntax highlighting. So I started to use CodeMagic but found a number of issues...

javascript Comments: 0