architecture The Problem with TodaysMeet TodaysMeet is a project I started in 2008 to help my father solve a problem in one of his classes. The fact that it’s as popular as it is—mostly in education—never ceases to amaze me. Unfortunately, I don’t give TodaysMeet
django The Evolution of SUMO When I joined the SUMO team six months ago, the team was just starting a discussion of “where do we go from here?” SUMO was built on a CMS called TikiWiki, and had diverged pretty significantly in two years. (David Tenser wrote a more
Code WP: Better Search Widget 1.1 Better Search Widget 1.1 is a significant upgrade to Better Search Widget that adds new features and fixes an old bug with internationalization. Features (New features in bold.) Optional default value. Optional, custom widget title**.** Optional onfocus and onblur listeners. Optional, customizable focus
attack Responsible SQL: How to Authenticate Users Most SQL-injection articles set a horrible example for young programmers. Here is a very typical “bad example” of why you need to escape user data before it goes into SQL queries: (ed. The symbol « is a line break that’s not in the real
Back-end Connecting PHP, IIS 6, and SQL Server 2005 I know I will be accosted for this, but at work we needed to run PHP on IIS 6 (fairly simple) and connect it to a remote database server running SQL Server 2005 (not terrible, once I gave up the Microsoft way). Yeah yeah,
Back-end Help Me Scale I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent posts on microblog scalability, and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction. Similar to social networks, social updates, social messaging, social… Like many social web sites—amongst our weaponry…—Picofiction lets you “follow”
How To How to: Upgrade or Recompile PHP on RHEL5 (Outdated) **Update: **This post is nearly two years old, and this is not how I would recommend upgrading PHP on RHEL, yet it continues to get traffic. If I can get my hands on a copy of RHEL, I’ll update this (or I might