Random thoughts & observations

From the mundane to the profound and everything in between here’s what’s rocking our world

Updating a range of records with MySQL

Posted: January 8, 2016
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

Updating a single record entry in a MySQL database table is fairly simple, but what if you need to update a batch of records with one single query?

It's not as difficult as you might think...

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Converting between dates and timestamps in PHP

Posted: September 23, 2015
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

There may be occasion, when working in PHP, that you need to convert date related values between date type formats and timestamps.

PHP makes that incredibly easy to accomplish.

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Solving JSON encode error Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument in PHP

Posted: September 20, 2015
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

We've recently been working on some PHP coding to generate JSON output drawn from a variety of MySQL database tables and hit the following error: json_encode(): Invalid UTF-8 sequence in argument.

Solving this was, thankfully, relatively quick and easy...

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Useful PHP Composer functions

Posted: August 30, 2015
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

Thanks, in recent years, to the introduction of Composer managing package dependencies for PHP has become much easier, quicker and far less stressful. The following are some Composer essentials that all PHP developers should be familiar with...

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Upgrading PHP installation on Mac OS X Mavericks

Posted: August 23, 2015
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

One of the great things about Mac OS X for developers?

The sheer amount of built-in, open source technologies available by default: Apache, Bash, Curl, Emacs, Nano, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby to name but a handful. 

In this article we'll guide you through bypassing the version of PHP installed by default on Mavericks and using a different binary instead.

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Installing Node and SaSS behind a proxy

Posted: May 24, 2014
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

If you find yourself working behind a corporate web proxy server chances are you'll be running into issues when trying to install SaSS and using the Node Package Manager (npm). Thankfully these issues are easy to resolve with a little command line magic.

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Installing SVN on Mavericks OS X

Posted: May 1, 2014
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

Looking to install SVN on Apple's OS X Mavericks?

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Blocking a range of IP Addresses

Posted: March 26, 2014
Written by: Saints At Play
Category: Server

If you manage a website (or a number of websites) you will inevitably, at some point, experience unwanted form spamming. It's certainly not the highlight of anyone's day but sadly a persistent experience in today's connected world. If you are able to use and configure .htaccess files on your web server then you can implement IP blocking to help minimise unwanted form spam.

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