code-diesel
/* PHP & MySQL Journal */
Accessing Amazon Product Advertising API
Posted in: libraries, php | ( 63 ) Comments
20 Aug 2009In this post we will see how to access the Amazon Product Advertising API from PHP. Amazon has recently changed (from 15th Aug ‘09) the authentication mechanism for accessing their API which must now be signed with your Amazon keys. Unsigned requests will be rejected by Amazon. Note that the code uses the hash_hmac() hash function which is only available for PHP versions 5.1.2 and above, so the code will not work for versions below that.
Microsoft URLScan and POST problem
Posted in: microsoft | ( 1 ) Comment
19 Aug 2009I recently encountered a problem on a clients Windows 2000 server SP4, who had a php site installed on IIS 5.0. But it was showing a strange behavior. Pages pushing data via POST were not getting processed, rather it was throwing a 404 error. Obviously it was because the allowed verbs in IIS were limited to GET and HEAD only. So the simple solution was changing the allowed verbs to include POST in the IIS administration panel. But as always happens, it was easier said than done. The problem was that IIS wouldn’t start; splashing an ugly ‘unable to connect to the machine‘ error. Microsoft knowledge base suggested some changes to the registry; but I could not mess with that solution, as the site was live.
Adminer – a fast MySQL administration tool
Posted in: mysql, tools | ( 2 ) Comments
18 Aug 2009
Before you go ahead and think that you don’t need yet another MySQL management tool, I think you should at least take a quick look at this one. Adminer is a single file (yes! everything in a single php file) tool to manage all your MySQL related tasks. All you have to do is upload the adminer.php file to your server and voila! you are ready to go. No messing around with huge software’s to manage your database. Weighing only 170KB, its easy to upload to any server. A demo of the same is included on the Adminer site.
Copying tables in MySQL
Posted in: mysql | ( 2 ) Comments
17 Aug 2009Whether you need to copy a test table to a production database, or you need to duplicate a table with only some selected rows or you just need to backup the original table, copying tables is a frequent task most of us regularly do. In this post we will see some quick methods to make copies of MySQL database tables.
Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
Posted in: security | Comments Off
29 Jul 2009Security has always been an issue in software development; mainly due to ignorance, laziness and a nonchalant attitude of programmers (I’m one of the guilty ones). ‘Security’ is the one section in a project scope that gets consistently ignored by not only the developers but also management. In defense of myself and other programmers I would have to say that writing secure software is hard work, and with all the pressure from management and clients to get the software delivered, its no wonder that programmers turn a blind eye towards security. But that is surely not an excuse to deliver a product full of security vulnerabilities.
Creating a .htaccess file on Windows
Posted in: tip | ( 2 ) Comments
27 Jul 2009Everyone who has tried creating a .htaccess on windows knows that Windows Explorer does not accept the ‘.’ character as the first character of a file. For most of you this may be old stuff, but for the newbies, the quick way to create the file is to open the command prompt and type:
copy con .htaccess [press enter] [press ctrl Z] |
The second way is to:
Open notepad and save the document with file name .htaccess with the ’save as type’ set to ‘All Files’; or save the document with file name as “.htaccess” including the quotes.
Quick way to determine if php is running at the command line
Posted in: php | ( 4 ) Comments
25 Jul 2009Many times it is necessary to determine if the php script is running on the command prompt. Recently I wrote a php shell script which could also be run from a browser and needed to decide in the code if to output a '\n' or a ‘html break’ after a text line.
The following simple function returns a true if the script is run from a command prompt and false otherwise.
Doubly Linked List in php
Posted in: algorithms | ( 4 ) Comments
13 Jul 2009Filter your wordpress content by location
Posted in: plugins | Comments Off
5 Jul 2009Today I’ve released my first Wordpress plugin, Country Filter. The Country Filter plugin allows you to control the visibility of Wordpress elements depending on the users country of origin. You can hide or show certain elements of a page or some sections of a post from users browsing from a particular country. For example you could have a ‘donate’ button that displays only if the user is browsing from France, India or UK.
Plugin download and installation instructions can be found here.
