Practical PHP Scripts and Tips

This blog has had rather a colourful (or “colorful” in US/web spelling!) history over its lifetime.

First it was my business blog … I had a business long ago “Deaken Creative” based on family tradition — “Deaken” coming from my name, Dean Kennedy. However, with “Deakin University” in my home state of Victoria, Australia, “www.deakencreative.com.au” was to confusing … so I changed the URL to dc.com.au.

That was back in the early 1990′s when .com.au registrations were still free! That domain is now part of a media/publishing business, but no longer as Deaken Creative, but dc.com.au Media.

Anyway, my next business name was “Terrabyte Communications” … and rather than buy a new URL, I simply used a sub-URL which you see here. “Terrabyte” was conceived from “terra” –earth, and “byte” — digital … long before the storage capacity “terabyte” became popular.

Anyway, Terrabyte Communications was a bit of a mouthful too, so along came my next business name, DMK Business Systems — which might sound quite long, but as “DMK” is easy to shorten. Finally.

But during the time I had the Terrabyte business name, I was creating websites and getting into PHP. I created a simple, 3-line date script that solved a problem: I lived in Melbourne, Australia, but my server lived in Pennsylvania, USA. I wanted my website to show my local Melbourne time … so I learned enough PHP to solve this little issue.

At the time, central PHP repositories like HotScripts and others were really in their infancy … so partly by default my little PHP script more attention than I would have imagined, several years ago getting 1000s of monthly downloads.

So the next iteration of this website tried to cover a whole range of web marketing and design topics … really way to much for what I could handle.

So I’m narrowing down the topics a bit, especially since I’ve had about 3 years of letting the site stay inactive.

The new focus will be where my PHP skills started … little scripts and tips designed to make the web experience more enjoyable (and leaving your website visitors to wonder a little about “how did you do that?” — especially as PHP is a server-side tool).

Anyway, enough story … time to get cracking again on PHP.

I was checking out tonight some online ecard software (like Sendcard and gCards) … and thought that if I was doing a Christmas theme … then some merry Christmas music would be nice to add.

A quick visit to The Google (sorry, that’s an inside joke I think in the Whitehouse!) … and viola! Two sites that had some great and free music to download …

Free Loops and Christmas MPfree.

Toe tappin’ stuff, the traditional songs … ready to listen to and download … and spread some Christmas cheer!

I’m on the lookout for a good source of audio intros, stingers, loops and exits for use in online videos, presentations such as MS PowerPoint slide shows and podcasting. Aaron from The Business Commandos has recommended Mike Stewart’s Front and Back Music, although I wish I could hear more samples on that page before I fork out the dollars.

Why isn’t there a royalty free single item download “micro-stock” site for this kind of audio, similar to what’s available in photography with sites like istockphoto, dreamstime, fotalia and their many friends?

Hmmmm, the search continues, although I still might end up with the Front and Back music package yet!

On one of the web forums I regularly visit, the text setting (for my monitor resolution and platform) is a little too squashed together in the “line height” — even though when you did deep into the CSS, you find:

     line-height: normal;

in the relevant snippet of CSS values.

Hmmm, there must be a way to fix this!

Quick Google search: “firefox override css for domain” — the first result was helpful!

What I discovered is that there is a way to permanently “adjust” css values for a domain name — at least using Firefox, I’m not sure if other browsers can do this too, but nowadays they just might have this kind of functionality — so that you can impose your own preferences and override the site’s css values.

In Firefox, it requires installing the free add-on called Stylish.

Stylish lets you customise the look of a website using your own styles.

In my case, I just wanted to change a font size in the css from “12px” to “10pt” — that’s all it took to solve my problem.

So, after installing Stylish and re-starting Firefox, I wrote a really simple bit of css code that applied just to the domain used by the forum:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("copywritersboard.com") {

.vb_postbit {
	font-size: 10pt;
}

}

In this case, I clicked on the Stylish icon in the Firefox status bar, and chose “Write Style …” and then (as my web page was on the forum site) chose “For copywritersboard.com” from the fly-out sub-menu (as I was on the Copywriter’s Board forum site).

Stylish automatically generated the opening 2 lines and closing line of code, all I had to add in was the “.vb_postbit” section with my font-size setting and the surrounding curly braces { and }.

Done!

Now, every time I visit the site and read the posts, the font used is automatically displayed to my preference.

Of course, Stylish is much more powerful, and can do a lot more that just this little change: I could change fonts, background colors, sizes, headings, font colors … to whatever suits my preferences.

Stylish works best when used in conjunction with the free Web Developer toolbar add-on for Firefox. With this toolbar enabled, I was able to turn on the feature called “View Style Information” under the CSS button — that way, I simply clicked on a post, and it highlighted the relevant css code properties (class name and values) — so I could easily override the value with a simple user style in Stylish.

The only “downside” is that, if you use more than one computer, you’d need to have this free add-on installed with the same code on all of the relevant machines. Still, for me, that’s only 2 computers.

But now, when I’m reading my favourite forum, I can have the post threads look the way I want them to without imposing my preferences on anyone else!