I am not a huge video fan, though watching a video online does have an undeniable coolness factor. I have done some client work involving videos for a site and during the process ran into a few things that might be useful to others trying to handle video. There are quite a few open source and inexpensive tools to help deal with video handling, and combined with some server settings and PHP code it is possible to build some pretty cool video features. Read Full Story

I think the phrase "Web 2.0" is for the most part universally despised, and I wholeheartedly subscribe to this point of view. While it may be fluffy market speak it does carry a meaning to me, a vague and over hyped meaning, but a meaning none the less. When I work on client sites I will suggest using AJAX or a more interactive design if doing so is a good fit for the site and overall functionality. More often than not however clients will ask for dynamic parts of a site, even going... Read Full Story

Rarely do I post what I would call "opinion pieces" (that is not to say my average post is not littered with opinionated statements), though I occasionally read some while trolling through tech and PHP related news and blogs. While doing so recently I came across an article with a title similar to "40 things bad PHP programmers do". As I scanned the list I thought the ideas where all valid, if not a bit over zealously stated in an effort to make the point. This and a rece... Read Full Story

Email comes in all shapes and sizes, from complicated nested multi-part structures to simple text bodies. But even messages comprised of just plain text require special preparation to safely and properly display from within a webmail application. For security purposes any HTML within a text message needs to be converted to appropriate entities. Using the CSS "white-space: pre;" setting is effective as well, the CSS equivalent of tags, but this makes word wrapping the message in suc... Read Full Story

Having decided at the new year to revive the Hastymail project (a neglected PHP webmail client I wrote years ago), I set out to improve the project website in a few different ways. First I moved it from the sourceforge web hosting to a private host, changing the site name from hastymail.sourceforge.net to good old www.hastymail.org. Many thanks to ThinkHost for generously donating the hosting to our project, and to David Schaefer for safe guarding the hastymail.org domain name for years in th... Read Full Story

Hastmail 2 has kicked off with a bang. And by bang I mean a bunch of late night coding. We have svn setup for the new code at sourceforge, and porting useful Hastymail 1 code has begun. The framework we are building from provides many basic web application mechanics, so the porting effort is focused on the back end functionality, like talking to the IMAP and SMTP servers. So far almost 1/3 of the IMAP related code has been ported, reviewed, and improved. I'm excited! I have yet to determ... Read Full Story

I have been meaning to update the site with some new fixes and features that have been running in my local copy for the past month and finally have taken the time to do so. So without my usual off topic long winded self absorbed introduction here is whats new. Read Full Story

Maybe it's the new year getting to me. Holidays always seemed so contrived after reaching adulthood, as if rather than celebrate human achievement or spread good will the experience instead is commercial and fabricated, but as I start to slide into my late 30's I'm as sentimental as a child. Worse even I get choked up at times for literally no reason at all. Seems even a Mountain Dew commercial can bring a tear to my eye. Whatever the cause I have decided to dedicate some time to ... Read Full Story

People often ask me, "Jason, oh great PHP master, how can I write secure PHP code?". To this I respond "Climb back down the mountain and return to your home my son, the answers will find you there ... as long as you click over to my blog and wait until I get this post done. Now GO!". Seriously though, about the only thing I am a master of is run on sentences, embellishing, and the sometimes spooky but usually droll ability to raise either of my eyebrows individually. I hav... Read Full Story

As a child I was, for a time, fascinated with computers. I even briefly entertained the idea that I would write a game in BASIC. The hours it took me to draw a slightly skewed line across the 16 color monitor of my Atari 800XL dispelled that notion almost as quickly as my prepubescent brain had latched on to it. Fast forward to college and while not a CS major, pursuing a Mathematics degree involved some logic and programming courses. When I say "pursuing" I mean barely attending cl... Read Full Story