joey nelson » php

werunthegame.biz

joey — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:38:53 +0000

Guilt by association: We Run The Game is running on some gallery software I wrote. The goal (and I guess there’s a pattern forming here) was extreme simplicity and speed.

Formatting date & time for RSS

joey — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:35:17 +0000

According to the RSS spec, all of the dates in your RSS content should be in RFC 822 format. That means they should look like this:

Sat, 07 Sep 2002 09:42:31 GMT

Here’s a PHP function that will take a timestamp and give you that string:

function rss_time($time){
	return strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z", $time);
}

I’m not proud of this

joey — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:53:36 +0000

…but I didn’t have much of a choice:

function parse_date_from_string($string=""){
	$month_names = array("", "January","February","March","April","May","June","July","August","September","October","November","December");
	$regex = "/(\d{1,2})[-|\/|\.](\d{1,2})[-|\/|\.](\d{2}|\d{4})/";
	$date = array();
	if(preg_match($regex, $string, $matches)){
		$month = preg_replace("/^0/", "", $matches[1]);
		$date['month'] = $month_names[$month];
		$date['day'] = $matches[2];
		if(strlen($matches[3]) == 2) $matches[3] = "20" . $matches[3];
		$date['year'] = $matches[3];
		$date['string'] = trim(preg_replace($regex, "", $string));
	}
	return $date;
}

Super simple PHP gallery

joey — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:54:40 +0000

Just save this as index.php and put it in a directory with a bunch of images. Images are displayed one per page (newest images first), and clicking on an image takes you to the next one.


exec("ls -r|egrep -i \"\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$\"", $files);
$files = array_reverse($files);
$request = $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];
if(!(is_numeric($request) && $request > 0 && $files[$request - 1])){
	$request = count($files);
}
$r_index = $request - 1;
$next = $r_index;
if($next==0 || !$files[$next-1]){
	$next = count($files);
}
?>


	"Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	my image gallery
 
	
 


	"0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" height="100%">
		"center" valign="middle">"?">"" />

Bookflipper

joey — Fri, 04 May 2007 18:08:43 +0000

Bookflipper is a tiny web app that serves up pricing information for used books from the Amazon API. My friend Brian has been picking up cheap books and selling them on Amazon for a profit. Now when he’s wondering if a purchase is going to pay off, he can just pull out his cell phone and enter the book’s ISBN into Bookflipper to see what the market is like.

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

The page size is usually between 0.5-0.6k, thanks in part to some output buffer trickery. Of course, the preview image is much bigger but it seemed too useful to get rid of.

WordPress plugin: x-y of z

joey — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:32:34 +0000

You can find it on the plugins download page now. This basically just gives you a function that will print out a snippet of text like “Viewing 1-10 of 423 posts” based on the contents of the page. Hopefully this is marginally useful to someone out there.

Reducing HTML output size

joey — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:05:23 +0000

I recently found myself writing a small web app for my friend Brian to use on his cell phone, one of the last places where page size really matters. Since every character counts, we want to keep our page structure lean and mean (probably a good idea on a mobile device anyway). But after that there’s a lazy, completely pain-free step we can take: stripping all of the redundant whitespace from our HTML.

With PHP’s output buffer handlers we can just set it and forget it:

function clean_html($output){
	$output = preg_replace("/\n/", "", $output);
	$output = preg_replace("/\t/", "", $output);
	$output = preg_replace("/\s+/", " ", $output);
	return $output;
}
 
ob_start('clean_html');
 
//a bunch of stuff that prints out html
 
ob_flush();

This will give use one long, ugly line of dense markup, but what do we care? It’s still valid and the browser handles it just fine. This seems to reduce page size by about 10-20% in this particular application.

PHP relative time function

joey — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:19:20 +0000

I couldn’t find a PHP function that would take a number of seconds as input and give me something like “3 weeks and 2 days” so I put this together:

function rel_time($seconds){
	if($seconds < 60){
		if($seconds < 0){ $seconds = 0; }
		switch($seconds){
			case 1:
				return "1 second";
				break;
			default:
				return "$seconds seconds";
				break;
		}
	}else{
		$date_push = array();
		$time_units = array(	'year'		=> (365*24*60*60),
					'month'		=> (30*24*60*60),
					'week'		=> (7*24*60*60),
					'day'		=> (24*60*60),
					'hour'		=> (60*60),
					'minute'	=> (60));
		foreach($time_units as $unit=>$unit_time){
			$total = 0;
			if($unit=='day' && count($date_push) && ($seconds < $time_units['day'])){
				$seconds = 0;
			}
			while($seconds >= $unit_time){
				$seconds -= $unit_time;
				$total++;
			}
			switch ($total){
				case 0:
					break;
				case 1:
					$date_push[] = "1 $unit";
					break;
				default:
					$date_push[] = "$total {$unit}s";
					break;
			}
			if(count($date_push) == 2){
				break;
			}
		}
		return implode(" and ", $date_push);
	}
}

Example usage:

$rel_time  = rel_time(time() - $timestamp);
print "Posted $rel_time ago";

It’s not as efficient as it could be, but it gets the job done for now. And it’s pretty easy to configure it for the time units that you want to use.

Snap Preview Anywhere contest

joey — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 05:58:48 +0000

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks at work building a web application for Snap’s latest contest and it just went live at contest.snap.com. It allows users to submit ideas (for new features for a product) and lets them do some simple Digg-style voting.

The concept is very similar to the last Snap contest but it’s now a standalone web application (instead of a half dozen hacky Wordpress plugins). The site is actually a heavily-modified version of my message board software that runs omgtru.com.

GD TTF PCDTR in PHP

joey — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 23:55:11 +0000

I’d been having a lot of trouble getting my Ubuntu machine to render TTFs with GD in PHP. So much trouble that I’d even tried crazy things like recompiling PHP. Luckily I found this post on excitris.com and I was able to solve all of my problems with one line of code. Since the code on their site is completely mangled, here it is:

putenv('GDFONTPATH=' . realpath('.'));

Now I can use dynamic text replacement without going insane.