UltraMega Blog

Noty Updated with WordPress Support

Steve — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:16:14 +0000

Noty has been updated to include a WordPress plugin for easy integration. Along with the original standalone version, you now have the option to install it as a standard WordPress plugin. This means that WordPress users never have to see code! You may also notice that this blog is now using Noty (over there on [...]

Noty – HTML5 Notes Widget

Steve — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:53:24 +0000

Noty is the name of the HTML5 application I developed for the recent HTML5 competition hosted at Nettuts. Unfortunately I did not win, but I did learn a lot about HTML5 and related technologies. It is available for purchase at CodeCanyon. Noty is a simple widget for taking notes about the current page. A potential [...]

Record HTML Canvas Animations to Video

Steve — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:36:14 +0000

Sometimes it might be useful to be able to record your canvas animation to a video format. Maybe you want to use your JavaScript skills to create fancy effects for a video. You could use some kind of screen capturing program and crop the video, but I'll show you how to do it with code! [...]

Create Callbacks Using __invoke

Steve — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:44:19 +0000

The __invoke magic method (available as of PHP 5.3) is used to make an object callable as if it were a regular function. The combines the usefulness of objects with the simplicity of functions. One application of this feature is creating callback functions that can be passed around like objects. This is common practice in [...]

Deciphering Magic Methods in PHP

Steve — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:36:31 +0000

Deciphering Magic Methods in PHP | Nettuts+ PHP provides a number of ‘magic’ methods that allow you to do some pretty neat tricks in object oriented programming. These methods, identified by a two underscore prefix (__), function as interceptors that are automatically called when certain conditions are met. Magic methods provide some extremely useful functionality, [...]

Round Robin Tournament Scheduler

Steve — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:07:13 +0000

Here's a snippet I wrote for a project that I thought might come in handy for someone else. It generates a schedule for a round robin tournament. I found some other snippets to do this, but I found them overly complicated or lacking in other ways. Here's an example of what this code does: <?php [...]

PHP: Recursive Functions

Steve — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:16:42 +0000

A recursive function is a function that calls itself. This is useful for certain applications. This short tutorial will show an example of a recursive function in action. Let's say we have the following array of categories. Normally this might be stored in a database, but we'll use an array here for simplicity. /* Example [...]

Using a PHP Class to Store Configuration

Steve — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:20:11 +0000

In a comment on my post listing 5 Tips for Writing Cleaner PHP Code, some good arguments were made against using constants to store configuration variables. The main arguments is that it pollutes the global namespace, which can lead to collisions when implementing other code, and the way it handles typos. This article demonstrates some [...]

Using SSH in PHP

Steve — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:19:38 +0000

This tutorial will show you how to use the SSH2 functions in PHP to execute commands over SSH. This requires the SSH2 PECL extension to be installed on your server (installation instructions). Keep in mind that as of this time, the extension is in a beta state, so stability is not guaranteed. Sending commands is [...]

Snippet: Fetch Twitter Feed (With Retweets) in PHP

Steve — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:19:17 +0000

Here is a PHP that fetches a Twitter stream for a specified user. It also combines retweets with the regular updates. This puts them all in an array to make it easy to output them however you want. This snippet uses APC to cache the data, but you can use any caching method such as [...]