Author Archives: lornajane

19 Jan
2012

Building A RESTful PHP Server: Understanding the Request

Once upon a time, what seems like a lifetime ago, I was away for a couple of weeks, and I wrote a series of posts about serving RESTful APIs from PHP to keep my blog going while I was away. Fast forward a few years and those posts are outdated and still wildly popular – so I thought it was about time I revisited this and showed how I’m writing RESTful PHP servers today!

In the first part of this (probably) 3-part series, we’ll begin with the basics. It might seem boring, but the most important thing to get right with REST is parsing all the various elements of the HTTP request and responding accordingly. I’ve put in code samples from from a small-scale toy project I created to make me think about the steps involved (should I put the code somewhere so you can see it? Let me know). Without further ado, let’s dive in and begin by sending all requests through one bootstrap script: Continue reading →

10 Jan
2012

Which Basket Should A Developer Put Their Eggs In?

The situation goes like this. Lots of excellent, capable people have great ideas for new software products. They are bootstrapping their venture, so they look for a developer who wants to give some time up front and receive a fair (let’s assume fair) share of the rewards once the product becomes successful.

The question is: as a developer, how do you know which of these products (I get about one tempting enquiry a month from what sounds like a real person who isn’t building a social network) is a good bet?

04 Jan
2012

Using lrnja.net Custom URL Shortener with Bit.ly

I’m a big bit.ly fan and recently I registered a shorter URL to use for short links – and I went for lrnja.net. I sat down to configure my new domain with bit.ly, and it was very straightforward (I’d almost say “designer-proof”! /me ducks).

  • First: register your domain
  • Log in to your registrar’s control panel and add an A record*
  • That’s it! In about 24 hours, you’ll be able to shorten with your domain

* or a CNAME if you want to use a subdomain of an existing domain.

Bit.ly has excellent instructions here: lrnja.net/bitlydomain

29 Dec
2011

The Tree Command

Today I’m working on a little tutorial (about writing RESTful services, for this site) and I used the tree command to illustrate the file and directory layout of the project. I love this little command and use it frequently, but it isn’t very well known so here’s a quick example. Continue reading →
23 Dec
2011

Tracking Your Domain with Bit.ly

As a blogger and lover of graphs, I am not sure how I hadn’t already seen bit.ly’s tracking domain feature. With this, you can register a domain and see reports on all of the URLs that are shortened with bit.ly which point through to that domain.

Continue reading →

20 Dec
2011

Inner vs Outer Joins on a Many-To-Many Relationship

Someone will probably tell me that this is an elementary-level topic, but I got some good questions regarding joins from my most recent ZCE class students, so I thought I’d put down the examples that I used to explain this to them. Being able to join with confidence is a key skill, because it means that you can refactor and normalise your data, without worrying about how hard something will be to retrieve.
Continue reading →
08 Dec
2011

Simple Regular Expressions by Example

Whenever I ask a group of developers if they are familiar with regular expressions, I seem to get at least half the responses along the lines of “I’ve used them, but I don’t like them”. Call me a geek if you like, but I quite like regex; I think often it seems unfriendly because it’s used inappropriately or just thrown into code with “here be dragons” type comments rather than documentation about what should match, and what shouldn’t!

As with most things, it’s pretty easy when you know how, so here’s my one-step-at-a-time approach to regex (stolen from my ZCE preparation tutorial slides). Let’s begin at the very beginning: regular expressions have delimiters, usually a slash character, and these contain a pattern that describes a string.

pattern notes
/b[aeiou]t/ Matches “bat”, “bet”, “bit”, “bot” and “but”
Also matches “cricket bat”, “bitter lemon”

Continue reading →

07 Dec
2011

Is This Marketing?

Last year, someone asked me what I’d chosen for the company Christmas cards (I was relatively newly self-employed at the time). The idea of company Christmas cards had not even crossed my mind, but that conversation stayed with me and this winter, I picked a photo I took last winter, and uploaded it to moo.com, producing this:

DSCF5647.JPG

Continue reading →

05 Dec
2011

Importing and Exporting MongoDB Databases

I’m enjoying working with MongoDB but as with any new technology, it can take a little while to find your way around all the tools related to that stack. In particular, I found myself wondering how do I mysqldump for mongodb?

It should have come as no surprise that the command I wanted was called mongodump, really! Continue reading →