September 24, 2014 in Learn
How to Install Laravel Homestead on Windows
In the first section of the Laravel Basics Course we install Laravel Homestead on OS X. Several of our students have requested that the installation procedure for Laravel Homestead on Windows be shown as well. One of the joys of…
June 19, 2014 in Learn
Using Laravel Homestead as Your Development Environment
There are many ways to setup a local PHP development environment available to us. Traditionally there are some very common issues with each of them preventing a good generic base to teach from. Some methods are cross platform methods where…
November 12, 2013 in Learn
Beginner’s Guide to Ajax Development with PHP
The common use of Ajax in web development has created a dynamic yet fluid Internet. Designers often build mockups which incorporate Ajax-based elements such as lazy loaders, tabbed widgets, and other similar page elements. In this tutorial I want to…
March 26, 2013 in Learn
Dynamic jQuery Image Avatar Cropping Effect
I can still remember the old digg.com user profiles with dynamic avatar cropping via JavaScript. Their user interface was clean, easy to use, displayed a sample before you cropped, and would auto-update as you changed the selection box. I have…
February 28, 2013 in Learn
Creating Vanity URLs in PHP and MySQL: Query String Variables
Vanity URLs can be extremely useful, especially in offline marketing materials. I covered two techniques for creating vanity URLs in PHP in earlier posts: using a subfolder with a header redirect and using rewrite rules in Apache. After publishing those two posts, someone…
February 11, 2013 in Learn
Creating Vanity URLs in PHP: Rewrite Rules
Vanity URLs can be extremely useful, especially in offline marketing materials. I covered how to create a subfolder with a header redirect in my last post; that’s the easiest way to get a vanity URL up and running on a…
January 31, 2013 in Learn
Creating Vanity URLs in PHP: Subfolders and Header Redirects
Every page on a website has a unique web address that appears in the address bar when someone visits the page in a browser. These web addresses are known as URLs. (This stands for “uniform resource locator,” but that’s not…
January 2, 2013 in Learn
Learn A New Programming Language Every Year
It’s that time of year again, when many of us are making New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, get out of debt, or make any number of other changes. Instead of setting resolutions to keep, I prefer to…
December 14, 2012 in Learn
Sending Email With PHPMailer and SMTP
Many PHP websites and web applications need to send transactional emails. A user may request a password reset that sends them an email, or you may need to notify a customer that their order has shipped. PHP does have a…
September 25, 2012 in Learn
Using inline-block to Display a Product Grid View
I have been working on a website that displays products in a grid view, with each product containing a title, an image and some in a grid view. To achieve this layout, I used an unordered list with the CSS…
August 7, 2012 in Learn
Create your first WordPress Custom Post Type
What is it and What it isn’t Everyone’s talking about them. I asked Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks what excited him about WP3 and he replied custom post types: “Think of how Tumblr works – how you can publish photos, quotes,…
July 26, 2011 in Learn
How to parse XML with PHP5
Feeds are streams of content that people can use to share pieces of information across websites. PHP5’s simpleXML functions dramatically simplify the process of interpreting the feeds into something useful for your web pages.