Mon, 14/12/2009 - 19:28 — horuskol

Okay, so automically generating a friendly URL for a blog post or forum post from their titles doesn't really take a lot - but this snippet might make it easier for you:

function make_slug($orig, $length = 0)
{
  $slug = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/', '-', $orig);
  $slug = preg_replace('/\-\-+/', '-', $slug);
  $slug = strtolower($slug);
 
  if ($length > 0) {
    // limits the length of the slug
    $slug = substr($slug, 0, $length);
  }
 
  if (strrpos($slug, '-') == strlen($slug) - 1) {
    // removes any ending -
    $slug = substr($slug, -1);
  }

Tue, 06/10/2009 - 19:53 — horuskol

I recently helped a poster at HTML Forums who wanted to be able to reformat floating point numbers in PHP.

The problem is that some of these numbers were in exponential format. There was also a requirement not to round a number like 0.004 to 0, although the 'precision' was to be constant for all uses of this function in the script.

8.8458e-119    = 8.84e-119
1.06542e-52    = 1.07e-52
2.68e-36       = 2.68e-36
2.91405e-35    = 2.92e-35
0.0190644      = 0.01
0.0205511      = 0.02
0.004          = 0.004

Sun, 13/09/2009 - 19:44 — horuskol

At almost 1,000 pages, the HTML5 specification from the W3C can seem a bit daunting.

However, the reason for this extremely wordy specification is to clear up a lot of ambiguity that existed in previous specifications targeted at browser vendors and producers of related software. This is actually a good thing, since it locks down the behaviour and rules that browsers have to obey, meaning that web developers can be more sure of conformity across browsers.

But that does mean that the specification is full of sections that are just not relevant to the creators of websites.

Sun, 06/09/2009 - 14:13 — horuskol

A fun little function that will produce the Roman Numeral representation for any number from 1-3999.

The reason for the limitation is because the Romans used barred letters for the number 5000 and larger, and the representation of 4000 would be MV, which is hard to represent in a simple ASCII string (maybe as an exercise to the reader, the function can be extended?).

function intToRoman($number)
{
    if (!is_numeric($number)) {
        echo "Input is not a number\r\n\r\n";
        return;
    }
 

A few weeks ago I asked my friend Sofee at Heart Shaped Designs if she would mind designing a site theme for RandomtTweak.

After a couple of weeks of swapping thoughts (from me) and designs (from her), I was handed a pretty smart looking final design and the component images and font specifications for me to use in creating the final HTML/CSS design. I just hope that Sofee will forgive what I've done with her design...

Theming Drupal

Sat, 01/08/2009 - 09:27 — horuskol

RandomTweak is now on Twitter - http://twitter.com/randomtweak

Sat, 01/08/2009 - 09:04 — horuskol

10 Typography Tips @ In The Woods

Typography is something that is ignored by a lot of designers when they're starting out - and yet, it can make the difference between having a block of text for a site, or a well arranged resource of information. In The Woods have posted a pretty decent article on the subject.

Tue, 28/07/2009 - 15:30 — horuskol

pChart @ SourceForge is a pretty neat and compact graph/chart library for PHP.

Mon, 27/07/2009 - 10:05 — horuskol

JediLlama - a veteran C/C++ developer and Qt guru has joined RandomTweak to share his wealth of know-how and tips for developing desktop applications.

JediLlama has been developing and supporting complex I-CMS and network applications for many years know, and I'm sure he will have lots to share in the future.

Sun, 26/07/2009 - 19:00 — horuskol

I recently helped another developer looking for a way to only allow access to one site from an iframe on another. Ideally, this would be done with the HTTP_REFERRER header, but this isn't always set by the browser, and so would prevent too many people from seeing the content properly.

My solution was simply to use a time-based key that could be generated on the site containing the iframe and tested on the remote server before allowing access to the content.