Articles

Things you should never do: Creating a PHP script which connects to a different server, to retrieve some information and display it on your website. And you should most certainly not do this on every single page request, without even caching the results. Recently I have been asked to help my brother with a module he downloaded, which did exactly this. So I created this jQuery Plugin instead.

Drupal's PHP filter enables users to use raw PHP code in text fields. While this is an extremely powerful ability, it quickly leads to serious security issues. Users with the ability to insert PHP code into your site, can practically do anything they want with your site. Also the PHP code is stored in the database and lives outside of your normal workflow. My Insert PHP module tries to fix the limitations of the PHP filter and provides a safer way to include raw PHP in your Drupal site.

As some of you might know, PHP scripts are compiled to bytecode right before they are executed. This process costs time and server resources. Also this is done all over again every single time your script gets executed, even if your script hasn't been changed in years. So what could be more obvious than caching the results of the compilation to reduce load on your server. Today I want to show you one way of achieving this, with a little help from the Alternative PHP Cache (APC).

Not all folders and files in your webfolder should be accessible to anyone. Configuration or debug informations should be kept secret. Also it can be pretty annoying if crawlers keep ignoring the rules from your robots.txt and just index and list all files they find. In this article I will explain to you how you can restrict access to files and folders.

Since 2011 Google provides an Apache module called Google PageSpeed. This module has some nice features, which can reduce the load time of your website significantly. In this article I want to show you how to install PageSpeed on Ubuntu, give you an example of a configuration and some tips, which may help you get going.

Drupal has somewhat limited options, when it comes to displaying information during site maintenance. By default admins may enter a simple maintenance message. Most of the times this is just enough, but sometimes you want to be able to make the maintenance page look more appealing. For this reason I developed a Maintenance Node module.

I can't help it. Every once in a while the RPG Creator pops up in my head and I need to work on it a little. Sooner or later I get distracted by something else, but most of the times I actually make a few steps towards completion. This time I revisited the battle script and turned it into a class.

DO YOU KNOW THAT FEELING? YOU JUST TYPED IN YOUR USER CREDENTIALS AND INSTEAD OF LOGGING IN, YOU JUST GET AN ERROR MESSAGE. YOU WONDER IF YOU HAD A TYPO AND THAN YOU REALIZE THAT THIS RELICT OF ANCIENT TIMES SCREWED YOU OVER AGAIN... CAPS LOCK. To prevent this from happening to your users you can provide a little hint to your login forms. This article tells you how to do this in JavaScript, with and without jQuery.

In search of a widget that could display Github repositories, I had to realize that Github itself does not provide something like that. After a little bit of googling around I finally found a nice piece of software by New Media Campaigns. Today I want to show you how to add this plugin to your website.

Don't look at me like that. I know what you're thinking... "Seriously a dice game? How creative. How do you come up with all those new ideas?" Yeah, I know. It might not be the holy grail of game development. But I was bored and I had nothing better to do. So here it comes. Yet another jQuery Dice game the world hasn't been waiting for.

Let's assume you have a few hours to kill, while your girlfriend takes an exam. What would you do? If "develop a jQuery plugin" was the first thing that came to your mind, you should absolutely read this article. If not... well, you also might want to take a look.

A while ago I stumbled across an older blog post about Less. The post itself was pretty euphoric and kind of reflected the common view of many other blog posts to this topic. The title of the article was "Write Better CSS with Less". Personally I was more interested in the discussion taking place in the comments section below the article. Using Less for about one year, I took this opportunity to sum up my very own résumé on the dynamic style sheet language.