Tips + Tricks

Bash Cheat Sheet for Web Masters

Bash Scripting Bash scripting is so useful; it allows us to take many mundane, common tasks like fixing permissions, setting up virtual hosts and deploying website versions and condense them to one line commands. Here is a bash cheat sheet of some of the more simple one-liners that I’ve run across in my time. Feel […]

Laravel – Using View Creators to Make Default Values

What is a “View Model”? In web MVC architecture, there are scenarios you run into where you’d like the same set of dynamic information passed into each view, but that view isn’t called from one location. One such example is a menuing system. The items you pass into the navigation might potentially always be the […]

Staying Informed About Drupal Security Updates

The Problem I have a few Drupal sites (which I don’t really enjoy maintaining), and this year, Drupal has released 6 security patches for Drupal 7. Drupal has an Update Manager Module, but the issue with this is that it sends emails about every single type of update available, so after seeing “Updates Available” for […]

Importing a SQL File That is Too Big for PHPMyAdmin

Oh Noes! My Database is Bigger than the Upload Limit! Don’t worry! Here a neat little trick that helps you out. PHPMyAdmin can extract a couple of formats of compressed files, namely GZip, BZip2, and Zip. I’ve never had great luck with exporting from PHPMyAdmin as a compressed file, as PHPMyAdmin usually complains when I […]

Adding Bootstrap Panel Classes to Widgets

Bootstrap CSS Bootstrap is an awesome CSS framework that allows you to rapidly prototype web applications. It makes it easy to create components that look consistent and unify a website’s feel. Something lesser known about Bootstrap is that it’s just as good with prototyping websites; it provides you with a some simple tools that make […]

Transforming API Data Objects in AngularJS

The Problem AngularJS is awesome, but one thing sorely lacking from it is the ability to use information from HTTP endpoints as Business Logic objects. For example, if you get a list of files from an API endpoint, all you get are the attributes from that endpoint, no methods. [{“filename”: “avi_1003.mov”, “filesize”: 1033293}, {“filename”: “avi_1123.mov”, […]

A Neat Little SQL Trick

What’s Going On? Have you ever needed to select a subset of a table, based on non-contiguous identifiers? I used to either use a join for that or write an external script to SELECT * FROM whatever WHERE key=’val’, then loop through the results using them as needed. Recently, I ran across this neat little SQL operator, […]