Do you know why Apache processes get stuck and stop responding when serving pages on a WordPress site? I’ve seen this happen here and on my previous host on a regular basis. I don’t know what happens. It can’t be a PHP script gone into an infinite loop because the […]
WordPress
Simple UTW Performance Boost
The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress is a great plugin. It does the job of handling tags rather well. I’ve noticed many hits from Google searches that go to a tag page instead of a category page of the same name so there’s something there that Google likes. I […]
apache , PHP , Web
Gzip Compression or No?
mod_gzip, zlib.output_compression or whatever way you compress your web pages is a great way of reducing your network traffic costs but comes at the cost of increased CPU usage. Despite what you might think, it can be more expensive to send data over the network, especially to slow clients than […]
PHP
Five common PHP design patterns
Over at IBM Developer Works there's an interesting article on PHP patterns. If you've never come across patterns before it's a good introduction. Just remember that these methods of solving software problems are most useful when you've got lots of code. Using the MVC pattern to print "Hello World!" is […]
Development , PHP
PHP Optimization and Security tips and rant
Andrew van der Stock’s criticism of PHP’s security model. What security? Global request arrays go some way to making applications safer but there are obscure functions and settings which can trip up developers. (via) PHP Optimization Tricks from Ilia Alshanetsky has one gem I didn’t know about – the ctype […]
PHP
Writing Scalable Applications with PHP
Linux Journal’s Writing Scalable Applications with PHP article makes a bold claim which some of the comments on it disagree with. Must follow some of the links later.
PHP , Web , WordPress
AJAX Instant Messenger
Now, this IM client is very cute and I could certainly learn a thing or two from it. The demo works well, you can drag windows around and type messages. Very nice! Wouldn’t it be cool if you could IM other users of WordPress.com or any WPMU site? (via)
PHP
The Holy Grail of PHP?
What is the Holy Grail? Depends on who you ask. Some may think that it’s the object orientated “Ruby on Rails” but others still use functional coding. There’s room for everyone. This combination of Smarty, PHP and Ajax is interesting. There are a few links in the comments to other […]
PHP
Web Application Security Reviews
John Lim lists some of the requirements for an “enterprise” financial application. I’ve never gone to the lengths John has to pass such an audit but I can imagine it wasn’t easy!
PHP , WordPress
Automated PHP code security checking
In my quest to find way of securing 3rd party PHP code I discovered the PHP Security Scanner. This could be a first stage check in the process of checking WordPress templates. Afterwards we’d have to flag unwanted commands. Well, we don’t want people opening /etc/passwd now do we?