Welcome to the blog of Jeremy Cook, a Guelph, Ontario based web developer specialising in PHP. Find out more information about me or how to contact me.
Guelph PHP Users Group
Colin DeCarlo and I have been working on a PHP users group for South Western Ontario for a while and we're pleased to announce the first meeting of the Guelph PHP Users Group. The group will be meeting on the last Wednesday of every month, starting on September 28th, at...
Read More Easy File Encryption
I've read in two different books that the streams extension of PHP is one of the most useful but least utilised parts of the language. I've always paid lip service to that idea but something I saw the other day really bought this home to me and I thought I'd...
Read More Ideas of March
I've been a little lax about my blogging recently but reading Chris Shiflett's Ideas of March post yesterday reminded me of why I think it's important and why I do it. If you haven't read it Chris' post calls for a blog revival as he feels that blogging has become...
Read More ConFoo Round-Up
I've just got home from attending the ConFoo conference in Montreal and I thought I'd write up a few of my thoughts about the conference. All of the talks I heard were good but some stood out more than others for me. I'll discuss each day in turn along with...
Read More Conference Time
I've been pretty bad about blogging in the last few months, something I hope to rectify over the next few months. A combination of a heavy workload, learning to drive (finally!), buying a house and a big freelance project has taken all of my time. I have a few things...
Read More Some More PDO Weirdness
I've said before that I'm a great fan of PDO and use it wherever possible. That said there are some annoying quirks in it, one of which I encountered today. I'll outline what I was trying to do, what I expected to happen and what actually happened. I'm also curious...
Read More Getting Started with PHPUnit
I haven't written here for ages. Things have been slightly quiet on the interesting work front and life has also got in the way. Anyway, I recently started work on some larger projects and have a few ideas on what to blog about from that. One of the projects is...
Read More Creative Switching
The switch statement is one of the basic control structures in PHP and many other languages. At its simplest it can be used to quickly 'choose' between a series of different values but with a little imagination it can do much more than that. I find it extremely easy to...
Read More Some tricks with Autoloaders
Autoloaders are a great feature of PHP5. Used properly they can help to really 'clean up' your code, negating the need for include or require statements. They can also lead to a real increase in performance as class files are only loaded and parsed when needed (lazy loading) instead of...
Read More Using Zend_Service_Twitter and OAuth
I've just spent all afternoon trying to update a very simple Twitter client to post status updates to Twitter. The code has been using BASIC authentication to post Tweets until now but seeing as that's about to be discontinued in favour of OAuth I thought I'd better update things. I...
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