The system requirements of Magento are quite extensive, it requires at least PHP 5.2.0 extended with mcrypt, PDO_MySql and simplexml. For the database Magento needs at least MySQL 4.1.20 with InnoDB storage engine. At MagentoCommerce.com you can find a complete list of requirements. But how do you know if your server meets these system requirements? [...]

I wanted to show my latest tweet on the front page of this site, and although I know there are several plugins which probably could’ve helped me do this, I decided to see how easy the API was to use. It turned out to be incredibly easy, as long as you have PHP 5.2 or [...]

Sometimes, for instance when you’re building a domain-info tool, you want to know the number of posts on that site that have made it to the Digg frontpage. After playing a bit, I came up with this pretty easy code: [code language="php"] function FrontpageDiggs($url) { $result['source'] = "http://digg.com/rss_search?search=".$url."&area=promoted&type=url&section=all"; $output = file_get_contents($result['source']); preg_match_all("/.*().*/",$output,$matches); $result['result'] = count($matches[1]); [...]

For all you developers out there building WordPress plugins or coding in the core of WordPress, this is the “proper” way of doing a 301 redirect in WordPress: wp_redirect(get_permalink($url),301); Easy isn’t it? Now go off and USE IT. I’m seeing way too much people who forget to add the “,301″, and stick with the default, [...]

As regular readers of this blog might know I have written quite some tools using the different API’s of search engines, and always found them quite useful. When I was implementing my sitewide search function, one of the things that bothered me that it was a bit slow. I knew that I had seen some [...]

Those of you coming to this site more often might have noticed a small change in the search box. It’s now implemented sitewide, and I’ve built a sitewide search functions using the Yahoo! API. It was quite nescessary because I found that people were searching for “sortable.zip” on the blog, and they wouldn’t find anything [...]

This one is just here for my own reference, because the default 302 status code just isn’t good enough! PHP 301 for Apache: header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”); header(“Location: http://www.example.com/newpage/”); exit; PHP 301 for IIS: header(“Status: 301 Moved Permanently”); header(“Location: http://www.example.com/newpage/”); exit;

I’m doing some work on a site which has like 4,500 pages indexed with a PHPSESSID in the URL, causing some major duplicate content problems. I got the server admin to disable the PHPSESSID’s by adding the following to the vhost config: php_value session.use_trans_sid 0 php_value session.use_only_cookies 1 I also wanted Google to get a [...]

Niall Kennedy wrote on his blog that The Yahoo Developer Network provided a short preview of the soon to be released del.icio.us webbadge. From this preview you could see an endpoint and a parameter, so Niall tried and it worked for everyone. That inspired me to make this fast PHP implementation of it, using the [...]

Every self respecting search engine has one, loads of other sites have one, and lots of people are using them to make great new stuff: Application Programming Interfaces or API’s. There’s a big ‘but’ on some of them though…