A common need you often face in PHP scripting these days is writing a long-polling endpoint for things like sending notifications or other kinds of responses back to the client. While using something dedicated like node, cometd or websocket makes ideal sense for such things, there are use-cases when you... Read More

Of late, I’ve found that a lot of unnecessary time and effort is being wasted on keyword-research activity by most new bloggers. Most bloggers do keyword research primarily for finding a niche i.e. they try to find a (relatively low-competition) topic related to their own where opportunity to rank is... Read More

My earlier article dealt with multi-query issues of MySQL, this one is dedicated to SQLITE. Multi-queries are often discouraged to begin with but there are times when you find yourself using them. One typical use case is populating the database initially when it’s empty. You do this by running an... Read More

Userscripts are a very useful and handy tool in the hands of power users. Just like customized garnishing, salt and pepper, etc. we put on our food before we eat, we can add custom javascript tweaks on the websites we visit. For example, you may want Reddit to automatically highlight... Read More

The most typical way people set default values to mysql date fields is by using the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP constant as follows: create table ledger_entries ( id int(11) not null auto_increment, entry_date datetime default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ); This will obviously work if you need both date and time parts in the value. But... Read More

Multi-queries are often discouraged with mysqli functions but there are times when you must use them. One obvious use case is initializing the database. One of the first things your app must do is determine if the database tables exist or not, and then run an initializing SQL script if... Read More

While it’s a topic which has already invited hair splitting debates ad nauseam, it has also invited a lot of hype and there is a need to unclutter that hype and think about this topic objectively. The Toolbox Approach This has been the classic or traditional approach when programming used... Read More

There are various misconceptions in the blogging world surrounding title cases these days and there are many who advocate putting all your headlines in title case, some of them are: “It Looks Good”: The most commonly thrown argument is that title cases are somehow aesthetically pleasing or they look good.... Read More

One of the most challenging aspects of blogging is how to perform research and more importantly, organizing your research. As a technology blogger, I face this problem too, so some days ago, I did some research on… guess what? Yep, on how to organize research for writing articles or blog... Read More

Today morning, I woke up to this dull news that Github is soon going to introduce “Sponsor Only” feature, which means the ability for an open source project to hide its source code from everyone except the one who sponsors them. This incident shouldn’t be taken in isolation but as... Read More