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 (such as “How To Do Foo”) instead of sentence case (such as “How to do foo”). Some of them are: “It Looks Good”: The... 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

Writer’s Block is something that even the best among us struggle with occasionally and there is no easy answer to it. I’ve been following techniques such as the 10 content-types method to brainstorm and come up with ideas but all such techniques have a limit, eventually the block finds some... Read More

If you’re suffering from writer’s block or don’t know what to write about or how to research content for your next blog post, this guide will help you. There are just about 10 basic content-types or patterns around which weblog articles are written these days, and by creatively combining them... Read More