Archive for the ‘PHP’ Category.

Brainbench certificate

Brainbench PHP4 Certificate I’ve just received three free certificates from Brainbench, an online provider of certification in a number of different categories. The three certificates look quite nice — they’re printed on nice thick paper and two of them has a “golden” star with the word “Master” on them :-)

I took a test in PHP, one in Linux Administration (Red Hat) and one in Internet Concepts. You can see my score here. The tests are quite long, and some of the questions are very difficult. When I took the PHP-test, I was asked all sorts of silly questions about functions you use with other databases than MySQL. It would have been nice if I could have indicated, that I only use MySQL.

1 Year Anniversary

Gimpster.com is now one year old — I know this because I’ve just received the bill for the next six months :-)

After I’ve made PHP Weather and my PHP Tutorial, I’ve received tons of positive feedback — thanks a lot. Those two projects together with the other things I have here at Gimpster.com have also made it possible for me to serve almost 100,000 pages the first year. Amazing!

No news for a while

It’s been somewhat quiet here at gimpster.com for a while. I haven’t had time to finish the new version of PHP Weather yet, because I’ve been busy doing other things like homework and some paid programming. That’s right — you can actually be paid to program :-) One could arguge that it’s more interesting to program PHP Weather, but it simply pays better to program for other people :-)

Working on PHP Weather

PHP Weather I’ve been working on PHP Weather today. And I have actually made some progress :-)

The print_pretty_en() function has been improved, and can now be customized by supplying the right arguments. Two arguments control the HTML-code that will be inserted in front of and after all numbers. This makes it easy to color all numbers red or do other things like that.

Another argument controls the format of the numbers. This argument can be one of these values: ‘both_metric‘, ‘both_imperial‘, ‘only_metric‘ or ‘only_imperial‘. So if it’s ‘both_imperial‘, all values will be printed with the imperial form first, and the metric second in parenthesis.

This new and substantially cooler version of PHP Weather is not quite finished, but it’s getting closer. So stay tuned! :-)

A new menu-system

I know that I haven’t been updating this page so often lately, but I’ve been busy with other things. One of those things is my new menu-system.

The main requirement for the new system was, that it should be able to deal with a tree of pages several levels deep. The new system handles this beautifully, as you can see at the sitemap. Notice how the lists are nested within each other. The most extreme case is at the bottom, where I use five levels to describe the structure of my Danish Stuff.

To define this structure, I have all the pages specify their parent and their children. All pages have a parent, but does not necessarily have any children. I store all this information in a huge array, which means that it is extremely easy to access the information.

Because all the pages have a reference directly to their parent, it’s quite easy to find your way back to the root of the tree. All you have to do, is to use a recursive function. This function takes one argument: the node who’s parent we want to find. So the function just adds the node to a global array, and then it calls itself with the parent as an argument. This means that you’ll eventually reach the root, where the parent will be an empty string (''). It’s called recursion because we have a function that keeps executing itself until some condition has been met. Because I can now use recursion, the code needed to build the sitemap, has been cut in half.

The next task, is to make some tools to make it easier for me (and eventually also others) to maintain the structure. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.