Generate random passwords in PHP

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Here is a function I wrote to generate a random string in PHP. It is probably most useful for generating passwords. You can specify the length of the resulting string, as well as what characters are allowed. The default length is eight and the default character set is alphanumeric.

Fetching remote web pages with curl and PHP

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This is a very brief example of how to use PHP's curl Library to retrieve the source of a remote webpage.

Determine file extensions using JavaScript

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A quick JavaScript function to determine a file's extension.

But we haven't even mastered Acid2!

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Safari was the first mainstream browser to pass the Acid2 Test now. Opera was a close second. Firefox finally nailed it down with version 3. Even Micrsoft, back in December, announced that IE8 passes the Acid2 Test. Web browsers have certainly come a long way towards standards compliance...or have they?

Netscape support ending in February 2008

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On December 28th, 2007, the Netscape Blog announced that AOL is ending support for Netscape web browsers effective February 1, 2008. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, considering the significant decline in Netscape's marketshare over the past decade to more competative browsers such as IE, Firefox, Opera, and Apple's Safari. Nevertheless, it is upsetting to see what was once the technical leader among web browsers become a thing of the past.

IE8 burns the Acid 2 test

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An internal build of IE8 is reported to have passed the Acid 2 test. This is great news, as Microsoft is showing more and more progress towards incorporating web standards into Internet Explorer, even though IE7 has remained dormant since it's release back in October 2006.

Select all, select none, and invert selection with jQuery

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A demonstration of selecting checkboxes using jQuery.We start off with a bunch of checkboxes:

External popup links using jQuery

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With the deprecation of the target attribute in XHTML Strict, opening links in new windows has become a bit trivial, if not annoying, to standardize. I always look for a consistent, unobtrusive approach that degrades gracefully; and since I use jQuery quite frequently, this is how I usually handle them.

Convert arrays to CSV with PHP

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The following snippet will convert a simple PHP array into CSV (comma-separated values) format.

Getting proportionally-resized dimensions of an image

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This is extremely useful when you need to scale down an image within a certain pair of dimensions.