I’m sure there is no need to explain the virtues of regular backups. Below are three steps to peace of mind

1) Configure a backup directory on the server

2) Make a backup script

Dont forget to change permissions

3) Schedule the backup in crontab

Add something along the lines of:

To backup at 11:30PM every day. Just as important as to backup up is to test restores; – it’s no good having backups and feeling at ease if you cant recover in the event of catastrophe!

A client recently asked if PHP was an Agile programming language, and during the (rather lengthy) explanation a few principles worth exploring were covered:

In the context of software development Agile is really no more than a set of principles and values. At a meeting in February 2001 people who were then developing software differently to traditional processes drew up a manifesto; they formalised practices favouring constant feedback and change, flat hierachy, and delivered early and often.

PHP is generally considered a lightweight language, – often it is used because it can get things done quicker than with other languages. A language is never agile because it does not generally define the processes used when developing with it. However it can have qualities that can make its development quicker; PHP is light, interpreted, and it is simple. Unfortunately these reasons have also attracted people unconcerned with best practices in order to ‘just get their sites up and running’

Agile doesnt mean doing the job quickly, – dont expect to finish the project earlier, but you will deliver earlier. A part of the system that is testable, usable, and something that adds value. From the feedback the team and customer will decide what will be delivered next. The iterations are closer together than other approaches and in order to deliver quickly you will only deliver what you need.

As far as web application development is concerned, being an interpreted, lightweight, embeddable, simple language, with fairly reasonable object oriented support, PHP is in a fairly unique position to fulfill the needs of agile development teams. The elements are available, but of course it is up to the enterprises to take the step and use what is there for setting up their own agile development environment.

This is a function to protect email addresses on your website from bots or spiders that harvest email addresses for spam purposes; it uses a substitution cipher generating a unique key for every page load.
PHP encrypts your email address and generates javascript to decrypt it because most bots and spiders can’t execute javascript. A visitor of your web page will not notice this as long as they have javascript enabled, otherwise they will see “[javascript protected email address]”

As the script contains quite a lot of special characters, a downloadable version is available here

Usage
echo hide_email(‘test@test.com’);

Further reading
Ross Killen’s implementation here
Methods to hide email addresses in page source here

A follow up to this post with another (free) online resource from O’Reilly Media.

This is the online home of Version Control with Subversion, a free book about Subversion, the version control system designed to supplant CVS. Enjoy it here