I needed a quick and simple method to show YouTube thumbnails to for a “What’s New” video section so I whiped up this quick and dirty class.

Continue reading “Getting YouTube Video Thumbnails using PHP” »

I recently had the chance to setup a Chase Merchant Account Orbital Gateway. I needed a PHP solution for it though Orbital didn’t have any PHP examples, only SDKs for Java, Perl and .net.

So I decided to use their XML API and create the PHP script using CURL.
I hope this is helpful to anyone looking for help with the Chase Orbital Gateway.

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The Rewrite Mod is often noted as the Swiss Army Knife of htaccess URL manipulation, a tool with unlimited functionality and flexibility though also one with a lot of complexity.

On that note it is also probably the most confusing feature for an htaccess novice, so don’t expect to understand this entire module in just one day.

The Rewrite Mod uses regular expression rules to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It allows you to apply an unlimited amount of rules that can contain an unlimited amount of rule conditions to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation tool. The rules rely on various server variables, environmental variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups.

Continue reading “A Day in the life of the htaccess RewriteEngine : Part 1 – Rewrite Directives” »

Sometimes you may need to password protect specific folders and files in your website without creating an entire user system or making a complicate setup and there are several ways of doing this.

You can create a simple html username/password form that posts to a server side script using PHP, PERL or ASP to set a valid user session. There is also the option of using client side JavaScript, though I would never recommend this as it’s not a secure or fool proof approach.

Continue reading “htaccess Password Protection using htpasswd and htdigest” »

I am sure you have clicked on a link only to end up with a generic 404 page not found error, most of the time caused because the page was removed from the site though it was still indexed in the search engines.

A great feature with the .htaccess file is being able to specify your own error documents, pointing an error to a custom page. Before you open up your .htaccess file in notepad you should get familiar with the servers error codes and what pages you should and shouldn’t use.

Continue reading “Setting Up An htaccess Error Document or Error Page” »