Tag Archives: programming

Sending Mail with PHP

Mail is extremely easy to send from PHP, unlike using scripting languages which require special setup (like CGI). There is actually just one command, mail() for sending mail. In this tutorial we will discuss how to use PHP’s mail() function. It is used as follows: mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers); In this example I have used variables as they have […]

Custom Backend Developed for Signature Auto Leasing

Signature Auto Leasing, a New York based leasing company, came to us with a static website, perfect for a leasing company – however lacking certain functionality. For example, their home-page features 6 lease specials – which are displayed through the use of rollover images. Finalizing each row are 2 static images which lead to their […]

Need a Job? Open Source Coding with Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Over the past eight years more than 6,000 students have “graduated” from Google’s Summer of Code program, working with almost 400 different open source projects. Students who are accepted […]

Want To Play With PHP 5.5? Meet CloudLinux.

PHP 5.5 is still in the Alpha stages of it’s release, and as such the majority of hosting companies out there don’t have it available yet across their networks. CloudLinux however doesn’t believe in that. Not when they have the PHP Selector tool in their arsenal. With the CloudLinux PHP Selector you can set a […]

Basic PHP Template System

PHP has many different template solutions, and the beauty of them all is how simple it makes maintaining and changing your website. Back in the day when everything was handled with static HTML files – if you needed to add a new link to your main menu – you found yourself editing dozens if not […]

Hello Scratchpad – A Real Time, Online HTML/CSS Renderer

I was doing some browsing, well Stumbling to be exact, and came upon a great new site called Scratchpad. Developed by Nathan Bashaw, Scratchpad serves as a great place to experiment and play around with your HTML, CSS and even Javascript. You get a dual-pane view; you’re code on one side, and a live render of […]

The PHP Ternary Operator

PHP has plenty of different operators, the majority of them being either unary or binary operators. A unary operator, such as !, performs its operations on just one single value. A binary operator, such as =, is used to perform an operation on two operads. So following the naming logic you’ve probably already figured out […]

FeedBurner API Shut Down

As part of Google’s spring-cleaning announcement –  the FeedBurner API has been shut down. Any application that requests subscriber information will fail to retrieve the data. This includes custom subscriber count widgets, and various iPhone apps – like Ego. This does bring up the concern of what will come of FeedBurner over the next several years. Will […]

HTACCESS Tutorials

Welcome to the .htaccess tutorials section of the Rapid Purple blog. The following tutorials are aimed to give you an introduction to creating and working with an .htaccess file; along with a few useful tips and tricks every webmaster should be familiar with. Creating An .HTACCESS File First things first. Before you can start using […]

NYCCCBA & Fastcase Integration Complete

The New York Criminal & Civil Courts Bar Association came to me requiring a members portal to be setup on their site and for Fastcase to be integrated within this system. Fastcase is the leading next-generation legal research service that puts a comprehensive national law library and smarter and more powerful searching, sorting, and visualization tools […]

Escaping Characters and Variable Expansion

Escaping characters is basic, but essential to an error-free PHP script. Consider the following sentence for example: Mike’s uncle said, “Isn’t that cool?” Now if we attempt to use PHP to echo this sentence to the browser, those quotes and apostrophes will cause some problems. The quotes and apostrophes inside the string are confused for […]

The BASH Shell: Pipelines

Pipelines are a great way to string together a series of commands. This means that the output from the first command in the pipeline is used as the input for the second command in the pipeline. The output from the second command in the pipeline is used as the input to the third command in […]

The BASH Shell: Command History & Aliases

Command History Bash keeps track of a certain number of previous commands that you have entered into the shell. The number of commands is given by a shell variable called HISTSIZE (which we will discuss later on). Bash stores the text of your previous commands in a history list. When you logon to to your […]

The BASH Shell: Wildcards & Command Line Completion

The GNU Bourne-Again SHell (BASH), as the name implies, is an extension of the Bourne shell. It provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) for working on *nix systems and is the most common shell used on Linux systems. Chances are that if you’re managing your own virtual or dedicated server – you’ll end up using […]