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Personal Home Page Tutorials & Guides

Practical Personal Home Page tutorials, troubleshooting notes and implementation guides from real projects.

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PHP Script: Make your own Thumbnail Generator via API
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PHP Script: Make your own Thumbnail Generator via API

Looking for an online tool that will take an image and make a thumbnail copy? This article is for me if I ever want to recreate an online tool capable of receiving an image URL and which both generates and outputs a thumbnail image and makes it downloadable via URL.

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URL Alias uniqueness with PHP & MySQL
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URL Alias uniqueness with PHP & MySQL

So this is an article for me on how to copy Joomla's and Wordpress' feature where a Title/Name value is converted to a search-engine friendly URL alias and is unique in the database. Ok that's a long sentence; let me try this:When I save a record in JoomlaCMS or WordpressCMSIt creates a unique name to use in URLsI want...

Read note 34,182 hits
Foreign Characters create symbols in PHP and MySQL
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Foreign Characters create symbols in PHP and MySQL

Applies to: PHP 5.4 MySQL 5.1.4 Databases initially setup with collation 'latin1_swedish_ci' What Another article trying to help people display foreign characters on their website without the funny question marks in diamond symbols and how I solved it in my case.

Read note 38,022 hits
Convert XML UTF-16 to JSON UTF-8 with PHP cURL
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Convert XML UTF-16 to JSON UTF-8 with PHP cURL

This is an article with notes for me on how to convert some received XML encoded in UTF-16 to some JSON in UTF-8. If it were entirely in UTF-8, I would simply load the received XML with SimpleXML and use the built-in PHP JSON_encode function. I ran into the following errors: Warning: SimpleXMLElement::__construct() [si...

Read note 63,693 hits
PHP: First name and Initial of Surname
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PHP: First name and Initial of Surname

A note for myself on some code to convert a string of two names into a string made up of the first name and then using the initial of the second name. -- What I have John Smith Fred.Bloggs -- What I want John S. Fred B. How?

Read note 19,108 hits
htaccess Rewrites SEF URL and submits to PHP
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htaccess Rewrites SEF URL and submits to PHP

A quick note on a htaccess rewrite rule I'm liking. What does it do? What I type: http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/videos.html Sends this to server: http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?myFolder=blog&myFiles=videos How?

Read note 31,139 hits

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