Archive for the ‘Coding’ Category
Creating XLS Files With PHP
For many years, whenever one of my web applications needed to output tabular data I’d rely on CSV format. This does the trick for most data, as Excel and most other spreadsheet programs will open CSV’s without a problem. What happens when you want to get a little fancier though? Maybe include some formatting on columns, or even embed images?
In that case CSV doesn’t cut it anymore. I had to investigate some methods of generating a valid XLS file directly with PHP.
Fixing Scrambled Curl Output.
I ran across a website tonight that would give me scrambled output when I pulled it down with cURL. Where I was expecting to see html content, I was instead getting what looked like a binary file. (Try running ‘cat’ on a jpg and you’ll see what I mean).
What exactly was happening, and how did I fix it?
Firebug… Lite?
Firefox is out for me. I can’t say exactly what killed it, but it had a lot to do with my surfing habits. I’d leave 10-20 tabs open as I went off to work, and when I came home, Firefox seems to have eaten everything it could resource-wise! Chrome quickly filled the void as my new browser of choice, but the current lack of plugins (i.e. no Firebug) means I can’t migrate completely. Or can I?
April 20th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
| Posted in Coding |
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PHP-cbv Initial Release!
Hey everyone,
Just wanted to give a heads up about a new project I’ve just released called PHP-cbv. It’s a web based comic viewer written in PHP. Makes it easy to access your comics from anywhere!
Get more info here.
Backing up your Gmail Data
For years now I’ve been relying on Gmail almost exclusively as my email solution, not only for personal accounts, but for several companies I work with as well. The breadth of features available with the Google service is incredible, one hard to match using open source tools.
That said, one aspect of Gmail that has always bothered me is backing up. What happens if Gmail goes down for a couple hours? What if your data suddenly goes missing? The lack of an SLA, not to mention that for the most part its a free service, make me worry about this stuff!
Looking around I was able to find a fairly elegant solution to back up all my emails. Here’s how you do it.