Category: Quick Tip

Essential toolkit for a developer building a site

This is my own opinion of the keys to give you a leg up when creating a new PHP/MySQL site:

  1. Apple Mac – Go to Web Directions and it is clear web developers prefer Macs for many reasons (costs vary)
  2. MAMP Pro – So so good, so easy to use and create local hosts on the local in various locations across your Mac ($US59)
  3. Coda – The best IDE / text-editor for Mac – the all in one window is amazing ($US99)
  4. CodeIgniter – Easy to learn and very fast to develop with PHP framework (free)
  5. CodeIgniter Coda Mode – Code hinting for CodeIgniter within Coda (free)
  6. Twitter BootStrap – Basic front end layout (free)
  7. Font Awesome – Font vector images for Twitter BootStrap (free)
  8. Litmus – Get quick screenshots of your sites (from $US49 p/month)
  9. VirtualBox and Windows IE Testing VMs – Microsoft allows you to download VMs to test your site in different versions of IE (free)
  10. Sequel Pro – Awesome database GUI (free)
And a bonus is the amazing Google Apps – GMail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Web Master Tools, Google Maps…(free for low volume usage)

With these tools you can get started on your next site in hours.

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Increasing the PHP Memory Limit

Today I needed to run a some code that did a lot of heavy lifting and kept having the error below:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/test_memory.php on line 46

The solution is to override the memory limit set by PHP.ini:

<?php
ini_set('memory_limit','64M');

Check out PHP.Net’s ini_set documentation for more details.

Notes:

  • This has be done as one of the first commands in your PHP file
  • You may need to have to increase the limit to more if the problem is still occurring
  • If this is unexpected there may be some really inefficient code in your code base

URL Shortening with CodeIgniter

If you are looking for a fast way to URL shorten with CodeIgniter you are in luck.

Basically you set your routes (application->config->routes.php) $route[‘404_override’] to point to the controller and action which directs shorten URLs

e.g. in you routes file:

$route['404_override']='short_links/retrive';

Then short_links has a function retrive

<?php
if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Short_links extends CI_Controller {

    function retrive()
    {
        $this->load->model('shorten_urls');//load the model which looks after the URLs
        $url = $this->uri->segment(1);//get the URL segment e.g. abc
        redirect($this->shorten_urls->get_url($url)); //lookup the original URL and redirect
    }
}