Bryan's thoughts on web design and development

How to auto-remove old files/directories from linux

I usually just keep old backups, perhaps for some undefined historical purposes, but more likely just out of laziness. But clearly, this method (or lack thereof) can eat up disk space rather quickly.
I recently created a simple bash script that will find an remove all files or directories that are older than a specified […]

Copy tables from one mysql database to another

At Xobni, I’ve developed a simple testing and deployment platform that helps us ensure that new web code is good before it’s pushed out the door. Part of this means maintaining two separate databases, one for development and one for live mode (Ruby on Rails developers will find this concept familiar). That way, we can […]

Windows Tools: TortoiseSVN

If you’re on a windows machine and you use SVN, I’ll bet you already know about TortoiseSVN. If not, it’s seriously the most important application in my arsenal. It makes svn management a snap in windows, where before I had to adopt a whole clunky editor (Eclipse) to do the job.
If you don’t know the […]

Deploy PHP like a Starfleet Commander

Ruby on Rails brought with it a lot of good practices in regards to code structure and maintenance. At least for me, my experience with RoR two years ago was the first time I’d used subversion and deployed my code (via capistrano).
Even though I use PHP on my day-to-day, there’s no reason why PHP […]

A better programmer’s font

For years I’ve used Courier New or whatever font my IDE chose for me. On a whim, I decided to search for a better programmer’s font; one that’s not only is easier on the eyes, but is more compact and efficient. I think I’ve found it: ProggyFonts

The Proggy font collection is composed of several free […]

Simple dynamic graphs with PHP+mysql

Graphing in PHP has always been an annoyance for me - while it would be cool feature to have, the need doesn’t come up nearly enough to warrant paying the exorbitant fees associated with most commercial graphing libraries. Besides, commercial PHP libraries always bring out the miser in me - it just doesn’t seem to […]

Zend Optimizer + APC = death

Our supporttrio support ticket installation went down last night. Their code is protected via Zend Guard, which requires Zend Optimizer to be installed.
Our site is served and managed by Rackspace. Last night I realized that I should actually use their services rather than keep installing things myself. So I asked them to install APC.
All seemed […]

Setting up multiple blogs with a single Wordpress install

I wanted to enable the rest of the Xobni team to create their own personal blogs, giving them the freedom to communicate their technical ideas and discoveries with the world. Unfortunately, while Wordpress supports multiple users, it doesn’t allow each to have distinct themes and posts. The recommended workaround is to install Wordpress multiple times, […]