It was harder to find what I was looking for than seemed reasonable, but eventually I figured out that you can convert a binary field from binary into a hexadecimal string using the MySQL HEX function.
Everything is easy once you know how!
Learning about Updatable and Insertable Views in MySQL. I was getting the error ER_WARN_VIEW_WITHOUT_KEY which said “View being updated does not have complete key of underlying table in it.”
You would have thought that error message was entirely self-explanatory, but it took me a while to understand the problem. The problem was, well, er, that the view being updated didn’t have the complete key of the underlying table in it.
For those of you who are dense like I am, that means that the primary key for the underlying table hadn’t been included as a column in the view definition. I’d done some processing on the actual primary key to turn it from upper case to lower case, and this processing meant the underlying key wasn’t actually in the view I was updating, because the primary key had been modified slightly in the view definition. I got rid of the warning by just adding the primary key column unprocessed at the end of the column list and that got rid of the warning.
Everything you need to know about MySQL Full-Text Search Functions.
Read an article today about Resizing images with PHP which has a follow up about Retaining Transparency with PHP Image Resizing.
I haven’t had to do this yet, but I see it in my future. :)
Quick and dirty PHP error handling:
error_reporting( E_ALL | E_STRICT ); ini_set( 'display_errors', 'on' );
Apparently the autocomplete attribute is now supported in HTML5.
Looking for a small 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image to use in your website? Here is a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image. You could use a transparent PNG instead, but then the file size would be bigger, so why would you do that? :)
Read this article SEO Best Practices for URL Structure this evening and learned to use no more than 3-5 words in your URL as according to Google’s Matt Cutts if there are more than 5 words Google algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
To format a float value as a percentage in PHP:
$formatted = sprintf( '%.2f', $value * 100 );
I was interested to know if using prepared statements was a waste of time if the statement was only going to be used once. I found Are Prepared Statements a waste for normal queries? (PHP) on StackOverflow and basically came away with the understanding that it’s a pretty low overhead and it’s good for security so you might as well use prepared statements all the time.
