A few weeks ago, I tweeted that I was writing a PHP library for shortening/lengthening URLs using some of the common/popular services. I said it was going to be called Slinky, and that it’d support a bunch of different services. Well, it’s now available for download and I think it’s pretty cool, even if I do say so myself 
Please grab a copy, try it out and let me know what you think. It hasn’t actually been used for anything useful yet, so I’m also interested to hear what you’re using it for!
So here’s an annoying one – I wanted to resize my browser window automatically, after the page had loaded (in a dynamic pop-up), to meet certain size requirements (namely to match a background image). The problem that I had was that all the different browsers support different methods and properties in relation to the ‘viewport’ (visible area of the browser), so I was having trouble finding a reliable way to do this.
I found a great breakdown over at quirksmode.org, but it didn’t actually work in Safari (2.0.2), so I found that out pretty quickly, because that’s what I’m working in. After a little playing around, I came up with the following modifications, which calculates the amount of chrome visible in the currrent window, and then takes that into account when resizing the entire window size.
I haven’t tested this on too much other than Safari and Firefox on a Mac, but I think it should be reasonably compatible with others.
// Viewable size you want once resized
x = 600;
y = 400;
// Now set the window size for different browser types
// all except Explorer
if (self.innerHeight) {
// Figure out the measurements
iX = self.innerWidth;
iY = self.innerHeight;
oX = self.outerWidth;
oY = self.outerHeight;
// And resize to match the desired target
gX = oX - iX;
gY = oY - iY;
window.resizeTo(x + gX, y + gY)
}
// Explorer 6 Strict Mode
else if (document.documentElement && document.documentElement.clientHeight) {
document.documentElement.clientWidth = x;
document.documentElement.clientHeight = y;
}
// other Explorers
else if (document.body) {
document.body.clientWidth = x;
document.body.clientHeight = y;
}
With a little prompting from someone who needed to known what license the PHP Blogger API code was available under so he could develop something based on it, I’ve finally added a license in with all 3 downloads available. With confirmation from the other 2 authors involved, all 3 packages are now available under a BSD-style license. Enjoy.
Eric Scheid (founder of the excellent IAWiki) shot me a line with a more efficient and much sleeker version of my random hex code straight after I posted it, so here it is!
function random_hex() {
$color = '';
for ($c = 0; $c < 6; $c++) {
$i = rand(0, 15);
$color .= substr("0123456789ABCDEF", $i, 1)
}
$color = '#' . $color;
return $color;
}
Thanks Eric!
I needed some PHP code to randomly generate me a hex value for use as a color in a webpage. Here’s what I came up with (WARNING: Some colors are UGLY!)
function random_hex() {
$color = '';
for ($c = 0; $c < 6; $c++) {
$i = rand(0, 15);
switch ($i) {
case 10 :
$i = 'A';
break;
case 11 :
$i = 'B';
break;
case 12 :
$i = 'C';
break;
case 13 :
$i = 'D';
break;
case 14 :
$i = 'E';
break;
case 15 :
$i = 'F';
break;
default :
$i = $i;
break;
}
$color .= $i;
}
$color = '#' . $color;
return $color;
}
Here’s a useful function that I wrote for PHP – it just opens a specified file and appends a string to it. It’s very good for logging things.
<?php
/**
* @return boolean
* @param $file FileNameToWriteTo
* @param $string StringToWriteToFile
* @desc Writes specified string to the end of the file with a linefeed attached
*/
function file_append($file, $string) {
if (is_file($file) && is_writable($file)) {
$fh = fopen($file, 'a');
if ($fh) {
fwrite($fh, $string . "\n");
fclose($fh);
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
} else {
return false;
}
}
?>
You might want to consider making the fopen() flags ‘ab’ for binary-safe (now reccommended on php.net) and also changing the ‘\n’ part to the appropriate line-endings for your operating system (\n = *NIX, \r\n = Windows, \r = Mac).
One of the coolest things in the PHP programming language is its excellent handling of arrays. The same, sadly, cannot be said for JavaScript 
This small JavaScript function implements one of the cool functions available in PHP, making it easier to store things in an array, and then check to see if they’re in there later.
// Returns true or false based on whether the specified string is found
// in the array. This is based on the PHP function of the same name.
// Written by Beau Lebens
function in_array(stringToSearch, arrayToSearch) {
for (s = 0; s < arrayToSearch.length; s++) {
thisEntry = arrayToSearch[s].toString();
if (thisEntry == stringToSearch) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
