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Use PHP and cURL to retrieve URL contents (with a few options)

Posted by Andy Langton on Monday, 27 July 2015

url_get_contents - a function to retrieve the contents of a remote URL with PHP and the cURL library.[break]Because I've used this function for a few different projects, it's grown to be a bit of a monster, however you can still use it in a pretty basic way, i.e. url_get_contents("http://www.example.com");

I'm not a professional programmer by any means, and I suffer from lack of organisation of common code that I use. So, I'm going to post a few of the things that I hunt for here, to save myself a bit of a search. Hopefully they may be useful to someone else too.

Drupal Tip: Dynamic Unapproved Comments Shortcut

Posted by Andy Langton on Monday, 27 July 2015

One of the most common tasks in Drupal is to review comments awaiting approval. I found a quick trick which allows you to add a link in your admin shortcuts which will dynamically add the count of shortcuts you need to approve. So, no need to go the extra clicks to see whether anything is awaiting approval.

Jquery: show/hide multiple elements independently

Posted by Andy Langton on Monday, 13 October 2008

Hiding a single element with Jquery was pretty straightforward. But what about if you want to show/hide multiple elements independently?

Thanks to Justin Young for requesting this new function and getting me to do something useful ;)

Accessible show/hide content with jquery

Posted by Andy Langton on Saturday, 17 May 2008

Update: Show/hide multiple elements independently

I'm a big fan of jquery since I don't often need to write any javascript, but for the times I do it cuts out most of the hassle of accessing on page elements, using CSS selectors and really helps with an accessible approach.

Get Monitor Screen Resolution with Javascript

Posted by Andy Langton on Thursday, 20 March 2008

Find out and display a user's screen resolution with javascript.

Get viewport/window size (width and height) with javascript

Posted by Andy Langton on Tuesday, 4 December 2007

While finding out monitor resolution with javascript can be useful for statistics and certain other applications, often the need is to determine how much space is available within the browser window.

Space within the browser window is known as the 'viewport' affected by the monitor resolution, how many toolbars are in use within the browser and whether the browser is in full screen or windowed mode.

Use mod_speling to fix mis-typed URIs

Posted by Andy Langton on Monday, 30 April 2007

I just discovered the Apache module mod_speling (yup, one 'l') which is a fantastic way to ensure visitors who mistype URIs get automatically redirected to the correct location.

Permanent (301) Redirects with PHP

Posted by Andy Langton on Friday, 30 March 2007

If you want to permanently redirect a small number of URIs, or redirect based on conditions defined in PHP, then you need a permanent PHP redirect.

To redirect clients based on things like screen resolution or window size, you should use javascript redirects.

Javascript/CSS Scrollbar Effects

Posted by Andy Langton on Monday, 26 March 2007

The ability to change a visitors scrollbars actually uses CSS rather than javascript.

To change the scollbar's colours, copy and paste the script below into your webpage (in the <head> section), and change the colour values to suit your page:

Javascript Redirect Scripts

Posted by Andy Langton on Friday, 23 February 2007

Redirecting a visitor with javascript is pretty straightforward. The simplest way is to use one of the methods below.

Note that in some cases a server-side redirect (i.e. one using a language such as PHP, ASP or Perl) is a better choice, since not all users will have javascript enabled. Search engine spiders are unlikely to follow javascript based redirects.

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