Ask About PHP

Lately, I’ve been kind of swept up by this craze to own one of those ‘netbooks’, those ultra-portable and cheap notebooks. I was keeping my eye on getting an MSI Wind, and hoping to get in touch with various PC providers to find out when the product will be available.

So I went to check out three retailers and their website and found their published email contacts. Instead of calling them on the phone, I decided to drop them an email instead. Imagine my surprise when two out of the three got bounced for various reasons, and one just went missing into the ether.

Let’s look at where each of these companies went wrong.
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In my previous posting I touched on a PHP class called DateClass (by Steve Powell) that I downloaded from phpclasses.org. The DateClass package actually contained 2 separate classes. One for manipulating dates and the other for date spans.

This post will cover how to use the DateSpanClass to easily calculate the difference between 2 dates, in intervals from seconds to years. Sadly, however, the class have some bugs which needs to be fixed before it can be used.

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Performing data/time calculation is basic requirement in any programming project. No serious application can hide from it, so thankfully PHP itself comes with some very useful data/time functions. But, I feel that those PHP date/time functions are probably great for data/time display and formatting, but not so much for calculating for things like the beginning/end of the week, the number of seconds between two dates etc.

Again thankfully, after a visit to phpclasses.org, I found a nifty little class written by Steve Powell (way back in 2004) called DateClass which did what I wanted. Unfortunately, the documentation was only a class reference sheet, and doesn’t come with any examples to quickly get things going.

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This book caught my eye recently because there was a chapter in it which talks about Search Engines. I’ve been looking at building a spider which can crawl a website and analyse SEO information for me, but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.

Written by Timothy Boronczyk with help from Martin E. Psinas, this book didn’t really go much into depth on building a web spider/crawler, nor provide me with any major new information. But, it does give some very practical real world advice in building those commonly used application projects.

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