I spent what seemed like an eternity today trying to figure out something in a form I was creating on a Drupal site. I was building a multi step form with previous and next buttons, both of which were submit elements like this.

Adding an alias to your system is a good way of saving time when remembering complex commands. You can reduce a command down to a quick two letter command that is easy to remember.

The alias command can be used to assign an alias on the fly. You can create an alias to 'ls -lah' by typing in the following into the command line.

Now, when you type 'll' you will actually run the command 'ls -la'.

Running a simple syntax check over your files is a good way to save time. This can be when testing code but best practice is to not to even commit code that contains syntax errors.

You can syntax check a single file using the -l (lowercase L) flag with the PHP executable like this.

Following on from the PHP script to print happy birthday I wanted do the same in a bash script. I don't really use bash for much more than stringing together commands so I had to figure out how to do loops and if statements using the simple bash syntax. I also wanted to pass the name of the person as an argument, rather than hard code it into the script. This is what I came up with.

When posting happy birthday messages to developers over social media I like to write it in code, just to be geeky. The following code will print the happy birthday song using PHP.

The annual PHPNW conference gets better every year, and this year was no exception. I have been going to the PHPNW conference since their inception in 2008 and this year I was lucky enough to be involved in some of the pre-conference organising and helping out over the event.