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When Google looks at a page it takes a snapshot of that page and uses this to match against the query a user entered. To view these cached pages run a Google search and look at the Cached link next to the green URL text of the result. When you view the cached page Google will also give you a date that the page was last cached on. This can be used as a metric of your sites importance as the more often the site is cached, the more favourable Google views your page.

Taking a reading of this metric can therefore be useful, which is why I set about to create a class to retrieve this result.

Download the Google Cache class here.

If you want to create a link that performs an action that can't be rolled back then you might want to stop the user from clicking that link unless they really want to. The best way to do this is to intercept the link with a confirm() command.

The first way to do this (and especially useful if you want to ad other functionality) is to use the following function.

function confirmDelete(delUrl) {
 if (confirm("Are you sure you want to delete")) {
  document.location = delUrl;
 }
}

For each link that you want to use this function on just replace the href with a simple bookmarklet like the following, pass the URL you want to use within this function call.

Every application has a locale, even if that is just the locale of the author. Through the use of locals you can make your application aware of what sort of language, currency and even timezone that the user would like to see. In Zend Framework this is accoumplished via Zend_Locale.

There are many things to do with locale once, but first you need to determine where the user is based. To find this out you simply create a new instance of the Zend_Locale object. The following code will create the Zend_Locale object and print out the language and region of the user.

$locale = new Zend_Locale();
$language = $locale->getLanguage();
$region = $locale->getRegion();
echo $language . ' ' . $region;

What you see here depends on where you are and what language you are running on your machine. For example, a person living in Germany, who speaks German would see the following output.

There are quite a few scripts available on the Internet that allow you to dump data from a database into a format that can be used to replicate that database structure elsewhere. The following function is my take on this commonly occurring script.

A small exploit has been found within the latest (currently 2.8.3) version of Wordpress that can cause any attacker to reset the admin password. The attacker won't be able to see what the password is, and the new password is emailed to you anyway, but it might cause some users to be locked out of their blogs if they can't get access to the email or their email is down. However, it is a real pain so I am writing this blog to allow other bloggers to fix their Wordpress installs.

The Problem

Wordpress allows you to reset the admin password, which some users might want to do. The normal course of events is that the admin user selects that they want to reset their password and Wordpress will email the user a link containing a key. Following this link will reset the admin password. The issue is that it is possible to recreate this link without first sending out the email, which will reset the password. Here is the URL that can be used to reset the password.

A common practice when setting up a Wordpress blog might be to create a page and display posts in a certain category on that page. This causes some pages to act very much like category pages.

The first step in creating a page of posts is to create a page template that can be used by the pages. Create a file in your template directory called pageofposts.php and put the following comment in it.

<?php
/**
  * Template Name: PageOfPosts
  */

This will cause it to be displayed in the Template drop down on your Wordpress page admin. This isn't going to do a lot so lets add some other functionality. Add the following lines to include everything you need to create a blank Wordpress page.

The latest versions of Zend Framework come with a handy little tool that gets you up and running with a basic Zend Framework install within a few moments. When you have downloaded Zend Framework you will notice that in minimal and full there is a directory called bin. This seems to be intended to contain lots of different tools, but at the moment it contains three files that are part of Zend Tool.

The important file in this directory is zf.php which is the actual core of the tool. The other two files are used depending on what operating system you are running. If you are running Windows then it is zf.bat that will be used, otherwise it is zf.sh that is important.

After running coding sites for a couple years there is one little problem that really annoys me, so when I set up #! code I resolved to fix it. The issue arises when you use some JavaScript based analytics software that allows multiple domains to be used, like Google Analytics. There is nothing wrong with analytics software that allows this, and it is potentially useful for tracking all manner of things. However, some web masters might not be that good at running sites and will lift code from your site (analytics and all) in order to implement a single widget on their site. What this means is that when a user lands on one of their pages it will register as a hit on your site.

A common issue I have come across in the past is that I have a CMS system, or an old copy of Wordpress, and I need to create a set of keywords to be used in the meta keywords field. To solve this I put together a simple function that runs through a string and picks out the most commonly used words in that list as an array. This is currently set to be 10, but you can change that quite easily.

The first thing the function defines is a list of "stop" words. This is a list of words that occur quite a bit in English text and would therefore interfere with the outcome of the function. The function also uses a variant of the slug function to remove any odd characters that might be in the text.

To check and uncheck a checkbox using jQuery you first need to access the checkbox element using the $() function. Once you have done that you can retrieve or change the value of the checkbox quite easily.

To uncheck a checkbox use the following snippet, which makes nice use of the jQuery attribute filters:

$('input[name=mycheckbox]').attr('checked', false);

To check a checkbox use the following:

$('input[name=mycheckbox]').attr('checked', true);

To test if a checkbox is set or not use one of the following, both return true if checked and false is unchecked.

var checked = $('input[name=mycheckbox]').is(':checked');
var checked = $('input[name=mycheckbox]').attr('checked');