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One nice feature for any blog or site (especially news sites) is to have a little list of forthcoming events that would interest your readers. One way of collating this information is to scour the web and update the list manually. However, this is time consuming and tedious, especially as there is an easier way to do it.

Have a look at the Yahoo site called Upcoming. On this site you can search for events on lots of different subjects in lots of different locations all over the world. Also, if you have an event you can put it up on the site.

The PHPNW conference was this weekend, and 8 members of staff from my company showed up to support the PHP community and learn a couple of things along the way. The conference consisted of 174 attendees, with 12 sessions hosted by 16 speakers.

The talks ranged from simple usability and design to getting started in Drupal and they were all well researched, planned and executed. I was especially impressed with the 3D timeline used in the Twittex talk.

The two talks that stood out for me where the Introduction to the Zend Framework and HTML to Drupal in 30 minutes. I will definitely be looking into these two products, and perhaps even buying a book on the Zend Framework.

Drupal is a CMS system that can be freely downloaded and used from the Drupal website. It is not an object orientated PHP driven system and so everything is available through function calls and variables.

I have heard that the learning curve on developing Drupal is quite steep, but once you get around this initial hurdle the whole thing is pretty simple. This ease of development means that it is possible to take an idea and use Drupal and all its features as the CMS behind your idea, thus saving you time on your project development.

This common problem has stumped many programmers in the past, so I thought I would add in my little part. Whilst doing research for this I managed to find a site called www.streetmap.co.uk which has a nice little PostCode to geographical reference tool. Using a simple URL parameter I was able to give the site a PostCode and strip the longitude and latitude from the resulting HTML. Here is the function I came up with.

One neat thing about Wordpress is the ability to add images to your posts in a quick and easy manner. You can also create thumbnails of larger images and link to them using a captioned image. The only problem is that when you have sorted out how your images look in your post in the admin section they just don't appear the same in your template once you have published it.

This is because Wordpress creates a set of styles that are used in the admin section and the default Wordpress templates. However, these styles are usually left out of custom template stylesheets. If you want to use the same sort of formatting that the Wordpress admin section has then open up your stylesheet file in your template and put the following stylesheet rules in at the bottom.

There is nothing more irritating than when you are typing out a long message in a text box and you accidentally move backwards, or clicking on a link and moving off page, therefore losing data you may have entered. There is a solution to stop this happening and it involves the onbeforeunload event.

Although not technically a fully supported event, onbeforeunload is run just before the page is unloaded out of cache. The onunload event occurs right after this, and it is too late by that point.

To prevent a user from moving out of the current page without some form of warning you will need to return some text with the onbeforeunload event. In some browsers that text will be used as part of the message, some browsers will ignore the message but continue anyway.

Include the following body tag in the page you want to incorporate this feature into.

Rather than use the old connection properties dialog in Windows you can open up a command prompt and use the netsh to set up all sorts of network specific settings. The most useful part of this is that you can create a bat file that will allow you to quickly change your local IP address very quickly.

To see a list of the network connections available you can use the following command.

netsh interface show interface

This runs the netsh program, in the interface context, and shows the interfaces available. There are lots of other contexts to chose from, just type netsh and then ? to see a list of commands. If you type in netsh and hit enter key you will see the prompt change to netsh meaning that you are in that program mode. Just type exit or bye to exit.

You can also ask for information about individual interfaces by using the name parameter.

I was sent an email the other day that contained some text were the start and end letter of each word were left alone, but the middle of each word was randomized. The weird part was that the text was still readable, which is due to the way in which the brain processes words.

I wondered if I could replicate this using a PHP script. All I would need to do is split apart the sentence into the component words and loop through those words, randomizing the middle of them. Clearly, it is not possible to mix up the order of letters in a word less than four characters long so a check would be needed for this. This is what I cam up with:

I have talked about generating random passwords before. Although that function generated some nice passwords, they perhaps aren't as unique as they ought to be.

This function, take from Webtoolkit creates passwords of different length with varying levels of complexity.

Creating image thumbnails is a pretty common practice, and there are a few scripts available that allow you to do this in PHP using the GD2 library. However, they are normally overkill for what should be a simple task, so after a bit of searching and testing I found the following ImageResize class, which is taken from http://shiege.com/scripts/thumbnail/. I have modified the code to be PHP5, but if you want the PHP4 version then you can get it from the site.