chaoscontrol.org

CSS, Minification… and You.

chris — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:51:01 +0000

If you run Yahoo’s YSlow or use FireBug to display page load times, one of the recommendations to increase your site’s performance is to optimize CSS and JavaScript transfers by “minifying” them.

Minification is the process of stripping out any of the unnecessaries that developers add to their files to make them easier to read and prettier to view. Things like white space (spaces), comment characters, line breaks, tabs, etc.

Example,

Original (279 bytes):

body {
font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
color: block;
line-height: 1.2em;
}

/* make divs centered */
.center {
display: block;
margin: 0 auto;
}

#box {
border: 1px solid #000;
padding: 15px;
margin-top: 5px;
}

Minified (165 bytes):

body{font-family:helvetica,arial,sans-serif;color:block;line-height:1.2em}
.center{display:block;margin:0 auto}#box{border:1px solid #000;padding:15px;
margin-top:5px}

The original CSS is now 41% smaller after minification! For low traffic websites, saving 114 bytes on a page load isn’t significant but for high volume sites, 1000 page loads (ignoring caching for the sake of argument) is about 111K of less data to be transferred. Now imagine a site like amazon.com getting millions of hits – the bandwidth savings becomes quite significant.

So, web developers. Reduce your bandwidth footprint and minify your CSS and Javascript files! You can use the free tool below to do so:

CSS/JavaScript Minify-O-Matic!

String Conversion Functions

chris — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:54:48 +0000

I had been doing some nerdy spring-cleaning and found this while digging through the ‘junk’ folder. Maybe useful so I’m posting it here.

// Convert ASCII Text to Binary
function text2bin($string) {
    $string_array = explode("\r\n", chunk_split($string, 1));
    for ($n = 0; $n < count($string_array) - 1; $n++) {
        $newstring .= substr("0000".base_convert(ord($string_array[$n]), 10, 2), -8);
    }
    $newstring = chunk_split($newstring, 8, " ");
    return $newstring;
}

// Convert Binary to ASCII Text
function bin2text($string) {
    $string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);
    $string_array = explode("\r\n", chunk_split($string, 8));
    for ($n = 0; $n < count($string_array) - 1; $n++) {
        $newstring .= chr(base_convert($string_array[$n], 2, 10));
    }
    return $newstring;
}

// Convert ASCII Text to Hexadecimal
function ascii2hex($string) {
    return chunk_split(bin2hex($string), 2, " ");
}	

// Convert Hexadecimal to ASCII Text
function hex2ascii($string) {
    $string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);
    for ($n=0; $n < strlen($string); $n+=2) {
        $newstring .=  pack("C", hexdec(substr($string, $n, 2)));
    }
    return $newstring;
}

// Convery Binary to Hexadecimal
function binary2hex($string) {
    $string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);
    $string_array = explode("\r\n", chunk_split($string, 8));
    for ($n = 0; $n < count($string_array) - 1; $n++) {
        $newstring .= base_convert($string_array[$n], 2, 16);
    }
    $newstring = chunk_split($newstring, 2, " ");
    return $newstring;
}

// Convert Hexadecimal to Binary
function hex2binary($string) {
    $string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);
    $string_array = explode("\r\n", chunk_split($string, 2));
    for ($n = 0; $n < count($string_array) - 1; $n++) {
        $newstring .= substr("0000".base_convert($string_array[$n], 16, 2), -8);
    }
    $newstring = chunk_split($newstring, 8, " ");
    return $newstring;
}

Uninstall MySQL on OS X

chris — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:49:59 +0000

If you look through the MySQL support docs, there is no clear description for uninstalling MySQL in OS X. Here’s how:

Make sure MySQL isn’t running. If you have the preference pane installed, stop the server. Otherwise you can stop it from the terminal:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM stop

Edit /etc/hostconfig

sudo nano /etc/hostconfig
Password:

AFPSERVER=-NO-
AUTHSERVER=-NO-
TIMESYNC=-NO-
QTSSERVER=-NO-
MYSQLCOM=-YES-

Remove or comment out (# marks the line as a comment) the line that says “MYSQLCOM=-YES-”.

Remove MySQL
Still in the terminal….

sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*
sudo rm -rf /var/db/receipts/com.mysql.*
sudo rm /etc/my.cnf

That’s it. MySQL is gone.

php5 Cookie Class (mmm…. cookies!)

chris — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:46:40 +0000

A php5 class for dealing with cookies. Technically it requires php 5.2 because of the added ‘httponly’ option but removing any reference to it will allow it to run under any 5.x build.

Example usage:

require 'cookies.class.php';
$cookie = new cookies('360000'); // Pass expiration value

if ($cookie->set('example', 'example') === TRUE) { // Pass cookie name and value
echo 'Cookie is set!';
 }
echo $cookie->value('example');

Here’s the full code:


 * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * @author          Chris Sprague (chris@chaoscontrol.org)
 * @license         LGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
 * @link            http://chaoscontrol.org
 * @version    	    1.0.0
 * @requires        php 5.2.0
 * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 */

 class cookies {

    /* Class Variables ------------------------------------------------------------------------- */

    /**
     * Name of the cookie
     * @var $mixed
     */
    public $name;

    /**
     * Class constructor
     *
     * @param int $expires Number of seconds until cookie expires
     * @param mixed $path
     * @param bool $secure
     * @param bool $httponly
     */
    public function __construct($expires, $path = '/', $secure = FALSE, $httponly = FALSE) {
        $this->expiration = $expires;
        $this->path = $path;
        $this->domain = '.' . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"];
        $this->secure = $secure;
        $this->httponly = $httponly;
    }

    /**
     * Deletes a cookie
     *
     * @param mixed $name
     * @return bool
     */
    public function delete($name) {
        if (headers_sent() === FALSE) {

           setcookie (
                $name,
                "",
                time() - 3600 * 25,
                $this->path,
                $this->domain,
                $this->secure,
                $this->httponly);

            // Confirm Deletion
            if ($this->check($name) === FALSE) {
                return TRUE;
            }
        }
        return FALSE;
    }

    /**
     * Creates a cookie
     *
     * @param mixed $name
     * @param mixed $data
     * @return bool
     */
    public function set($name, $data = '') {
        if (headers_sent() === FALSE) {

            setcookie (
                $name,
                serialize($data),
                time() + $this->expiration,
                $this->path,
                $this->domain,
                $this->secure,
                $this->httponly);

            // Set $_COOKIE value for same page load
            $_COOKIE[$name] = serialize($data);

            // Confirm Set
            if ($this->check($name) === TRUE) {
                return TRUE;
            }
        }
        return FALSE;
    }

    /**
     * Returns the value of a cookie
     *
     * @param mixed $name
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function value($name) {
        if ($this->check($name) === TRUE) {
            return unserialize($_COOKIE[$name]);
        }
        return FALSE;
    }

    /**
     * Check the existance of a cookie
     *
     * @param mixed $name
     * @return bool
     */
    public function check($name) {
        return isset($_COOKIE[$name]);
    }
}

Last.FM Top Albums WP Plugin

chris — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:42:31 +0000

I’ve been meaning to package this into a proper WordPress plugin but.. one day. In the meantime, here it is in it’s raw form.

What it does is get your top albums from Last.FM and displays the album art in a pretty table. The XML file gets cached so it wont make an API call to the Last.FM servers on each page load.

It uses simplexml so you’ll need to be running at least php 5.

Dirty Install: Add your username and API key, create a folder in your wordpress plugins directory called CCO-LastFM_Top_Albums and save the below code in index.php of said directory. Call the function in your template.

* I should note that this has been minimally tested.

';
    foreach ($xml->topalbums->album as $album) {
        echo '
        
            image . ' />
        ';

        if ($i >= $div) {
            echo '
';
            $i = 1;
        } else {
            $i++;
        }
    }
    echo '';
}

B’ak’tun Countdown Widget

chris — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:36:47 +0000

Displays a countdown to December 21st 2012, marking the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan long count calendar. AKA, the end of the world for the doomsdayists.

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.