Nick Fehr

No longer using Tumblr!

I’ve migrated all my posts to my own website. If anyone is at all interested in seeing it, check it out: http://www.nickfehr.com/blog/

Opera for iPhone is just the beginning.

Opera mobile for iPhone was released yesterday and, frankly, I’m just as surprised as everyone else that Apple would approve a competitor to their Safari web browser. Yes, I already tweeted this link, but this Slashdot article claims that it’s not very good: http://bit.ly/augyRh. I really hope it doesn’t improve because this would pave the way for MORE browsers on MORE platforms. Already, we have to deal with Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome and Opera for Mac and PC, which presents all kinds of inconsistencies. What if we had to develop for Chrome on Blackberry? Or Safari for Android? Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile? This sounds like an awful slippery slope we’re heading down, which has the potential to create hundreds of extra hours for designers and developers. For now, I’m crossing my fingers.

Sending Cookies with cURL and PHP

For some reason, this was something I haven’t had to do before and was surprisingly hard to find a resource for. This comes in handy when dealing with an XML API, which is what I was using it for. In my case, I had to authenticate by pulling a cookie from a server and sending it back with every subsequent request.

Example:

$c = curl_init(‘PATH_YOU_ARE_SENDING_TO’);
curl_setopt ($c, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$page = curl_exec ($c);
curl_close ($c); //close connection

This will return the response from the server and store it in $page. Very simple.

Shared webhosting providers switch to FTPeS

This is so annoying, and I’ve noticed it on several different shared hosting providers that I use. Seems like everyone is changing to FTPeS, and providing god awful instructions on how to switch. It is solved by changing your connection type to FTPS. That is all. Look how Webhostingpad decides to explain it:

Over the course of the next two weeks we will be switching the configuration of our servers to require TLS when connecting to the FTP server to increase the security of our servers.  This will require a few small configuration changes on your ftp client.  Please see our knowledge base article linked below for instructions on how to set this up with the Filezilla FTP client. The configuration should be similar for other clients.  The only thing you should have to change is setting the servertype to “FTPeS/FTPS explicit” instead of FTP.  This also means that the Java based FTP client in your account dashboard will be disabled as this does not support FTPeS.

FTPeS instructions:
http://support.webhostingpad.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=226

Absolutely terrible.