Over the past little bit I've let one of my web sites dwindle down as I found it not as fun update. You see, with the previous incarnation of my photography portfolio website (www.tyleringramphotos.com) it was running on WordPress. I have had a few iterations with themes but essentially each blog post was a new photo. I began to dislike the way that worked and thought through some new ways … Continue Reading »

Alright over the past couple days (well today and yesterday) I've been tinkering around with a new layout here for Tyler Ingram dot Com. It's not an entirely new layout, but right off the bat you probably have noticed the various changes I implemented. Why Change the Layout? Some people fear change, I love change (well for the most part). I wanted a new layout that would give more emphasis on my … Continue Reading »

The past few hours I have been pretty geeky. I've been looking into Flickr's API (application programming interface) and how I can monkey around with it and PHP. What did I want to accomplish? At the beginning I didn't really have a goal, I wanted to see what I could do with it, how I can access my photos and from there I would figure out something fun to implement. Well … Continue Reading »

I was looking over my index page and wanted to modify WordPress' pre-built the_excerpt() function which limits the amount of words displayed for a particular post on my front page without cutting words in half. The draw back from using the built-in the_excerpt() function is that you can not modify how it works, there is not option to give the function arguments such as how many words to display. So how … Continue Reading »

One of the tasks I have been looking into at work is the ability to use PHP to authenticate users against a Windows Active Directory (AD). After searching around on the internet I did manage to find a great little tutorial that helped explain the steps in searching the AD for a particular user and then if they existed to authenticate them with the submitted credentials. While writing this post I … Continue Reading »

For some strange reason one of my php scripts at work stopped functioning and was throwing a fatal error complaining that the json_encode() function was undefined. I thought this was a bit strange since I could of sworn the previous week it was working fine. I am using the json_encode() function to allow javascript to properly parse data that it requests via AJAX. It allows the parsing of database information … Continue Reading »

Well if you have not heard about SugarCRM it is an open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software package that utilizes the language PHP to interact with a MySQL database. What does that mean for you? Well depending on your organization’s size it can mean you can obtain fully-featured contact management software that has an upfront cost of $0. The only thing it really requires is a web server running … Continue Reading »

While trying to increase my web programming knowledge I was thinking to myself: What can I learn that might benefit other people? That’s when I thought about Facebook and how it supports PHP applications. The next thing was to think of a relatively easy project that would allow me to learn the Facebook programming environment and I thought about what Facebook is to some people; Facebook is a fun stalker … Continue Reading »

A recent comment that was left in one of my posts was asking how they could utilize PHP to create a redirect for their Affiliate links. After a few moments of brainstorming a decent solution presented itself to me. Using a couple of lines of code (of course depending on how many affiliates you use) you can redirect people to any location you wish. To take it one step further … Continue Reading »

I've seen it posted a few times where people ask: What's the best way to learn PHP? Well there are many ways to learn PHP but I still favor the route that I took. When I first started to learn PHP it was because I wanted to be able to create dynamic content for web pages. When I want to learn something I need to find a reason to learn it … Continue Reading »