Insights - Ryan Sechrest (Page 3)

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Insights

Objectives and how they were achieved.

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Prevent autosave on a custom post type in WordPress

I have a custom post type that doesn’t use the WordPress editor or its contents externally, but every time a post is saved or programmatically created, I do write contents to the post_content field so I can search for certain data in the WordPress back-end. The problem is

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How to install and configure OSSEC to monitor the integrity of your website/server

OSSEC is a lightweight, but powerful piece of software that you can install on your server to monitor its integrity. On the official website, OSSEC is defined as: […] an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active

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Insights Featured

Send and receive binary files using PHP and cURL

I was working on a project where I had to send and receive binary files to and from a REST API, so I decided to document some of the code I wrote. Keep in mind that I’m extracting all of these code snippets from a custom PHP class I

Various types of fishing hooks.

WordPress hooks for saving, trashing, restoring, and deleting custom fields in a custom post type

This took me quite a while to figure out, but I finally determined what the proper hooks for managing custom fields in a custom post type in WordPress are. In my scenario, I have a custom post type that uses the add_meta_box() function to add a few custom

Change Firefox's update release channel from esr to release

I noticed today that my Secunia PSI was reporting that Firefox 11.0 was outdated. I went to Firefox > About to check on that, but it was reporting that it was up to date. That’s when I noticed I was on the “esr” update channel, which is odd,

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Create a simple caching feature in your PHP script to cache your HTML output

Every major site caches content in one way or another, whether it’d be entire pages, a subset of content, or only database queries. Having a caching system in place allows you to not only serve content to the user faster, but also reduces the strain on your server. The

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Firefox 9 uses significantly less memory

I received an update for Firefox 9 today and I’m very pleased with its improved memory (RAM) management. Firefox used an average of 600,000 K for about ten open tabs, however, since the new release of version 9, we’re now down to an average of 200,000

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Validating user input with PHP: methods, data, and its applications

If you’ve ever read any kind of article that talks about sanitizing, filtering, cleaning, escaping, or validating user input, I’m sure you’ve come across this line: don’t trust it — ever! Before you can protect yourself from unwanted data, injections, script crashes, and the like, you’d

Person signing papers.

Hybrid form validation: security of server-side (PHP) with efficiency of client-side (jQuery)

I’ve built a lot of forms in my day, and to be honest, it’s not one of my favorite things to do. The designing and building aspect is fun, but the validation and error reporting, ehh. We all know that server-side validation is a must, and technically speaking,

Graph on a computer screen.

Google Analytics: accounts, web properties, and profiles

For new users, the difference between accounts, web properties, and profiles might be confusing, so I decided to break them down. Please note that I’ll be describing the steps and behavior of the newly released version of Google Analytics. Check toward the very top when logged in to make

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Letting users print coupons the easy way

The goal is to present numerous coupons to the user, who can then freely select which ones they’re interested in and easily print them. Requirements * Simple and intuitive user interface * Print-out will only contain selected coupons Solution We decided to stack all of the coupons, so they could be