Googleing around for a solution I came across a couple of different options (using DTS Wizard, another using a 3rd party app etc.), but nothing looked like it could do the job I was after – basically I wanted a no-fuss phpmyadmin style export to csv option. Dissatisfied with the options out there, I ended up deciding to write a php script that would connect to the db using the mssql php extension, get the required data, and automatically spit out a csv file. Writing the script was the easy part, the difficult bit was getting PHP to talk to the database due to an incompatibility between the SQL Server Express 2005 db driver and the php extension. To get PHP to play nicely with MS SQL Server 2005 Express you need to resolve this driver problem, here’s how you do it:

1. Search your computer for ntwdblib.dll
2. If you right click on each occurance of the file (I had one in the php, apache and system32 directories)
3. Hit the details tab, and if any of them say a number that ISN’T 2000.80.194.0 then you need to download that version of the file.
4. Once you have downloaded the file, you need to replace all of the existing ntwdblib.dll files with the one you have downloaded, or figure out which one your php version is using. Obviously, make back-ups first.

A more in depth tutorial on how to do this can be found
here.

Here’s the code for connecting to the db, generating a CSV file and outputting to file in the simplest way I could come up with:

//MSSQL connection string details.
$dbhost = "LOCALHOST\SQLEXPRESS";
$dbuser = 'dave';
$dbpass = 'password';
$dbname = 'target_db_name';
$db = mssql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
if (!$db) {
	die('Could not connect to mssql - check your connection details & make sure that ntwdblib.dll is the right version!');
}
$db_selected = mssql_select_db($dbname, $db);
if (!$db_selected) {
	die('Could not select mssql db');
}
$sql = "SELECT * FROM target_database_table_name";
$results = mssql_query($sql, $db);
//Generate CSV file - Set as MSSQL_ASSOC as you don't need the numeric values.
while ($l = mssql_fetch_array($results, MSSQL_ASSOC)) {
	foreach($l AS $key => $value){
		//If the character " exists, then escape it, otherwise the csv file will be invalid.
		$pos = strpos($value, '"');
		if ($pos !== false) {
			$value = str_replace('"', '\"', $value);
		}
		$out .= '"'.$value.'",';
	}
	$out .= "\n";
}
mssql_free_result($results);
mssql_close($db);
// Output to browser with the CSV mime type
header("Content-type: text/x-csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=table_dump.csv");
echo $out;

For reference, I’m using PHP 5.2.3 on wamp – the driver fix mentioned above didn’t seem to work with 5.3.*

[To understand what the options after the wget command, you'll need to refer to the wget documentation]

Download a single file

Start with an easy one!

wget http://www.example.com/archive.zip

Download an entire website

If you don’t want to be courteous, then you can ignore the –random-wait switch if you don’t mind running the risk of getting banned. If you only want to download the site to a certain depth, then you can use the switch -l followed by a number to indicate the depth e.g. “-l 2″ to a depth level of 2. Downloading an entire website can also be achieved using the -mirror parameter.

wget --random-wait -r -p -e robots=off -U mozilla http://www.example.com

Download an entire ftp directory using wget

Handy if you don’t want to spark up an FTP client.

wget -r ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com
or
wget --ftp-user=username --ftp-password=password example.com

Check for broken links using wget as a spider

This is the command line equivalent of using a Windows based tool called Xenu Link Sleuth. It will spider an entire website, ignoring the robots.txt and generate a log file of all broken links. Handy.

wget --spider -o wget.log -e robots=off --wait 1 -r -p http://www.example.com

Get server information

wget -S -q -O - http://www.example.com | grep ^Server

Diff remote webpages using wget

diff <(wget -q -O - http://www.example.com) <(wget -q -O - http://www.example2.com)

Schedule a download

If you've got a big file to download, you could schedule getting it in this manner. Couple this command with a cron job and you could feasibly create a snapshot of a website at given time intervals.

echo 'wget http://www.example.com' | at 01:00

So, assuming that you have an authenticated session, here’s what you need to do:

var params = {};
params['message'] = 'Message';
params['name'] = 'Name';
params['description'] = 'Description';
params['link'] = 'http://apps.facebook.com/summer-mourning/';
params['picture'] = 'http://summer-mourning.zoocha.com/uploads/thumb.png';
params['caption'] = 'Caption';
 
FB.api('/me/feed', 'post', params, function(response) {
  if (!response || response.error) {
	alert('Error occured');
  } else {
	alert('Published to stream - you might want to delete it now!');
  }
});

If you do this right you should get something like this appearing:

Spamtastic.

Assuming that you have installed the Facebook static FBML application on your fan page, and you are on the page where you enter your source code, drop in the following (but obviously replace yourdomain with your own server address):

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yourdomain.com/stylesheet.css?v=1.1" />
<div id="wrapper">
	<fb:visible-to-connection>
		<img src="http://yourdomain.com/thanks.jpg" alt="Thanks!" width="520" height="400" />
		<fb:else>
			<div id="non-like"><img src="http://yourdomain.com/please-like-this.jpg" alt="Like!" width="520" height="400" /></div>
		</fb:else>
	</fb:visible-to-connection>
</div>

Include the following CSS in your stylesheet:

#wrapper{position:relative;}
#non-like{position:absolute; top:0; left:0;}

You can flesh out the above example to make a richer example, but it should be enough to get you started. When you are developing the page, remember that if you make changes to your stylesheet while you are working on the page, increment the stylesheet version number otherwise your changes won’t be picked up in Facebook due to their aggressive caching policy! The other gotcha is if your mark-up isn’t valid – if that is the case then the mark-up in between the will probably not render. Oh, and if you are the admin of the page then it won’t work properly either, so be sure to test the page with a Facebook login that doesn’t have admin privileges for the fan page you are editing.

Here’s an example… don’t be shy in liking it! ;-)

I thought I’d share some recent learning’s with using the Facebook Graph API as there seems to be so few examples out there about how to utilise various aspects of its functionality. I will explain how to create a photo album and then insert a photo into it using PHP.

The code example assumes that you have already generated an authenticated session and have the correct permissions (read_stream, publish_stream, photo_upload, user_photos, user_photo_video_tags). If you haven’t already done so, then there is a good example here about how to do so and you can read more about the Facebook permissions on the Facebook dev site.

The following snippet creates a photo album and then uploads a photo into it:

//At the time of writing it is necessary to enable upload support in the Facebook SDK, you do this with the line:
$facebook->setFileUploadSupport(true);
 
//Create an album
$album_details = array(
		'message'=> 'Album desc',
		'name'=> 'Album name'
);
$create_album = $facebook->api('/me/albums', 'post', $album_details);
 
//Get album ID of the album you've just created
$album_uid = $create_album['id'];
 
//Upload a photo to album of ID...
$photo_details = array(
	'message'=> 'Photo message'
);
$file='app.jpg'; //Example image file
$photo_details['image'] = '@' . realpath($file);
 
$upload_photo = $facebook->api('/'.$album_uid.'/photos', 'post', $photo_details);

You can add more detail to the created album and photo than I have in the example by using additional parameters within the arguments array.

Screenshot of the PHPMyAdmin field setup for an IP address field

You’ll realise I’m sure that you can’t just add the dotted IP address straight into an INT field without first converting it into a valid format. For that you’ll need a PHP function called ip2long which will convert a string containing an IP dotted address into a integer that can be stored in the INT field.

Here is a quick example of how you might go about getting the real IP address of a client and then storing and retrieving its value from the mysql DB:

//Test if it is a shared client
if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])){
  $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
//Is it a proxy address
}elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])){
  $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
}else{
  $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
}
//The value of $ip at this point would look something like: "192.0.34.166"
$ip = ip2long($ip);
//The $ip would now look something like: 1073732954

Now that you have the real IP address of the client converted to the INT format, you can write it into the DB as you normally would:

$sql = "INSERT INTO user(ip) VALUES('$ip')";
$dbQuery = mysql_query($sql,$dbLink);

To retrieve the original IP address from the database you can use the mysql function INET_NTOA like so:

SELECT INET_NTOA(ip) FROM 'user' WHERE 1

Alternately you could use the PHP function longtoip to convert the returned INT value into the dotted IPv4 address in the PHP code instead, and you could even add the dotted IP address to the INT field in the db using the mysql funtion INET_ATON.

Storing IP addresses in this manner is beneficial because it takes less space than storing it as a string. The other benefit is that lookups are faster because integer comparisons are quicker than string comparisons.

// create new PDF document
$pdf = new TCPDF(PDF_PAGE_ORIENTATION, PDF_UNIT, PDF_PAGE_FORMAT, true, 'UTF-8', false);
 
// add a page
$resolution= array(100, 100);
$pdf->AddPage('P', $resolution);

Make sure you express the height and width in the unit of measurement (pt, px, mm, cm etc.) that you are using as well.

Here is screen shot of a completed “Schedule New Task” form so that you can see what a working configuration looks like:

Setting up Crontab from within Plesk to load a php file.

The fields on the form look fairly self explanatory to fill out, but the first gotcha for me was how to get it so that the job runs every hour instead of on just one named hour. To get the cron to run every hour you just need to use an asterisk (*), the same technique can be applied for all other time frequencies as well.

Once you’ve set the cron to run at the required interval, you will need to tell it what command to call. This isn’t obvious either. Firstly what you need to do is call php or state the path to the php folder, then pass it the parameter “-q” (to suppress the HTTP header output), and then state the full path of the php file that you want to run e.g.

php -q httpdocs/cron.php

If you just put the path to the name of the php file that you want to run, then the cron will throw an error.

For reference, I’m using Plesk 9.5.1 & PHP 5.3

One situation might be in displaying a place name. Say for instance that place name had to be rendered in block that has a width of 200px, with a height that can flex as necessary to accomodate the content. This won’t be a problem in 99.9% of situations, but what happens if the place name is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?! Yes this place does exist! In cases like this you might want to apply a special class name, or maybe dynamically adjust the font-size so that it fits within the allowed container. The consequences of not defending against this situation might be that the layout behaves unpredicatably, breaks, or perhaps some of the word could be hidden by the overflow property in the CSS being set to hidden or something.

So, should you find yourself in a situation where you need to measure the height and width of a text element, this code might help you:

HTML

<p id="place-name"> Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch</p>

CSS

#place-name{
    position: absolute;
    height: auto;
    width: auto;
}

JavaScript

var oPlaceName = document.getElementById("place-name");
if (oPlaceName){
	var iHeight = oPlaceName.clientHeight + 1;
	var iWidth = oPlaceName.clientWidth + 1;
	if (iWidth > 200){
		//Deal with the long text.
	}
}

I have prepared a quick standalone example should you want to see this in action.

A place name might have been a bad example, but it could have quite easily have been any other type of field who’s length or height you might want explicit control over. Other applications of this that I can think of quickly could be adjusting the font-size of headings so that they never wrap, perhaps adjusting letter spacings so that they have aligned edges, or whatever else the designers .psd file shocks you with! With a clever implementation, this sort of thing could be achieved without the user even noticing, but that’s a job for someone else!

Ensure the document head of each page has the “noindex” meta tag. This statement tells search engine spiders to not index any of the content on the current page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

Ensure the document head of each page has the “nofollow” meta tag. This statement tells search engine spiders to not follow any links on the page.

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

Add a rule to the robots.txt file that prevents search engine spiders from accessing the site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Just remember to remove these measures when you launch the site!