Beau's Tech Blog

I have had a few cases recently where a customer will complain about a specific browser giving them a non-secure connection, or mix-ed mode error on some browsers. Most commonly, older versions of IE are the culprits, but I have seen a case where Firefox 4 showed a page as non-secure while IE8 and 9, Chrome and Safari all had no issues with it. When your customers are banks, you want to make sure even their customers running obsolete IE6 and IE7 browsers see the padlock, despite the other mountain of issues involved with supporting older browsers. Any one little item can be the culprit. Some browsers don't consider certain connections to be an issue, while others do. The obvious things to check first are script source paths for js libraries, etc... Make sure those are using https. As of the time I am writing this, embedded Google maps cannot be on an SSL page. However, when all else fails and you find yourself sifting through nested js files and searching for image source paths tha...

A very common dilemma I come across as a PHP developer is how I want to handle creating thumbnails for lots of images. Sure, I could use some software and make thumbnails, but I'm talking about bigger projects that need to handle it for thousands of photos. I have been down the path many times of using PHP GDI+ and writing a function to do resizing. A couple of years ago I got fancier and made some proportiate resizing functions so that those pesky pictures people take holding their cameras vertically don't have to be squished into a pre-determined width of 100px. However, each and every time I do a project like this I always think how messy it is. If you have 50 thousand photos, you will have 100 thousand files once you pre-make all those thumnails. And what if the client comes back next year and wants a different size, or you decide to do something in-between sizes for another use? Heck, what if you update a photo, you have to reme...