I have just blown 4 – 5 hours on this “feature” of PHP and I thought someone else would care to know.

You can’t use numeric keys for sessions in php! Continue reading →

“We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors.”
– Bruce Joyce

I wrote about my experience writing a site crawler in php in an earlier post, and I’m going to use some of the background there to make my point here. So it might help to go read it if you haven’t already.

[Google’s crawler [Googlebot] isn’t that sophisticated/writing a crawler in php]

From my casual observation of the way Googlebot crawls some of the sites I work on, I have reached the conclusion that it works in much the same way that a crawler I wrote a year ago worked.

Google bot goes page to page, gathering links from your page and tacking them onto the current url that it is at, right then. So why do query strings give it such a problem? Continue reading →

I spent a lot of time early last year, trying to write a crawler in php (I know, I know).

It was supposed to sit on the server and when so that when you went to the url, it’d generate a google sitemap for your entire site.

What I found out was that writing a good crawler is very hard work. Not because of the recursion involved, but because of the infinite ways link tags appear.

Now Google has validated my experience (more on this in a second).

Continue reading →

I was trying to take advantage of PHP5’s new auto_prepend_file directive today, by using the php_value directive to set it in a .htaccess file. But as soon as I did that, my cheerfully running application puked and died, with the familiar message.

“Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request”

I had seen this behavior before, when I was writing an app for a client a few months ago, but I hadn’t had time to investigate it. Today I decided to go a-googling and I promptly found my answer …

Those are Apache directives, but in CGI mode Apache calls the php binary, which turn reads php.ini. Since the binary doesn’t read httpd.conf it has no effect on PHP. As PHP isn’t loaded into Apache, Apache doesn’t know what to do with the directives and borks.

Ian Bickings’s “What PHP Deployment gets right”

This is a wonderfully written article on how PHP works, and the funny thing is that Ian seems to be more of a Python guy than anything. Needless to say, I learned a few things from reading this … Continue reading →