I’ve been building a PHP script to import an XML file every 24 hours into a MySQL database using a CRON job. The table contains almost 150,000 rows of data, each with a unique ID (primary key). The goal is to check if each ID exists. If so, update the record, otherwise insert it as [...]
Goodbye Stargate
May 9th, 2011 
bbcentral I’m dreading tomorrow night…it could be the last time I ever get to watch a new episode of Stargate. It’s the final SGU episode, and it looks like there may not be any new series or any more SG-1 or Atlantis movies. And so ends a chapter of my life that started 14 years ago. [...]
How to Add Up/Down Swipe Functionality to Sencha Touch
March 16th, 2011 bbcentral Whilst working with the Sencha Touch mobile JS framework, I was disappointed to find that it only handles left/right swiping. The application I’m working on requires swiping up/down/left/right to navigate, so I needed to add this functionality to the code. It was simple enough to hack the Sencha Touch JS file, but this would have [...]
How to send mail from a Google Apps Group/List
January 25th, 2011 bbcentral If you use Google Apps for your domain, sometimes you have a “group” setup, such as info@yourdomain.com. Mail sent to info@yourdomain.com is then forwarded to the members of the group, such as chris@yourdomain.com. The problem is that when you want to send an email from the info account, Gmail adds the “Sender” header which makes [...]
How to Remove Font Styles in TinyMCE
January 14th, 2011 bbcentral I use TinyMCE Editor on several of my projects, and I regularly have a problem with my users pasting content from Microsoft Word etc. This means that I usually end up with multiple ugly font styles on the page that don’t match. There is a relatively undocumented feature in TinyMCE called “valid_styles”. This will prevent [...]
How to add an “Invite” tab to a Facebook Page
December 26th, 2010 bbcentral I was asked today how to add a tab to a Facebook Page to allow your fans to suggest the page to their friends. Here’s the code: <fb:request-form method=”GET” type=”YOUR PAGE” invite=”true” content=”DESCRIBE YOUR PAGE”> <fb:req-choice url=”http://www.facebook.com/YOURPAGE” label=”Check out!” /> <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext=”Tell your friends about YOUR PAGE” rows=”5″ cols=”3″ showborder=”false” /> </fb:request-form> Obviously you’ll need [...]
Why I’m ditching vBulletin for IP.Board
May 16th, 2010 bbcentral My website Blues Brothers Central has had a forum since early 2004. Initially I wrote my own basic forum, but it became clearly soon afterwards that it needed something more powerful. For a while I used phpBB2, but after a year or two even that wasn’t good enough. The lack of features and regular security [...]
PHP Variable Preparation Function for MySQL
April 19th, 2010 bbcentral This is a handy PHP function I wrote to prepare values for insertion into a MySQL database. For example, if you prefer to use arrays of data and have a function automatically join them together: It can make life much easier as you don’t need to manually write all your SQL queries and list every [...]
I’ve Moved!
April 18th, 2010 bbcentral This blog has now moved from http://bbcentral.wordpress.com to http://www.chrisrossi.com All old blog posts will be automatically redirected for the time being. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks!
Adelaide, Australia
The new “Press Enter to Submit” Facebook Comments System
Today Facebook rolled out a change to their comments system. The “Submit” button is now missing, and pressing the “Enter” key no longer adds a new line, it submits the comment. The obvious downside to this is that comments will be posted incomplete, when users are trying to add paragraphs but accidentally submit the comment. [...]