Jerry Travis.com

For years, I have wanted a way to programatically find foreign keys in MySQL tables using PHP. After a lot of thought, I have written Phind. Phind basically consists of one function getForeignKeys() whose only parameter is the table name. If that table has foreign keys, Phind returns a multidimensional array containing an index for the key as the first index, and the part of the key as the second index.

My ultimate goal is to use Phind to create a PHP CRUD generator written entirely in PHP. That’ll probably be a long way off, though. I just don’t have time to sit down and finish something like that right now.

The source code for phind is here: Simply rename the file from phind.txt to phind.php when you save it. You can also go here to see Phind in action on a table in a database on my server named ‘contacts.’ Eventually, I will add more examples to the documentation included with the phind.php file, but for now, it’s sparse. However, I’m sure there are enough PHP guys who have been looking for a way to make sense of what foreign keys are in a table and where exactly they are pointing to.

I hope this helps somebody.

I downloaded the Free Arthemia Wordpress theme the other day to use with my students’ FBLA site. I really like how the theme looks like a professional newspaper like the New York Times as wells as how easy it is to add Headline and Featured stories just by assigning a category to them.

One thing I could get working was the images that show up with the Headline and Featured stories when you add the Image custom field to an article. The images would just show up as a red x. When I tried to view them in Firefox, I got the following error:

After poking around on the Internet for a minute, I found that there are some files that PECL finfo uses to sniff out the MIME type of files. Apparently, the files are some sort of flat file database that holds, well, MIME types.  Luckily, I extrapolated a solution after seeing a workaround on a forum. If you’re using Arthemia Free Version 2 and are having the same problem getting your images to load, here’s all you must do.

Replace lines 216-220 of the /wp-content/themes/arthemia/scripts/timthumb.php with the following code:

$file_cmd = "file -ib  \"$file\"";
exec ($file_cmd, $exec_output);
$mime_type =  $exec_output[0];

That’s it! The only other thing you have to make sure to do to get your images to resize and show up properly is to put the absolute path to the images without your domain. So, in my case, I have an image whose full path is:

http://breathittfbla.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/foreman.jpg

To make it work, the value for the Image custom field has to be set to:

/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/foreman.jpg

After changing those lines of code and then putting the right file path in the Custom Field, Arthemia is resizing and displaying images in Headlines and Featured Stories without issue.  I hope this helps somebody!

I haven’t been a Wordpress user very long, but I have found one plugin that eased a big issue with me: Good meta descriptions in Wordpress posts, categories, and archives. Out of the box, WordPress isn’t really equipped o use Excerpts as the Meta Description for a post. Enter Headspace2, which allows WP authors to edit Meta Descriptions to their heart’s content.

Go to http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/7975.htm for a great explanation of standards mode and quirks mode.