Though not necessary, running PHP on your home machine can make development much quicker and easier. Without affecting the actual website, you can edit files and execute them locally, uploading all to the server when finished. This article will cover the installation of Apache and configuration of PHP on your local Windows machine.

RSS Feeds are a great way to keep up with the latest news and blog sites, but we can also use them to bring data into our PHP applications. In this article, I will show you how to load any RSS feed into variables that you can manage in PHP.

Including up-to-date radar images on your website is easier than you might think. In this article, I am going to share where you can get radar images for free for US radar sites and even share some sample code that will fetch the closest radar site by lat/lon and display it on your website.

Pie chart, circle graph, call it what you want, but these charts are loved by descriptive statisticians across the world for their instant appeal to the viewer’s eyes and inferential mind.  Though descriptive statistics can be deceiving, pie charts, created in this article with the GD library, easily describe the data in a very literal [...]

An IP address used to mean nothing to us, other than where they are in the cyber world, but it is now possible to find out where they are in the real world, using databases that are freely available. In this article, I will disclose where you can get a free database that will tell [...]

Better recognized perhaps as “bar graphs” to most people, in the world of statistics, histograms provide a graphic representation of a set of data.  This graph can be used to make inferences about the data and draw conclusions about the sample and population.  In this article, we’ll dive into a few new functions available as [...]

There are times where a PHP script needs to fetch the HTML from a remote page, or even post some data to a remote location. Learning how to use cURL or fsockopen() can be time consuming and unnecessary. There is a nice PHP class called Snoopy that can take care of all these functions very [...]

Easily the most useful application of the GD library is the ability to dynamically output clean, sharp graphs and charts.  A scatter plot, the plotting of points based on an independent variable and the dependent variable (usually X and Y), is a great application that uses several common GD functions and is useful for data [...]

There are hundreds of libraries available to add on to the PHP base, and GD is just one of those with thousands of possibilities.  Used to process images and even dynamically create and output graphics, the GD library is relatively easy to learn with distinct potential in the graphics world. In this article, I will [...]

CodeIgniter has quickly become my favorite framework to use when coding applications in PHP. CodeIgniter makes it way too easy to follow the MVC approach, maintain modulated code, and to also have access to several additional helpers and libraries. But, there was one major flaw: The inability to easily access via the command line. Why? [...]