Category Archives: Programming

Automatically Save HTML Of Every Page You Visit

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about the best way to capture the HTML of every webpage I visit. Sure, you can always write a screen scraper or bot, but I guess I wanted something a little … Continue reading

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Extracting Table Data From PDFs with OCR

PDF is the ideal format for things you don’t want anybody to read. Kidding.. sort of.. I am a bit biased against PDFs. Though I reluctantly admit their usefulness in a very few situations, mostly they’re just annoying. For a … Continue reading

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Web Font Picker

Google Web Fonts is kinda awesome. If you haven’t checked it out already – basically it gives you a ton of new font choices that still degrade gracefully for older browsers. All you have to do is add a stylesheet … Continue reading

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Half-baked Objects and 10% ORM

I’ve used Object Relational Mapping (ORM) libraries on a few projects in the past. Without getting into the many, many details, ORM bridges the gap between data storage in a relational database and Object-Oriented Programming. Simply, instead of writing SQL … Continue reading

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Random Links

This is super old and super cool – an article from 2007 in the New York Times about using Amazon/EC2/S3/Hadoop to produce static PDFs from 71 years (4TB) of NYT archives. I don’t think I had even heard of Hadoop … Continue reading

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A Little Trick For Dealing With Lots Of View Files

I’ve been messing around with the Kohana Framework a lot lately. The simplicity of using the View Factory has led me to have a ton of little view snippets and it gets tricky remembering where they all live. So I … Continue reading

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Ranking Blogs by Readability

Further proof that I’m a dork: this afternoon, instead of working on my apps, I was screwing around with pydot and matplotlib making visualizations of user engagement (on another blog). At one point it occurred to me that it might … Continue reading

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Automatically Converting PNGs to JPEGs in WordPress

This took me entirely too long to figure out.. The goal was to reduce the load page and server load by converting PNGs to JPEGs. This method may be lack a bit of subtlety, as it *always* converts PNGs to … Continue reading

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An Easy Munin PHP Plugin

I’ve been playing sysadmin lately, which is not my favorite thing in the world. Anyway, while trying to read up a bit on monitoring, I came across Munin – one of those apps I’ve heard of but never really gotten … Continue reading

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Making My Own WordPress Chartbeat Plugin

Instead of doing something useful this morning, I made my own little plugin using the Chartbeat API to display the most popular posts on a WordPress blog. Note: There is really no reason to do this. The Chartbeat Plugin does … Continue reading

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