Posts categorised under:

Web

Importing CSV files into a MySQL table

Importing a CSV file into an SQL table

CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values, and CSV files are text files that look something like this:

example.csv

Username,Email,Address,Contact
johndoe,john@example.com,"71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore",+65-91234567
janedoe,jane@website.com,"24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore",+65-81234567
marysmith,mary@smith.com,"83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-97654321
bobsmith,bob@smith.com,"84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore",+65-87654321

Essentially, the CSV file format is meant to represent tabular data. The above CSV file represents the following table:

UsernameEmailAddressContact
johndoejohn@example.com71 Pickering Street, Singapore, Singapore+65-91234567
janedoejane@website.com24 Raffles Lane, Singapore, Singapore+65-81234567
marysmith mary@smith.com 83 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore +65-97654321
bobsmith bob@smith.com 84 Riveting Road, Singapore, Singapore +65-87654321

Due to their tabular nature, data in a CSV file can very easily be imported into and stored in an SQL table. The commands to do that, however, are not very well-documented online.

If a CSV file does not open as a text file on your computer, that’s because your computer is opening the file with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. In such a case, to see the file as text, you will want to open these files on a text editing software such as Notepad.

Continue reading →
0
Python in XAMPP

Running Python in XAMPP

Are you looking to run Python as a server-side scripting language on your XAMPP installation? Here’s a guide on how to set it up.

Continue reading →
0
Why doesn't text-align center always work?

Why doesn’t text-align center work? A primer on block and inline elements in HTML and CSS

If you’re just starting your foray into web development, you’ll probably find that HTML and CSS have a variety of quirks that can make working with them somewhat frustrating for beginners. One of these quirks involves the text-align CSS attribute, as the attribute only applies its effects to certain kinds of HTML elements.

Continue reading →
0
PHP mail not delivering domain emails to external mail server

PHP mail not sending domain emails to external mail server

Recently, I’ve done some work for a client with an odd issue: the contact forms on their website (let’s call it client-website.com) — which delivered completed form enquiries using PHP’s mail() function — could not send emails through to email addresses containing their own domain.

This means that, if we were to set the form to deliver enquiries to an address like hello@client-website.com, the email would be completely dropped — you would neither find it in the junk or spam folders, nor find any trace of the email in their admin and mail logs. If we delivered the email to our own personal email addresses (e.g. personal@gmail.com), or to emails from another domain (e.g. mail@terresquall.com), then the email would go through (and skip right past the spam folder too).

For weeks, this problem confounded me, until now… and it’s actually a really simple fix.

Continue reading →
0
Adding dates to custom post permalinks in WordPress

Making date-based permalinks for custom posts in WordPress

If you didn’t know already, this blog is not the only thing that we work on — we also take on clients to work on website and web-related projects for them. Recently, we worked on a website project where we had to code a custom WordPress post type into the custom theme we made for the client (yes we make those).

This custom post type (which shall henceforth be called Articles — what we named the post type) was supposed to serve a purpose similar to the default WordPress Post — it was meant to go into a blog section for the website, and the client wanted to be able to assign categories to individual articles. All of this is pretty standard fare when it comes to WordPress customisation, as you can easily figure out how to do it reading official guides and documentation from WordPress:

We needed something a bit more though, as we wanted to customise the permalinks (i.e. auto-generated URL) of our Articles such that they are:

  1. Preceeded by the article slug, e.g. example.com/article/my-article-title
  2. Display the year and month before the post title, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03/my-article-title
  3. Display a list of articles posted on the specified year and month if it was specified in the URL, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03 would show all the articles posted in March 2021.

Want to find out how we did it? Then continue reading.

Continue reading →
0
Setting up Infusionsoft's PHP SDK

Using Keap’s (aka Infusionsoft) PHP SDK (2021)

If you are creating applications that work with Keap CRM — formerly known as Infusionsoft — you might be unsure where to start. After all, many of the guides available online for working with Infusionsoft’s API are outdated. Additionally, although the official documentation is an option, it’s a little too vague, especially if you are new to the whole web API business.

I recently worked on a project where I had to integrate a set of fields in a web form with Keap’s CRM system — that is, users will fill up a web form, and the information will automatically be sent to Keap’s CRM database for storage. After a lot of trial and error, as well as source code reading, I’ve managed to get my form working.

I’ve put together this guide in the hopes that you can have a smoother journey of integrating Keap’s / Infusionsoft’s CRM into your web services.

In Keap’s / Infusionsoft’s defense, their documentation is much better in their GitHub repository, as they have more concrete instructions and examples. Once the API is set up on your web application, the information in the repository is actually very helpful.

Continue reading →
5
Adding virtual hosts on Bitnami Apache

Adding virtual hosts on Bitnami Apache

Over the weekend, I’ve spent a substantial chunk of time figuring out how to add a virtual host onto a client’s subdomain. In laymen’s terms, this means that:

  1. My client has a website hosted on a domain (which we shall call example.com, for confidentiality reasons)
  2. We want to build a web application on app.example.com, which will be entirely separate from example.com.
  3. To save on cost, we want to host app.example.com on the same server that example.com is using (i.e. create a virtual host on the web server).

This means that we have to configure our web server so that it will serve a different webroot depending on the domain it is being accessed from.

Continue reading →
0
Security for your Ubuntu Droplet

Setting up basic security for your Ubuntu Droplet

Have you recently spun up a new Ubuntu Droplet on DigitalOcean? The other day, when I checked my authentication logs in /var/log/auth.log, I came across several login attempts with random usernames.

Malicious login attempts in Ubuntu
Login attempts by malicious users.

We often take security for granted, but it becomes something of great concern once you start to manage servers of your own. If you were to leave your Droplet as it is, it is only a matter of time before hackers guess your login credentials and gain access to your system. Hence, here are some basic security measures you should set up to prevent others from breaking in:

Continue reading →
0
PayPal Conversion
Original photo by Lukas from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/analytics-blur-business-close-up-590045/

Save money by being smart with PayPal conversion

In today’s digital era, where everything is becoming smarter and faster, and everyone is about doing things that make them look smart, PayPal is absolutely invaluable. It’s a payment platform that stores all of our payment information across different cards and banks, so we don’t have to remember and re-enter pesky things like credit card numbers everytime we purchase something. Just click on PayPal’s big yellow checkout button! It’s the smart thing to do, right?

Continue reading →
0