Wow, has it really been a month since I’ve posted? I’ve been essentially working four jobs for the past two weeks and barely have time to breath. It’s an awesome time to be a PHP programmer in the NYC area - there is no shortage of work at the moment.

Enough excuses, on to the topic. Last week I posted a question on the CakePHP Google Groups asking how to build case insensitive routes. I knew you could use regular expressions, but I’ve always done case insensitivity by adding “/i” at the end. This doesn’t work here since Cake is adding the start and end markers to the regular expression.

No one responded to my question, so I spent a few hours digging through regular expression syntax, figuring there had to be a way to apply case insensitivity to a part of an expression rather than the whole thing. I finally found it.

If you want to have an “about” page that is linked to by “/about”, “/About”, or “/aBoUt” you can use:
Router::connect(’/(?i:about)’, array(’controller’ => ‘pages’, ‘action’ =>’display’, ‘about’));

The “?i:” applies case insensitive matching to the grouping which is marked by the parens surrounding it.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Changes

I’m going to be changing the format of this blog slightly. While I still hope to do app reviews and talk about bootstrapped projects, since I closed my other blog, I’m going to be using this as a forum for some general programming talk as well.

Guest Post

I did a guest post for CenterNetworks’ Startup Tips Month. Not sure how I sneaked in as an “industry expert”, but I’m happy my post made it.

New RSStalker.com

I’ve completely redone RSStalker.com. I’m still working out a few issues, but it’ll be launched shortly. The design is a gazillion times better than the old one and it now runs on CakePHP 1.2 Alpha. This was my first project with 1.2 and I’m pretty impressed. I’m still a bit hesitant to use it for bigger projects, but I like the direction and can’t wait for the stable release.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I wrote my first guest post the other day. It was an intro to Xdebug for PHPDeveloper.org. I didn’t like the end result as much as my post on how to use Xdebug to speed up your code.

Popularity: 70% [?]

Since I haven’t posted in a bit I wanted to drop a quick note so both my readers (hi mom!) know this blog isn’t dead. I’ve got two sites in the queue to write about. First up will be Blogarate.com - hopefully by the end of the week. Then I’m going to take a look at StarTrack.net. Keep the submissions coming.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I’ve got a couple interesting apps lined up. I hope to make my first real post the first week in Jan and then profile a new site each week after that. This will be the last “site update” posted here, as I want to keep this blog dedicated to the apps, rather than trivial site news. All future updates will be at siteamonth.com. See you in the new year!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be profiling one independently built web app per week. At first I’ll probably have to search around to find interesting apps. But eventually I hope that enough developers know about this blog and will volunteer information about their applications.

Check out our about page to learn more about this blog and its goals.

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If you have a cool web app tell us about it.

Popularity: 9% [?]