Comment Systems play a more and more vital part in social media experience. Since google announced to also index the most common commenting systems some new players appeared on the block. So which comment system to pick? It largely depends on the application you build, but if you are looking for a solution with many social media features -DISQUS may be the one you should be looking at. What if you would like to make a service only based on a commenting system as in saying all content of my website will be user generated! DISQUS is the one to go for … here is why:

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There are many software clients that let you sync content from your local environment to a remote server via (s)ftp but what to do if you have a multiple remote environments/server in form of a test/staging server in and live productive server. In this case you could of course upload your changes first to the test server and then do the same to the productive server. That of course has a major disadvantage since you may have made local changes which are not reflected/tested before syncing the two. Suppose you have others testing the application on the test server you are bound to not change anything while in test modus. So if you dont use any sort of cvs/svn system the only reliable way must be to sync the approved changes from the test server to the productive server while you can still locally develop further.

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Making MySql Backups is a crucial thing and should be done automatically by some routine rather then people doing it by hand. Doing the backup is one thing – securing it is another. Here is a way to dump a database and zip it password protected with 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org)

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The iSimpleDesign Amazon S3 Player lets you access your S3 Account to playback your .mp3 files with the AS3 Flash Dewplayer. See (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/isimpledesign-amazon-s3-music-player-plugin/) for more. All you need to do is enter your credentials in the plugin properties in the backend and you are good to go … But!

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Splitting a PDF according to its Table of Content (Bookmarks) with PHP

by using the linux lib http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ you can use the following command to write a bookmark structure from a PDF to a .txt file

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You want to mix/merge/edit audio file only with php on-the-fly? export your mix to mp3 … thinks its not possible? Well it is!

This will only work on Linux as you need the sOx Soundexchange Library http://sox.sourceforge.net/ and Lame http://lame.sourceforge.net/. Make sure you have the right versions for your environment installed as the wrong setup will not be stable. For installation – see installation guides on the project websites. Once you have everything up and running you should specify your needs and create a runtime routine for rendering audio on-the-fly.
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What is the fastest way to parse a XML string into a equivalent valid Array representation?

I have seen quite some efforts on different blogs and the comments on php.net in some of the functions suggest some valid approaches. The problem with most approaches though, i find, is the lack of xml testing before passing it to the function to transform the xml to array. When you want to make sure you have a valid XML string the PHP DOMDocument class and its sub classes provide everything for iteration through its childs, to saving string presentations to file and so on. On top DOM perfectly validates XML strings when passed into the loading methods of the class. Also i believe any approach using DOM rather then handling the XML string with regex or whatever should be much faster and safer to rely on.
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Count pages of a pdf is pretty simple!

One way of finding out how to count the pages of a PDF file with PHP apart from imagemagick which always performance very slow and shaky (depends on the version) is to use the Linux Ghostscript library via shell and PHPs exec() commands. More…

Video playback with GPS coordinates/track synchronized still remains future? Not quite:

The prototype is already 2 years old i think by now. it all started when i saw people riding mountainbikes with a camera attached to their helmet. my first impression was – who is gonna watch these videos. The stuff i have seen before, the quality was pretty miserable and the footage quite boring due to the missing context.

Being active myself with outdoor sports i thought – ok action video can be thrilling if done right but what if you could combine video with geo coordinates to make a mashup of both?! Back then there did not exists any standard for embedding geo coordinates into video meta data/stream data frame by frame or whatever, … like EXIF for DSLRs.I guess nothing has changed in these regards. I suppose the only available way is to log coordinates in NMEA form while the the video is recording. Very well possible that there may be some recorders that already do that by now – would be nice because then you need only one device instead of having a external GPS logger. But before any of this will be available for action cameras some years will pass.

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So this is it – finally i found the time after all these years to set up a blog and combine it with my portfolio which i formerly had under a separate webpage. For long it bugging me that my old website had no blog functions. Because of this and lack of time i never had any real push in starting to publish/comment on all the tech stuff i do. So this shall be the beginning – lets hope that i will find the time to furnish my new home.