Abstract Flow

Over the past couple years I have written a large number of various scripts and programs, mostly in PHP. Some were just to test concepts, but others had working and useful bits of code. With this large number of files and directories to keep track of it is easy to mess something up, such as forgetting to backup part of it. Oops.

You will notice the domain http://projects.abstractflow.com, which is like some sort of manual source control operation. Well, unfortunately, it sucks. The truth is I was simply too afraid to get into the complexities of true source control with SVN. No more. After losing a payroll application that I spent several hours writing, because of a silly backup mistake, I realized I would absolutely need to start using source control before anything else went wrong.

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Download here

Many websites benefit, or would benefit, from a simple navigational breadcrumb. For those of you who are not familiar, lets take a URL such as http://example.com/foo/bar/index.html. A breadcrumb for that URL may look as follows:

1
2
3
4

<a href="http://example.com">Home</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/foo">foo</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/foo/bar">bar</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/foo/bar/index.html">index</a>

Which would create something like

Home, foo, bar, index

Typing out that source and modifying it for every page on your website is an option. A better, and less tedious option, is implementing my breadcrumb() function instead.

All the documentation is within the PHP source. Essentially, you create an array that tells breadcrumb() how to format the breadcrumb. Every option has default values though, so just using breadcrumb() with no arguments is fine! Download the package and try it out. Hopefully it suites every breadcrumb scheme you could imagine.

This was one of the first things I wrote with PHP. It is an invincible artificial intelligence for the game Tic Tac Toe. The intelligence itself uses masses of if and elseif conditions in a procedural format. To achieve invincibility it took hundreds of tests and multiple rewrites.

Looking at the code a few years later I am a bit embarrassed by the poor coding. Nonetheless, what works works. Coded well or not it is still invincible!

Play the game, and good luck! You may also view the source of the computer AI.

Try it out, download

This is rather a strange project… I am bad at naming things. I will admit that. So I ended up writing a script that included many prefixes, suffixes, and other word segments that would randomize and produce incredible souding words. The only problem is, none many of the words ended up that incredible sounding. If you go through a few hundred you may find somethat that rolls off the tounge nicely. Like megalance, demectomy, or multism.

Try it out, download

You’ll never have to pick up a graphic editor again to make your custom-font header images.

This concept could potentially be an equal or better than sIFR because requirements are on the server and not the client. Being able to use custom fonts on headers is usually a popular demand. The true power is being able to have custom headers in dynamic environments. It is extremely easy to use as it requires no JavaScript, Flash, or fancy setups. Certain implementations may involve those technologies though. You just copy the dynamic image script to where ever you want it, and start linking to it. You can link to it with an image tag, or even in your css documents. It is a very clean solution.

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