How to fix a corrupted Installation list in Softaculous, a web installation management application. The underlying data file can be manually deleted, and the install list can be automatically regenerated.

I recently worked on a new website for the Social Science Action Research Group (SSARG). SSARG is made up of social sciences and humanities specialists who provide consulting, research, writing, and editorial services to individuals, government agencies, community and not-for-profit organizations, and private businesses. You can see it at https://www.ssarg.ca/.

My experience Installing Laravel (a PHP development framework) on a GoDaddy shared hosting account.

As mentioned in my last post, I tried out CakePHP, which is a PHP framework for web development.  I like a lot of the ideas of it, and the structure it provides.  But, it seems to not have enough of a user base to have a substantial “ecosystem”, which Laravel has.  So, I’m giving a Laravel … Continue reading CakePHP to Laravel

My latest discovery in the world of PHP is CakePHP.  It is a framework for developing web applications in PHP.  I’m not an expert in it yet, but so far it’s looking pretty interesting.  It seems to have a significant but not huge following.  The neat thing about it, is gives a strong order to … Continue reading CakePHP

This post is about some difficulty I had in making an Apache OpenOffice Base “odb” front end work with an MySQL database backend on Mac OS X, and how I got things working. I originally had an Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Base “odb” file working on Windows, accessing MySQL with ODBC.  The “odb” file had a … Continue reading Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC

While using PHP to display web pages drawing on a MySQL database, I’ve had some difficulty with strings in non-English characters.  In my case, it happened to be Inuktitut syllabics.  Most text seemed to display properly, but some didn’t.  Ultimately, I found the simple solution, was I needed to enable the “mbstring” extension in PHP, and … Continue reading PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters

I’ve recently had to import a large Excel spreadsheet into MySQL.  Of course, there’s lots of ways of doing this, and most of the time, it’s a rather trivial thing to do.  That is, it’s easy if you have English characters and single-line text fields. Approach 1:  CSV.  This is often the “go to” approach … Continue reading Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL

I wrote a little PHP script that shows data from any table in an HTML table, and I had a little frustration in trying to keep the HTML table and column widths fixed.  I wanted to do this, because I want very large tables to appear to load very quickly, and not have columns “jump” … Continue reading How to keep fixed width HTML tables/columns fixed