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	<title>Bill Richards</title>
	<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog</link>
	<description>a developer&#039;s blog</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:52:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>PHP: Check if a URL exists with cURL</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In my previous post about email validation one user pointed out that this will not actually validate if a website&#8217;s domain actually exists. Here is a simple function that will do just that, determine if a website exists using PHP and cURL.
Edit: After searching a bit, I found another similar cURL solution that checks the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/05/php-check-if-a-url-exists-with-curl/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Getting Upcoming Birthdays From MySQL</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Assuming you have a table called `users` with birthday as `bday` for the column name, this will pull all users who are having a birthday in the next 7 days. This is very useful if you want to showcase your member&#8217;s birthdays on your website.

SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE  DAYOFYEAR(curdate()) = dayofyear(`bday`) LIMIT 30;

There [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/03/getting-upcoming-birthdays-from-mysql/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Goodbye MTV API</title>
		<description><![CDATA[About 7 months ago MTV released a promising API MTVN which opened up  a ton of artist metadata and the ability to embed videos from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo. Looks like they&#8217;re pulling the plug come March. As a developer and someone who uses the API, I am pretty upset about this. Thanks [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/goodbye-mtv-api/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Error calling method on NPObject!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Have you seen this error? If you work with Flash actionscript and Javascript, you probably have. It can be pretty frustrating the first time you see this error since it&#8217;s not very informative. In my experience, this happened when I was trying to communicate with actionscript via Javascript using ExternalInterface call. The problem was sure [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/error-calling-method-on-npobject/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Customize your Amazon S3 Url</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I see a lot of sites still using the long default Amazon S3 url so I thought this might be helpful to someone. Lets say I setup a bucket for images on this domain at images.wrichards.com.s3.amazonaws.com to serve all my images. I don&#8217;t really want to type out the extra s3.amazonaws.com bit everytime I link [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/customize-your-amazon-s3-url/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>JQuery sort()</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today I was trying to figure out how to sort a set of list item elements alphabetically using JQuery. Seems simple enough but after searching around I couldn&#8217;t find any ready made solution. The best I could find was JQuery Table Sort (which is a nice sorting package but not what I was looking for). [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/jquery-sorting-elements/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>PHP5 Email Validation</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In prior version of PHP you had to use some regex solution to validate an email address, now in PHP5 it&#8217;s as simple as:
function isValidEmail($email){
 return filter_var(filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL), FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
}

if(isValidEmail('email@domain.com')){
//valid
} else {
//not valid
}
I&#8217;ve been using PHP5 ever since it was released but didn&#8217;t look into the PECL Filter extension until recently. Pretty handy.
Please note that I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/php-email-validation/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Sphinx : A MySQL full-text search engine</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ This has got to be one of the coolest things I have come across in a long time. Sphinx a standalone MySQL full-text search engine. I&#8217;ve been working with it for a couple weeks now and I must say, this thing is blazin&#8217; fast. I was most impressed by performance on large data sets [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/sphinx-mysql-php/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Lighttpd, Flash and Crossdomain.xml</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A few weeks back I ran into a rather odd situation when trying to load an xml file via Actionscript across multiple domains. No matter what I did, it would not load! Typical way to resolve this is to put a crossdomain.xml granting access to the swf host location right? Well, if you&#8217;re planning on [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.wrichards.com/blog/2009/02/lighttpd-flash-and-crossdomainxml/</link>
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