###Step 1: Looping through a directory with php:

  $dir = '/absolute/path/to/folder/on/server';
  $files = array();
 
  if(is_dir($dir)) {
 
    if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
 
        while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
            $files[] = $file;
        }
 
        closedir($handle);
    }
    else{
      echo "Could not open dir: $dir \n";
      exit;
    }
  }
  else{
    echo "'$dir' is not a valid directory\n";
    exit;
  }

This fills the array called “$files” with all of the files in the directory.

###Step 2: Randomly select a file

    $randomFile = $files[rand(0,count($files) - 1)];

This selects a photo at random in one line

This past winter Tom and I went into the web consulting biz together under the company Adventex Design which I started back in 2000. Currently we’re working on some top secret projects which we hope you’ll be hearing about soon If you or someone you know has some programming talent and experience with web applications we’d be interested in chatting with you.

Apparently this problem is caused by comments inbetween floated DIVs being mistreated by Internet Explorer. The simple fix is to either remove the comments or use comments of the form:

$str = substr($str,0,strlen($str)-1);

I found:

$str = substr($str,'',-1);

This will actually remove the last character whatever it is so be careful, for my uses it’s perfect.

I know this is not novel but it’s elegant and these are the things that make my day.

For those of you who make posts on this site, I’m going to make sure you can upload photos and map data just as I have. You’ll then be able to include photos from the gallery directly in the posts with the g2 button in the writing interface.

If you are looking to keep session variables for your site users who might be using multiple sub-domains on your site there is a relatively easy way to set this up though not well documented till now.

You want xxx.domain.com, www.domain.com and maybe even just domain.com to share the same session?
Session Cookies Problem

Before I go on, I’m assuming you store your session id in cookies. If you don’t then this won’t help you, sorry. If you are then I can enlighten you with the problem with sharing sessions. Simply put, the cookies that store your session ID is host_name specific. Thus two different cookies are used to store domain.com and www.domain.com. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge and what would seem to be for security reasons, your browser and php for that matter won’t let you read other domain’s cookies. Make’s sense really. Wouldn’t want malicious.cracker.com reading your bank session cookies while you’re checking your balance.

My Fix

So you need to change the php session configuration option for session.cookie_domain from the default of “” (which inserts your hostname) to:

“.domain.com”

You can do this with: session_set_cookie_params() before doing your session_start() or if you have php start your sessions for you automatically you might consider throwing:

php_value session.cookie_domain ".domain.com"into the .htaccess file for the site. If you put the .htaccess file in the directory for xxx.domain.com then all sessions started on xxx.domain.com will be shared on all other domains like www.domain.com. This means however that sessions started in www.domain.com won’t carry over unless the .htaccess file is also present in it’s root directory.

Important Note

The first dot in “.domain.com” is not always nessesary however for support of all browsers it is suggested.