HTML has come a long way from its inception back in Tim Berners-Lee mind in the late 1970's but its core standard of using tags within angled brackets hasn't changed much from its first, faltering steps. Indeed, with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) getting towards the final stages of standardizing HTML5 not far away, there are now many new elements that you can use to enhance your web constructions, and that includes many you probably didn't realize exist.

In today's tutorial I will show you how to search through your bash history in order to avoid re-typing long commands every time. You will also learn about a few use cases for the grep CLI utility.

The xdiff extension is a great way to monitor and patch files or strings containing differences between different revisions. This has proven to be very useful for me on a project where I needed to implement a monitoring system for an editor. The man wanted to be able to track the historic contribution that each of his authors and proofreaders had on an article. Basically it was a git tool for journalists.

While xdiff can also do binary pacthing, I won't be focusing on that in this tutorial. Instead I will show you how to install and use the extension to compare strings.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use two of the lesser known PHP functions (metaphone($str) and levenshtein($str1, $str2)) to implement a "sounds like" search using PHP. By putting these two functions to good use, you will get exceptional results when matching phrases that contain spelling mistakes or simply 'sound similar'.

This post is to give you a few tips that you should remember when dealing with loops in PHP. You will learn why it is bad practice to initialize variables inside a loop, why a do-while can cause headaches if one doesn't understand it properly, when for loops should replace foreach and some more interesting loop gotchas.