Tutorials

SQL: Multiple Joins on a Single Table / Relationship

There are some times when we have to create multiple joins on a single table, i.e. when we have many elements in a table referencing the same foreign key.   It's not a difficult situation to deal with when you've dealt with it before, but can be a little confusing for new DB users.  That's why I've created this tutorial - to explain how to properly design and reference your tables in SQL.

Photoshop Brushed Metal Pattern Tutorial

Here's a nifty tutorial on how to make a brushed metal pattern in Photoshop.  I'm presenting it in a tutorial because there's a nifty trick I want to share.

How to Denormalize a Normalized Table Using SQL

July 13, 2006 - written by Steven Moseley

Often times, we sacrifice some usability in our data in order to follow nth-normal form in our database architecture.

This tutorial will teach you a trick that allows us to retrieve name-value pairs of data as denormalized column-value pairs.

XML and XSD (Schema) Primer

February 4, 2004 - written by Steven Moseley

I decided to put this little XML tutorial / primer together for those of you who are interested in learning XML, but don't want to spend weeks doing so. This 15-minute course should give you guys a good basic understanding of how XML works without much time investment. I suggest that if you find this primer interesting, go read up more on XML (and the associative standards) and learn more. There's a lot more you can do with it than what I'm showing here.

How to Pass Spam Filters with PHP mail

July 24, 2006 - written by Steven Moseley

Ok, so you've set up a nice mail form on your remotely hosted PHP site, but every time you send an email to someone through it, it seems to get derailed by spam filters??? There's a simple reason for this. If your website is hosted on a shared server, you're likely using a mail server with a different domain than your own, and when you try to alias that as a message from your domain, many new email clients will register you as a spammer!

This tutorial shows you how to fix the problem and send a mail that is branded with your domain, but gets by spam filters.