Do you write code? Do you work with others? Read this.

A bit cheesy, dontcha think?

I admit, I’m guilty of one or more of these (especially the Prima Donna), but there are things that I can — and do — work on. Reading this article made me rethink some of my attitudes as a developer and a manager, but it was this one line made the whole article come together:

What’s worse, they don’t have a single ounce of Asperger’s in them, so they insist on staring at your eyes throughout the meeting.

Read the whole thing here: https://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/15-workplace-barriers-better-code-220975. Hopefully you’ll get some insight into how you and your office works together.

Display Featured Links Randomly Using PHP

I had a request to add a “Link of the Day” feature to one of the pages on the Law-related Education pages of the OBA website using technology we already have. I’m sure there are widgets out there already that will do this for me, and it may even be built into whatever CMS we deploy next, but I wanted to learn a bit so I decided to add it to our current site. I don’t know much about PHP, but I learned to code in VB.NET and C++, so I can learn enough as I go to make things work.

With the help of “The Google”, I was able to piece together a bit of code that reads from a CSV file into an array, then randomly displays a link from within that array on each page load, so that a new link gets displayed on each visit.

The original code has appeared in several forms across the Internet already, so if it’s yours, please let me know so I can credit you. I’ve made some slight adjustments to fit my needs.

<?php
/**
* @function makeClickableLinks
* @param string
* @returns string
*/
function makeClickableLinks($text) {
    $text = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}(tp|tps)://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)', '\\1', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\+.~#?&//=]+)', '\\1\\2', $text);
    $text = eregi_replace('([_\.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+\.)+[a-z]{2,3})', '\\1', $text);

    return $text;
}
/**
* @function displayLink
* @param string // path to csv
*/
function displayLink($csv) {
    $fp = fopen($csv, "r");

    while (!feof($fp)) {
        $contents[] = explode(",", fgets($fp, 512));
    } //!feof($fp)

    fclose($fp);

    do {
        $x = rand(0, count($contents) – 1);
    }
    while ($contents[$x] == 0);

    // displays link title above clickable URL
    echo $contents[$x][0] . "\n" . makeClickableLinks($contents[$x][1]) . "\n";

    // displays link title as clickable link
    echo '<a href="'.$contents[$x][1].'" rel="nofollow">'.$contents[$x][0].'</a>';
}
?>

UPDATE

WordPress keeps messing up code formatting, so I made it into a Github Gist.

UPDATE 2

Just learned of a shortcode for formatting code blocks on the hosted version of WordPress. Hooray for sourcecode!

View a working sample of this code.