There are two answers guaranteed to show up on nearly every PHP question on Stack Overflow - use the mysqli/PDO extension instead of the deprecated mysql one (to avoid SQL injection), and that you can't parse HTML with regular expressions.
With that in mind, my favorite two answers:
[How PDO is still vulnerable to SQL injection attacks](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/134099/are-pdo-prepared-statements-sufficient-to-prevent-sql-injection/12202218#12202218) by Anthony Ferrara
[Parsing HTML with regular expressions](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression-pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string/4234491#4234491) by Tom Christiansen
I've posted a bunch of projects to Github in the last few months and haven't linked to them anywhere, so here's a quick roundup of recently notable projects:
[lib_timezones](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_timezones) - A PHP and JS library to handle user-specified timezones properly, with reasonable client-side auto detection.
[lib_classsify](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_classify) - A partial PHP port of Github's own [linguist](https://github.com/github/linguist) which can automatically detect the programming language, given a code fragment.
[js-emoji](https://github.com/iamcal/js-emoji) - A JavaScript library to allow display of Emoji in then browser for OSs without native support (anything that's not OSX 10.8 or iOS 6)
[lib_autolink](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_autolink) - My old PHP URL-detection and linking library, updated to handle multiple protocols.
[lib_solr_query](https://github.com/iamcal/lib_solr_query) - A PHP library to turn user-entered complex search queries into valid SOLR query syntax. Supports phrases, booleans, nesting, assertions and more.
Feb 14th:SlowPal is one of that breed of product that does one thing well. It helps that PayPal's log are so infuriatingly slow to begin with.
Feb 3rd: Chrome continue to get better and better. Ilya Grigorik explains some of the optimizations going on under the hood in this chapter from an upcoming performance book. If you work on the web, it's a fascinating read.
Jan 5th: An interesting little piece on British environmentalist Mark Lynas, an early anti-GMO campaigner, who has come around after discovering science.
From the same guy who explained the difference between England, the United Kingdom and Britain, comes a video explaining the Netherlands. Or Holland, Or Whatever.
Buildy seems like it might be fun, in a modern City Creator sort of way, but I haven't managed to create anything cool myself (here's my effort) and there's no good directory of player-created stuff. Have any of you been playing with it?
Just in case any of you were desperately trying to figure out a gift to buy me in the next two weeks or so, I wouldn't say no to this Gin Advent Calendar. In fact, I'd be pretty happy about it.
Does anyone know anything more about the amazing Lego Christmas tree at the Trafford Centre in Manchester. I've only come across a single tweet, saying it was made of 350,000 bricks. Pretty impressive.
