Abhishek Gupta

May 17, 2012September 5, 2021

Turn off Gmail ads or web clips

Gmail by default shows ads also called web clips above the list of emails. It’s easy to switch these off but they’re not intuitively named when looking at Gmail’s settings. This post shows how to switch them off.

To remove the web clips, click the settings cog icon above-right from the message list. This will show a drop down menu where you can select the Settings option.

On the next page along the top of the settings are a series of tabs/options. Open the Web Clips tab and uncheck the Show my web clips above the Inbox checkbox. You don’t need to click a button to save, it immediately takes effect.

Now go back to your inbox and there are no longer any ads above the message list.

May 13, 2012September 5, 2021

MYSQL next increment value or last inserted value

Getting the next auto increment value and last inserted value from a mysql table are both two different things and should not be confused with one another. Next increment value should be the next id to be inserted and last inserted value is the last id inserted. Sometimes I see programmers using former code to get the latter task done and vice-versa. That might do it in some cases, but in the long run will surely fail.

Correct way of getting the value of next to be inserted id, is:

$query_autoinc 		= "SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'table'";
$exec_autoinc 		= mysql_query($query_autoinc);
$row_autoinc 		= mysql_fetch_assoc($exec_autoinc);
$next_insert_id 	= $row_autoinc['Auto_increment'];

May 12, 2012September 5, 2021

PHP N-level menu using recursion with DB structure

Recently I needed to come up with a code that would help me create a n-level menu and breadcrumb for that. So for that I wrote this code which works with great ease and provides huge flexibility. Also I kept it really low so that it is easy to embedded it in any kind of design. This is just the half part of my code which prints the menu.

Function:

$table	= 'menu';

/**
 * The showMenu() function prints the menu with all its sub menus
 * @params:	$ulclass  common class to be applied in ul elements
		$liclass  common class to be applied in li elements
		$father   Father of each child menu. Pass '0' to print complete menu.
 * return:	string
 */
function showMenu($ulclass, $liclass, $father) {
	$showmenu_query = "select * from $table where menu_father='" . $father . "' order by menu_order";
	$exec_showmenu = mysql_query($showmenu_query);

	if ( !$exec_showmenu) {
		echo "Query failed. Check your query. Error Returned: " . mysql_error();
		return false;
	}

	$toAppend = '<ul class="' . $ulclass . '">';

	while ($row_showmenu = mysql_fetch_assoc($exec_showmenu)) {
		$toAppend.= '<li class="' . $liclass . ' &nbsp; '. $row_showmenu['menu_class'] . '">';
		$toAppend.= '<a href="' . stripslashes($row_showmenu['menu_slug']) . '">' . stripslashes($row_showmenu['menu_name']);
		$toAppend.= '</a>';

		$submenu_query = "select * from $table where menu_father='" . $row_showmenu['menu_id'] . "'";
		$exec_submenu = mysql_query($submenu_query);

		if (mysql_num_rows($exec_submenu)>0 ) {
			$toAppend.= $showMenu($ulclass, $liclass, $row_showmenu['menu_id']);
		}

		$toAppend.= '</li>';
	}

	$toAppend.= '</ul>';
	return $toAppend;
}

May 12, 2012September 5, 2021

Redirecting site or pages to a new domain or url aka 301 redirections

I learnt about 301 redirection when I moved my wordpress site from earlier domain to this new domain.

Htaccess redirect is better than the meta refresh or redirect tag because there is no delay as the browser reads the .htaccess file first. Here is how it works.

Go to your site’s root folder, download the .htaccess file to your local computer and edit it with a plain-text editor (ie. Notepad). If you are using FTP Client software and you don’t see any .htaccess file on your server, double check your setting and make sure you have turn on invisible / system files.

May 12, 2012September 5, 2021

Logging errors to file in PHP

PHP offers simple but effective solution to log all errors to a log file. On all production web server it is a must that you turn off displaying error to end users via a web browser. Remember PHP gives out lots of information about path, database schema and all other sort of sensitive information. You are strongly advised to use error logging in place of error displaying on production web sites. The idea is quite simple -only developer should see php error log.

The way I choose to do it is by having a common config.php file containing this code and included in the first line of every page.

// Display no errors in runtime pages
ini_set("display_errors" , "0"); 

// Log errors to file
ini_set("log_errors" , "1");

// Error log file path and name
ini_set("error_log" , "logs/Errors.log.txt");

Good luck!!!