The name change is now on the books — What was Lantenengo Industries is now officially Ink Plant. The process of filing a DBA was actually relatively simple after I figured out what had to be done. To spare you the same difficulty I had in tracking all that info down, I’ll list it here…

How to register a sole proprietorship in Manhattan (New York County):

• Choose your business name. It has to be composed of real words or your name (You can’t just make up some cool sounding word.)
• Hop on the subway and head down to 60 Centre Street.
• Buy a DBA form from the coffee shop right inside the front door ($2). Don’t fill it out yet.
• Go to the County Clerk’s office in Room 109B in the basement.
• Go up to the counter and check with the clerk to see if the name you want is acceptable. If it is, fill out the form, pay them $120 (cash, money order, or credit card) and they’ll give you two notarized copies of the certificate.
• That’s it. You’re official now. Congratulations.

There are a number of cool things that you can do after opening up an IMAP connection in PHP (monitoring bounce-back rates, processing incoming attachments, etc.) but before you do, you have get connected. Normally, this is a pretty straight-forward process, but sometimes different mail server settings can throw you a curveball. Here’s a couple quick tips to help you get started:

1. Open up a phpinfo() page and make sure that you have the IMAP extensions installed. If you don’t, here are the instructions on how to get them.
2. Copy our PHP IMAP Connection Tester onto your server and configure it with your account information.
3. That’s it. I told you that was easy!

A note: I ran into the following error today: “Certificate failure for mail.example.com: Server name does not match certificate.” It took me a while to find the solution but finally came up with this — add /novalidate-cert after the port number. So, for example, if you’re using our tester, set $mail_port = 143/novalidate-cert; Hope that helps!

If you have any other tips, help the world out and share them below!

Over the weekend, I posted three new code snippets:

The Image Upload Form has everything you need to create a simple HTML form allowing users to upload their own JPEG images. After it verifies that the image is valid, it saves it and generates a thumbnail using the PHP GD library of image functions. The code is clean, so it’s pretty easy to manipulate it to suit your needs (other file formats, different resizing, etc.)

The Cron Job Tester is the result of an epic battle I had with the server hosting one of my client’s sites. I couldn’t figure out why these cron jobs weren’t running and so constructed this little tester to simply log an entry in a text file every minute. From there, I was eventually able to find out that the host’s “Easy Cron” function was overwriting my crontab file. Arrrgh…

Finally, I posted the PHP code to Copy All the Rows in a MySQL Table to another, identical MySQL table. You can, of course, do this easily in phpMyAdmin, but I needed to have the function automated for this particular project. Hopefully you can get some use out of it too.

I managed to sneak away from the whirlwind of other tasks on my desk for a few hours today to work on continuing the big switch-over from my old site to this one. I got some big progress made and now all the major pieces are now in place. There’s still some minor things that need to be tweaked and I still have to go down to the courthouse and make the name change official, but we’re almost there. It will be so nice to be officially Ink Plant and to get out of this state of limbo.

The biggest change (other than swapping out logos, etc.) that I made in the switch was to separate the site into 4 categories: Company, Network, Blog, and Code:

• Company - This was the entire site before. It consists of the stuff you’d expect to see from a web development company: a portfolio, information about us, a sales pitch, etc. This is where I want to attract new development clients and also to provide a resource area (with invoices and such) for my current clients.
• Network - Right now, this section simply lists and links to the various sites that Ink Plant maintains as a publisher. In the future, I want to build this out to include more information for potential advertisers on the Network.
• Blog - You’re looking at it. I’m going to try very hard to keep posting up here regularly. I’d love to use this to start discussions regarding interesting aspects of the web development business.
• Code - This is going to be a repository of code snippets that I’ve put together. I definitely have some work to do there still because there aren’t enough code chunks to be useful yet and the design looks kinda lame. But, that’s probably going to be a project for later…

Well, I hope you like the new site. If you have any comments/suggestions, send them my way. Have a good night everyone.

I’ve been trying to juggle a million different projects lately and haven’t had much of a chance to write up here. I wish I could just pause time for a month or two and get caught up on this gigantic checklist of tasks that I want to get done on my sites.

One of the bigger tasks on the list is switching all the Lantenengo Industries stuff over to Ink Plant (I’m going to be officially changing my business name in the near future for branding reasons). Tonight, I got a decent-sized chunk of that switch taken care of: I closed down my old blog (redirecting it to here, of course) and pulled out the code snippets that I had published there, creating the new Code section of this site.

I also published a new code snippet that generates the PHP to display a MySQL table automatically. I’ve probably written this out by hand a couple hundred times, so it’ll be nice to finally have this little shortcut. Hopefully some of you will benefit from it too. Enjoy!