In attempting to write cross-platform, portable PHP code, I used PHP's DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant to write path strings, e.g. "..".DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR."foo", because the "proper" way to do it on Windows would be "..\foo" while on everything else (Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X) it would be "../foo".

Well, as Christian on php.net pointed out and the guys at Web Design Forums confirmed, that's completely unnecessary. As long as you use the forward slash, "/", you'll be OK. Windows doesn't mind it, and it's best for *nix operating systems.

I wrote this funtion to help avoid 404 errors when a user asks for something like /my/site/section/doesntexist/. I use it to help bump users “up” to /my/site/section/. Feel free to use/modify/share it; I'm making it public domain.

With all the recent talk and buzz surrounding the unsurprising Ruby programming language, I couldn‚Äôt help but think about other ways to simplify programming.  Consider the following:

if (foo == bar, baz, "faz")

Why not use syntax like that featured above to mean "If foo equals bar, or foo equals baz, or foo equals the string 'faz'"?

If you do CSS, you may be familiar with the ::before pseudo-element.  Have you ever tried using it to insert an unusual character?  I did today, and it took about 20 minutes to figure it out.  Here’s here to do it.