As a former resident and biker of Philadelphia, I can tell you with that there is absolutely no enforcement whatsoever of the existing bike laws. None. With no reason to obey the word of law, bikers have taken great liberty to make their lives easier: Running traffic lights on the wrong side of the road, not wearing helmets, etc. This lack of law has bred a culture of bad bike behavior.

With the recent deaths of two people on account of bad biking practices, you are now set to introduce laws that will dramatically alter the landscape of the city's culture. The combination of reactionary over-enforcement of existing laws and penalties so severe that people risk losing their bicycles can only result in unrest and discourse. I am especially concerned with the penalty of having your bike confiscated if it does not have "brakes". This leaves the police in effective control over a person's possessions in a matter where they may not have expertise. While I certainly abhor the idea of riding around without brakes, the notion that an officer can simply take your bike over the perception that you don't have them is a frightening one.

We already have an existing set of laws. Enforcing them will foster a better community. Augmenting them to the levels you threaten only serves to disenchant people from biking in the city. Philadelphia has already ostracized it's skateboard community by treating them as though they are thugs and criminals. Let's not do the same to bikers.

Respectfully yours,

And here's an example of how you might use this...

// lets say that "featured albums" are associated to a category with the ID of 5. $album = mk_get_first_post_from_category(5); //5 is the ID of the category we're selecting against. if($album != null){ echo '

Featured Album

'; echo $upcoming_event[0]->post_content; }

Be on the lookout for more lurk style sites soon.

Step 1. The .htaccess file

In case you are unfamiliar an .htaccess is a directory-level configuration file thats used for slightly modifying the configuration of your web server. With one line of blockquote we can tell a webserver to parse CSS files as if they were PHP.

Copy the blockquote below into your .htaccess file. If you don't have one you can create one by opening a new file in any text editor and saving this file as &emdash; creatively &emdash; .htaccess. Quickly transfer this file to the directory on your web server with which you wish to parse CSS as PHP.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .css

Step 2. The key to dynamic css

Here's the thing. Now that you've told the server to parse all CSS files as PHP you're going to need to use PHP to output a css header. This will automatically tell the user's browser that they are recieving CSS. Copy the PHP code below into your CSS document, and paste it on line 1.

header("Content-type: text/css");

Easy, right? Now that we have enabled PHP functionality in CSS we're capable of, well, lots of things.

An Example

Here's an example where we will query a database for a list of banner images, and select a random one to use as a background image for an <h1> element. One caveat, and that is the object $db i use in the code example is an instance of the ezSQL Database Class.

#PHP
header("Content-type: text/css");
$random_banners = array();
$banner = $db->get_results("SELECT * FROM banners ORDER BY date", ARRAY_A);
if(count($banner) > 0){
foreach($banner as $b){
$random_banners[] = $b['id'];
}
$max = count($random_banners);
$random2 = rand(0, $max-1);
$bnr = $db->get_results("SELECT * FROM media WHERE id = ".$random_banners[$random2], ARRAY_A);
}

#/PHP

#CSS
h1{ float:left; text-indent:-9999px; background:transparent url(images/) no-repeat 0 0; width: 100%; height: 125px; margin:0 0 0.75em 0;padding:0; }

• Tight front wheel clearance
• Detail of the front wheel clearance
• Ridiculous lugwork
• Hand painted Campangolo logos
• High Flange Campy Record track hubs.
• The Complete Bike.

if(typeof document.body.style.maxHeight === "undefined") {
alert('ie6');
} else {
alert('other');
}

Breckenridge, March 2009