When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 2

September 16, 2024 | Comment

When I launched WDiL earlier this week I knew that it was what might be politely described as a MVP. And while I like SimpleCSS it doesn’t make for the most attractive sites. Therefore, I set about making it more appealing while also adding more functionality.

Moving from Simple CSS

I spent quite a bit of time looking for a pre-built theme that I could use as the basis of WDiL but none seemed to be where I wanted to go. In the end, I plumped for vanilla Bootstrap which with its pre-built components allowed me to get a … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL)

September 10, 2024 | 1 comment

My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL!

Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL)

WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems by allowing you to record every time you do something and then see stats on things such as frequency and average interval.

While I have tried to make it very simple it still requires a bit of setup and hosting by you. As part of … Read the rest

Cloudflare Zero Trust

April 9, 2024 | 1 comment

I love Cloudflare – there I have said it! If you are looking for a way to keep your site secure and performant then Cloudflare is the way to go. Today I am going to be looking at just one aspect of Cloudflare and what it can do for you – Zero Trust.

What is Cloudflare?

I like to think of Cloudflare as the Swiss Army knife of cloud-based tools. It offers solutions for a variety of things from security to performance to domain registration to content delivery all packaged in an easy to understand and use web-based interface. And, … Read the rest

A Minor Update to my Bluesky Library

February 26, 2024 | Comment

A quick post to say that my Bluesky library has had a small update. This is to take into account that from version two of Clark’s library that handles the calls to Bluesky the connection method has changed. Therefore, if you have updated to version two then remember also to update the PHP2Bluesky code which can be found here.

You can read all the posts on the PHP2Bluesky library here and get in touch if you find any issues or have an enhancement suggestion.… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Eight – Retrieving a Post

January 26, 2024 | Comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

Once again I have been looking at the Bluesky API as part of a question posted on my Github respository. This time the question was “Can I specify one URL and use PHP to retrieve only one bluesky post by someone else?”. You don’t actually need my library to do that but I thought it would be useful to post details here as it’s not immediately obvious.

Identifying an

… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Seven – Handling Multiple Images

January 10, 2024 | Comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

It really is very gratifying when people use your code in their own projects and get in touch to ask questions, suggest changes or, heaven forbid, highlight bugs! Yesterday, someone raised an issue asking if it was possible to upload four images to a post. Let’s take a look and see…

Who Wants Multiple Images Anyway?

To be honest, when I wrote PHP2Bluesky it was very much for my own … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Six – Handling Handles and Oversized Images

January 3, 2024 | Comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

I wrote a series of posts towards the end of the year that took you step-by-step through using the Bluesky API to post to the social network. Having used the code Patrick Delahanty got in touch to say that he had found a couple of issues. Firstly, handling user handles and secondly dealing with large images. Let’s take a look at both of those.

Handling User Handles

As with … Read the rest

Changing your Bluesky handle to be your own domain

December 27, 2023 | 2 comments

I’m liking Bluesky, which is a little like a rough around the edges X without the toxicity found there. And here’s a neat thing you can do on Bluesky that you can’t on X. If you have your own domain you can use that as your Bluesky handle. In the rest of this article, we’re going to look at how you do that.

Why would you want to do it?

First off why would you want to do so and what are the implications of making the change? I see a number of reasons to make the change:

it

… Read the rest

Automatically Restarting Unresponsive MySQL Service

October 29, 2023 | Comment

This blog and others that I run are all hosted on a cloud server with MySQL installed locally. Occasionally MySQL becomes unresponsive and I have to login to the server to kick it back into life by restarting msqld.

The most likely reason for MySQL becoming unresponsive is lack of resources so the best solution would be to increase the size of the server – however, that requires money that I don’t want to spend. Therefore, the next best option was to write a script to detect when MySQL was unavailable. Enter mysqladmin.

mysqladmin — A MySQL Server Administration Program

… Read the rest

Working out my credit card statement date in Excel

September 7, 2023 | Comment

This might be the most niche post I have ever done but I hope that it might prove useful to someone.

My credit card bill gets made up on or around the tenth of each month but, for reasons I won’t go into here, I needed to much more accurately predict when it was actually going to be created. Through a combination of searching and testing, I discovered that in my case it is always made up on the sixth working day of the month. Turns out that there is an Excel (and Google Sheets) function that can help with … Read the rest