Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Final Version

June 29, 2024 | Comment

I have just pushed what will be the last version of my script to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file to my GitHub page.

Firstly, the good news. This version now supports BLOCKQUOTEs which means that the WordPress quote block is rendered in a way that it is more obviously a quote. There has also been an improvement in the output of code blocks but support for this is still pretty basic but does now work.

Now the bad news. While looking at the output from my own sites I found that some posts weren’t … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Code Blocks

June 5, 2024 | Comment

At the back end of last year I released a script that allowed you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. In the last update, I said that I wanted to add proper formatting for code blocks and today I have done that. You can find it on the GitHub page.

This proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The code uses the FPDF package and extends out the “Links and flowing text” example provided. I knew I needed to convert all <pre</preblocks to be displayed as … Read the rest

Overcast Statistics

May 1, 2024 | Comment

Podcasts are huge at the moment and they are pretty much all I listen to these days when I am out walking or in the car. I do this by the (mainly) excellent Overcast app. I say mainly because it has a UI that I struggle to find things in. Anywho, the one thing that it lacks (other than an intuitive UI) are decent stats and I really wanted that for my annual Review of the Year posts over on my personal blog.

After a quick DuckDuckGo I found the following post from James Hodgkinson with a Python … Read the rest

ChatGPT as a Replacement Programmer

March 9, 2024 | 1 comment

When I left university I did so with a good grounding in several programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran and Pascal. Then, at my first job, I was given training in the language Application Master, part of ICL’s VME operating system. One of the things I was told about Application Master was that it was a “fourth generation language (4GL)” and that this would be the last generation that required a developer to write the code.

This was the late eighties and until very recently we have been still waiting for this transition to happen.

ChatGPT has Entered

… 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 | 1 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

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Five – Putting it all Together

November 10, 2023 | 2 comments

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/

In this series of posts we have looked at:

In this final post we are looking at putting it all together. This includes a worked example plus a complete library of functions that will allow you to easily interact with the Bluesky API.

The Prerequisites

What this project has predominately been about is the correct formatting … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Four – Link Cards

November 9, 2023 | 4 comments

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/

In this we post we are continuing to look at accessing Bluesky from the API via PHP. Previously we looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text, images and handling links and in this post we take a look at Link Cards.

What Even IS a Link Card?

Link Cards are the snippets of a website that is linked to a post that you will no doubt be … Read the rest