Where’s Santa?

December 10, 2024 | Comment

I had an unusual request from my friend John recently – could I help him map the location of Santa as he goes about his deliveries? Ok, it wasn’t quite like that. He is a member of the Lions, and every December they take out a sleigh with Santa on the back through the streets to the delight of lots of excitable children. The issue was that parents didn’t know exactly when he was going to appear in their streets and were constantly looking and waiting for his arrival. If there was a map of the live position, this would … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 4

November 14, 2024 | Comment

It’s been a while since I last pushed a new version of WDiL but finally I got round to adding the few things left that I wanted in the app – most notably notifications. Read on for details of that and everything else that’s included.

New Functionality

Let’s take a look at what has been included in this latest release:

  • the interval between triggers is now shown on the trigger stats page
  • added a user account page to allow setting of Pushover details
  • send reminders notifications via email and Pushover
  • fixed some bugs.

Notifications

One of the things I felt … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL) – Version 3

October 4, 2024 | Comment

I’ve pushed another update to WDiL adding lots of new functionality and bug fixes. The most impactful of these is the forgotten password routine as this now requires the addition of the ever reliable PHPMailer. However, the most useful and visible are the changes on the activity stats page which now includes more statistics and a graph showing trends.

New Functionality

Let’s take a look at what has been included in this latest release:

  • graph of triggers and intervals on stats page
  • details of the general interval trend on stats page
  • you can add a comment to a trigger
… Read the rest

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

Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language (CESIL)

July 12, 2024 | 1 comment

When I first learned programming in about 1978 the school I attended was lucky to have a Research Machines 380Z on which there was the BASIC language. Using this one of the pupils then wrote a CESIL interpreter for their (I guess) O Level project. Other pupils then used this to learn the fundamentals of programming.

Skip forward a few years and I now owned a Sinclair ZX Spectrum having also previously had a ZX81 too. I decided that I would also write a CESIL interpreter this time using Sinclair’s variant of BASIC. Remarkably I still own the sheets of … 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

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 | 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/

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

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Three – Links

November 8, 2023 | 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/

So far we have looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text and images. In this post I want to look at how links are handled. Unlike X and Mastodon on Bluesky when you post text that includes one or more links these are not parsed and activated. You have to tell Bluesky that you have links in your text and where they are.

Parsing for Links

In … Read the rest