-
Building on Datapoint: Weather With Icons
19 December 2012
Read moreI wrote the other day about the new datapoint API from the MetOffice (there were some great links to other weather APIs in the comments, if you like weather). I've been using it to create a detailed forecast of the weather over the next few days, mixing in some lovely weather icons by Adam Whitcroft, from The Noun Project (the same site that the icons on my own site came from) - so I have something like this for each kind of weather:
-
Ubuntu Icons Directory Routing
06 December 2012
Read moreI had the weirdest problem the other day so I thought I'd write it down! I uploaded a toy script for someone, but it had images in it and they wouldn't load. The image files existed, and I could request everything around them, files in other subdirectories were okay; the …
-
Datapoint: Weather API from the MetOffice
03 December 2012
Read moreI'm working on a little hobby project which needs to know what the weather is going to be. I had a look around and noticed that the MetOffice had released a new API called DataPoint. They have a selection of APIs, including some map overlays and some actual weather data (more on that another day) but I was especially charmed by their text APIs - this is basically the basis of weather forecasts used everywhere :)
-
Unpacking and Editing a Chrome Extension
26 November 2012
Read moreI've been having an issue with one of my chrome extensions recently - the keyboard navigation extension that I blogged about previously. This is a huge problem for me because without this extension, I can't "click" on anything on the internet! It was working on some pages, but on others it was drawing elements but not styling them correctly. The extension doesn't seem to be actively maintained, so I realised I was going to have to dive into the extension itself to understand the problems and have any chance of fixing it. Hurrah for open source software (not that I really write any js but I figured if I could understand the problem, maybe I could ask more intelligent questions)
-
From MySQL to MailChimp via CSV
13 November 2012
Read moreDon't you hate disclaimers? I do, but before I do anything else, I must ask that you don't use the techniques below unless you are emailing responsibly.
Today I needed to pull email addresses for people who had signed up to a thing out of MySQL and into MailChimp so that I could actually email them about the thing. MySQL actually has a very cute feature for exporting the results of an SQL query as a CSV file, which I had to look up to remember how to do it. It goes something like this:
-
Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Estelle Weyl
15 October 2012
Read moreHappy Ada Lovelace day! Technically that's in about half an hour as I write this in the UK but as I'm speaking at FOWA tomorrow morning, I will post this now before I get distracted. Ada Lovelace day is a day of celebrating women in science and technology, and one …
-
PHPNW Tutorial Day
09 October 2012
Read moreI've spent the last few days at PHPNW - it was amazing and inspiring and incredibly sociable from beginning to end but I wanted to share some thoughts about tutorial day in particular. For context, I delivered a full-day tutorial at PHPNW this year, entitled "PHP Tools", containing the following topics:
git
apache virtual hosts
api documentation
static analysis tools
profiling with xhprof
deployment with phing
Somewhere along the line my attendees were unexpectedly efficient (or I was impatient) and we ended up ahead of my planned schedule, so I asked if anyone had any questions to fill the final hour or so.
-
Git Cheat Sheet
26 September 2012
Read moreToday I thought I'd share my "cheat sheet" for git - the commands that I use on a day-to-day basis. I've used entirely the command line tools, since those are the same on every platform. GUI tools and IDE plugins are available for git so it is worth taking a look at what is available for the development environment you use.
-
Github API Access Tokens via Curl
25 September 2012
Read moreI'm working on some demos for a tutorial I'm giving next month and since I'd like to show off Github's API, I needed an access token for it. They have the usual web flow but I'm cutting as many corners as I can to keep the demos nice and quick, so I looked into the support Github has for generating an API key programmatically.
-
API Documentation with IODocs
18 September 2012
Read moreI write a lot of APIs, and I also preach that your API isn't finished until it has excellent documentation. Which is great, but that means I therefore have to lead by example and document my APIs :) Enter iodocs from the talented folk at Mashery.
Iodocs is a node.js application (which is fun for a PHP developer. Most developers write a bit of JS, but this one hasn't). You describe your API and all its methods in JSON, and then iodocs presents an interface for you to enter API keys, add parameters to each request and press the "try it!" button. This makes your API call and shows you the results on screen, which seems like a great way to demonstrate what all the various parameters do!
-
Do Open Source with Git and Github
06 September 2012
Read moreThis article originally appeared in the May 2012 php|architect magazine.
Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren't involved in open source, either because they don't know how to approach a project, or because they just aren't sure how the process even works. In this article we'll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.
-
Posting Raw Data with Curl
31 August 2012
Read moreThis week I've been working on a feature which handles an incoming API call from an external source (actually Paypal's IPN service). Making external calls into my development platform isn't how I usually work, so instead I captured the body of the request that was being sent, and replayed it …
