Author Archives: lornajane

14 Jan
2013

PHP at FOSDEM 2013

In case you haven’t been following, FOSDEM is a Free Software/Open Source weekend event held every year in Brussels – it’s free to attend and it’s huge! It’s actually a network of smaller events, and this year that includes a whole day of PHP on the Saturday (2nd February 2013). Our schedule is excellent, taking in frameworks, extensions (tutorial from Sara Golemon!), nginx, APIs and a few other goodies. Also, this lovely one-day PHP conference is in the wider context of an event that is packed full of otehr excellent open source technology sessions – see the full schedule for what else is on offer. I love these open source events for the opportunity to dip into not-PHP topics, and I hope to see you in Brussels! Come along, be geeky, and bring your friends :)
10 Jan
2013

How NOT to Design Your API

Recently I tweeted as a #linktuesday link the 10 Worst API Practices post from ProgrammableWeb. Today, in search of some concrete examples of APIs implementing unhelpful antipatterns, I sent out a tweet for help:

[blackbirdpie id=”289014953954930688″]

In the raft of responses (and thankyou all, this was fabulous, helpful and entertaining in equal parts!), there were some definite patterns that I’d like to share with you, in no particular order. Continue reading →

07 Jan
2013

You’re Not Using Source Control? Read This!

Last week I wrote an email to a client who hasn’t yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You’re not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).

The document goes on to talk about the available tools (git, Hg, SVN) and give a sales pitch for _why_ source control has benefits for an organisation. There are also some action points to follow to implement source control if you haven’t already taken the leap, which I hope will help anyone looking to take that step – it’s kind of awkward in this day and age to admit that your organisation doesn’t have source control, but however this situation arose, hopefully this document wraps up my thoughts on how to find a good way out! Continue reading →

01 Jan
2013

Become a ZCE in 2013

A few people have told me it’s their New Year’s resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I’d make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won’t be taking a whole preparation course, link below:

Edit: Pack now available from https://leanpub.com/zce
Continue reading →

25 Dec
2012

Christmas Kitchen

It’s Christmas and we’re at home this year, which means I’ve been spending a lot of time in the kitchen! This post combines Christmas planning thoughts, a craft project, and some recipes we enjoyed this year – and delivers a surprise to anyone subscribed to the main blog feed expecting only technical content. Continue reading →
19 Dec
2012

Building on Datapoint: Weather With Icons

I 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:

noun_project_2590
Continue reading →

11 Dec
2012

9 Magic Methods in PHP

This post forms part of a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I’m reposting them here. Previously in the series was an introduction to OOP in PHP, in two parts

The title is a bit of a red herring as PHP has more than 9 magic methods, but these will get you off to a good start using PHP’s magic methods. It might be magic, but no wands are required!

Continue reading →

06 Dec
2012

Ubuntu Icons Directory Routing

I 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 same files in other subdirectories also served correctly. Yet in my error logs I just had lots of:

File does not exist: /usr/share/apache2/icons/ ...

Which was really odd, because my webroot is somewhere else completely!

Eventually I spotted a /icons entry in the configuration for mod_alias in apache, which intercepts all requests to /icons on any virtual host, and rewrites it. Err, thanks? Renaming the directory to “images” solved the problem in this instance, and I hope if you googled for an error message, you will find this page and be able to fix it equally quickly :)

03 Dec
2012

Datapoint: Weather API from the MetOffice

I’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 :)
Continue reading →