PHP

Farewell, old friend!

Code

I’ve been working on doing a “virtual” clean-up recently: taking down old projects, cleaning up some servers I manage, updating my about info, etc. One old project, in particular, is making me feel a bit nostalgic – I’m saying goodbye to bootstrapicons.com. It was a search engine for bootstrap and font awesome icons, which allowed users to tag icons so they were easier to find. Launched way back in June 2013 it was the first personal project I made that ever got any kind of traction. I still remember the first day it hit over 1000 monthly users – I had made it big time!

Okay, so maybe it didn’t exactly make me famous. Still, it got posted in a few bootstrap resource groups, had quite a few user-submitted tags for icons, and was really fun to work on. Alas, all good things must come to an end. Once Fontawesome introduced a similar search to their main icon list my traffic plummetted, and it had just kind of sat there since then. So sadly, for the common good of not having really old and likely at this point not incredibly secure projects sitting around the web, it is gone.

(PS: For anyone keeping score the cutting-edge technology powering this bad boy I believe was PHP 5.3, with a sweet jQuery powered autocomplete filter.)

Conference: php[world] 2019

Code

I spent last week outside Washington D.C. at php[world] 2019. It was the first PHP specific conference I have been to and it was great. I attended the whole day workshop on testing in PHP and learned a ton. If you get a chance to attend one of Steve Grunwell’s presentations it’s definitely worth your time. He mentioned he will be presenting a similar talk at WordCamp US later this week. If you are attending, be sure to check it out: https://2019.us.wordcamp.org/session/confidently-testing-wordpress/.

The next two days were the standard hour-long presentations on various topics. Some of my favorites:

(Note: I will add links to the videos when they become publicly available.)

It is also the 25th anniversary of PHP as a language and there was a lot of talk about why and how PHP got where it is. There was a shared proudness that PHP came about not as a well-planned exercise in computer science. Instead, it was as a community of people just trying to get things done. That is why you will find things like mismatched naming conventions and duplicated functionality. While PHP gets complaints about those things today, it also is the defining reason it is so popular. It was a really interesting perspective on the evolution of a programming language over time.

I do have to say that the area where I stayed was a bit disappointing. Just a lot of chain restaurants and not much to do nearby. Having said that, I stopped by the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center by the airport before I flew out and it was amazing! I had never heard of it before, but it is a hangar by the Dulles airport that is part of the National Air and Space Museum. I left myself an hour and wish I had more time there. It was huge, there were over 200 planes including an SR-71 Blackbird and a Concorde. Oh yeah, and you could walk right up to the Discovery shuttle! (See header image) It was free and definitely worth your time if you are nearby.

Overall, it was a really good conference. I also learned that there is a similar conference in February called SunshinePHP held in Florida. As one of the Michiganders looking outside my window today and seeing the first snowfall, I kind of wish I had chosen that one instead…

Introducing Bootstrap Icon Search

Code

I really love the bootstrap front-end framework, and one of my favorite things about it is that it comes with a great icon set. The biggest issue I have with it is that the class names to call those icons are not always either easy to remember or accurate for how I use them. For example, I like to use the icon-envelope as an icon on any systems that has a messaging system. Every time I have gone do use it however, I struggle to remember what the name of the  @%#$ icon class is!! It got to the point that I just kept a paper printout at my desk. That seemed like a bad way to do it, so I created a website that allows you so search the icons based on “tags” that are submitted by users. That way, I will be able to find my message icon, and hopefully, some other people will be able to as well. You can find the site at http://bootstrapicons.com – the more people that use it and submit tags, the better it will function, so please take a look and let me know what you think!

SimplePie – Easy PHP RSS

Code

SimplePie RSS LogoI write for this and two other blogs, and I like the homepage of my personal portfolio (www.brentswisher.com) have up to date information about all of my posts.  It makes for an easy one-stop-shop of all of my online activity, and I like the idea of having a dashboard of my recent activity as a home page. The issue is that manually updating the page each time I create a new post would be a bit tedious.  Since all my blogs have built in RSS Feeds, I though that would be a great way to embed new posts.

These were the criteria I was looking for:

  • Customizable so that I could make it match my sites theme
  • The links would be visible by search engines
  • I could customize what would show (titles, date, domain, etc)

After a little searching, I found something that works great: SimplePie RSS

SimplePie is a PHP based RSS parser.  It’s a PHP class that allows you to access RSS feeds in a object oriented way.  It is really simple to customize as you specify which parts of the feed to display, and you can insert them using standard PHP code anywhere in your site that you need.  It’s fast, easy to learn, well documented, and I would recommend it for anyone looking to use RSS in their website.

Advantages:

  • It uses PHP as opposed to a scripting language, so the links are indexed by search engines and will count for SEO.
  • It uses a object oriented approach to the feed, making it easy to customize what you want to display (title, link, body, etc)
  • Easy to install, just download and include.

Tips:

  • Make sure that you have the page encoding set to utf-8.  If you forget to specify this or use another encoding, strange characters will replace items like dashes and apostrophes.
  • Be aware that SimplePie caches your feeds.  If you make changes and expect to see them in the feed right away, you might need to wait for the cache to be refreshed.
  • To make it easier to make changes, create a separate page for each feed, and then include the page wherever you want to display the feeds on your site.

I would definitely recommend SimplePie for a RSS parser, what about you? Let me know if you have another solution you enjoy!