Experimenting with PHP

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been following courses for three years now. Within the last week or two I decided to start experimenting with PHP using my website as a guinea pig. I have already converted a few pages to PHP. Some of them use for each loops and others use the include functionality. My aim is to practice the skills that I have studied, within a production environment.

Some of the tasks are repetitive. This isn’t a bad thing. It builds habit and understanding. By doing something frequently enough the pattern gets burned into my subconscious. When that’s done I will spot errors automatically, and if I get an error message I will know what it means.

One error message I got was $article was not found and after seeing it three or four times, I know to check that I have included the array data php file. Problem fixed, time to move on to the next page.

What I enjoy about PHP so far is that it’s intuitive. Error messages are from the line beneath the line where the error is. This means that bugs are fixed within seconds not minutes.

Another aspect that I really appreciate about foreach loops is that they’re direct. With Javascript you need to understand the DOM, parent elements, children etc to get things to work. With PHP, so far, I work directly with the elements that I’m manipulating.

If I tried to do my instagram clone now I would find it much easier to do. I progressed.

Looking forward learning to use PHP directly, means that when I use WordPress, Laravel and other solutions I will understand what I am doing, and what is going wrong, if things do not work.

For now I am happy to rework my website. I will practice new skills. The website will benefit.

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On The Desire To Change Career
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On The Desire To Change Career

Byrichard

If I had been smart I would have changed career path around 2006-2007 when I was in London surrounded by entrepreneurs and web developers, rather than now during a pandemic. Normally I struggle to find new contracts because of two things. The first is that for camera and editing work there are very few opportunities per year, and the opportunities that do arise have hundreds, if not thousands of candidates so the probability of success is low. The other issue is that because there are few jobs, if you fail you may have to wait months for an opportunity to appear.


That’s why I have spent the entirety of the pandemic reskilling. Every single day I study web development. I have gone from IT support courses, to CSS to HTML, to Javascript to frameworks and back to JavaScript. The journey is long and hard. When I was finally free to study Angular in depth I found that my knowledge of Javascript was not deep enough, so I went back and studied on JS pathway, and now I am studying a second one on Linkedin Learning. My goal is to be proficient. This isn’t a one day goal. This is a journey.


You can follow my journey on github to see what I am learning. One of my side projects, to practice what I have learned is this one. At the moment it is a simple app that retrieves a random image from my instagram gallery and displays it with its title. This self-project is worthwhile because it is easy to follow a course and code along with the teacher. The problem with this is that when there is no teacher, and no model you need to innovate and find your own solutions.


Last year when I tried something similar I found a way to convert from Json to CSV to bring it into Wordpress. Now I am working with Fetch, random number generators to find a post, let to be within the scope of one block, converting epoch time to human readable date and time, and more. If I followed instructions I would find it easy to do, but I couldn’t find any, so I am experimenting with ideas from courses. The next step is to find how to use classes and ids’ to embellish it with CSS.


I started with the random post generator. The next steps will be to use constructors, for each loops, display ten posts at a time, but also to enable finding them by year and month. I can also add more metadata fields than I can with Instagram. I could add country, type of landscape and more. I can practice building a CMS from the ground up. In letters of motivation I wrote about learning about Media Asset management tools from the ground up, and now out of curiousity, that is what I am doing.


It has taken a while to understand how Javascript works, but now that I have I can spend more time experimenting and learning each day. My increasing proficiency will be shown through the projects I build in courses, but also the self-led project.


Sometimes I add comments to commits, to explain what I found hard, and then I show the code that resolved the issue. If you’re curious as to why I would use a self-hosted json file and media files the answer is simple. I don’t need to go through the process of asking for permission to acccess an api to access my own data. For an example of working with ajax and json you can refer to this project.


And Finally


When you work in the media and broadcasting you constantly need to look for opportunities, to face rejection, and continue looking. With the skills I am learning now people are already interested, and that is the reason to change from skills that are less interesting, to those that are.

Last Three Steps Before Handing In My Dissertation

Byrichard

Being at the stage I’m at, and having discussed the work with the tutor there are three things I must make sure to do before handing in the work.

The first task is uniformity. I need to go through two or three sections and make sure that I tie them into the overall structure of the dissertation work. It’s meant to flow from one section to another. That’s something I’ve got to work on.

The second thing I’ve got to work on one or two paragraphs, make sure that the information that I wrote down is comprehensive and there’s no so what question left in the air.

The final task is to make sure that I have a clear dissertation title and write the dissertation conclusion according to this. Once that’s done I’m pretty much done with this most major of assignments and it’s been a great learning curve. I think it’s been the best learning experience overall that I’ve had in University.

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Playing with Vim and Laravel

Byrichard

I love using Atom because it’s light and fast, even on a six year old machine like mine. Github is soon going to archive atom. I will lose my favourite editor. That’s why I played with VS Code, Sublime Text and other solutions. Vim is the winner for now.


Vim is on every linux and mac machine, and can be installed on Windows. Out of the box Vim is a really simple, limited editor but if you invest the time, to find plugins, and learn how to use it then it becomes a great application.


This weekend in the process of studying Laravel I decided to use VIM and one of the best features with Vim is that when you’re following a tutorial you will get the file path given to you. Type it into terminal and you’re in the file. No scrolling through hierarchies, no reading through long lists. You go straight to the file and start working.


This is good for production websites too. I am currently in the process of taking the static content on my website and making it dynamic. This requires going to the section index page, seeing a file name and opening it. With vim I see that I want tricycle.html and I type it, and the file is open. This saves a great amount of time.


Vim can feel really slow when you train yourself to use i to insert, esc :wq to save and more, but once these are natural reflexes using Vim speeds up. I find that the more I use it, and the more comfortable I am with simple things, the more willing I am to experiment with additional features, for example option 8 and nine to jump by paragraphs to go up and down documents.


One of the biggest mental hurdles is remembering to work without a mouse, like we did in the eighties. Everything is via the keyboard so you don’t click and drag. You yank and put. You also shift V to select a line and jk up or down to select more lines. You can then delete.


I am not comfortable with cut and pasting yet but that will come with time. Vim is an excellent piece of software, but you need to invest time in learning how to use it.


I like that it’s free, available on almost all machines automatically, and that it’s resource light. There is no need to have a heavy application like Visual Studio Code running, if you learn Vim.

On Whether I Prefer Vanilla JavaScript or Frameworks?
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On Whether I Prefer Vanilla JavaScript or Frameworks?

Byrichard

Today someone on twitter asked this question, and rather than be reply: 320 of 10,000, I chose to write a blog post about it. The TLDR answer is Vanilla JS because if you learn how it works without the help of a framework you understand the language. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have an interest in learning to take full advantage of frameworks.


As I listen to JavaScript Jabber one thing is clear. Whereas if we listen to courses and twitter discussions we are tricked into thinking that we should either use React or Angular we see, through JavaScript Jabber that frameworks are as diverse as they are flexible. One app will be excellent for one type of task and another will be awesome for something else. If you spend time learning Vanilla JavaScript, and then you learn about the diverse choice of frameworks then you can either write concise and effective code that does what you need with little to no bloat.


I don’t want to just learn a framework and be inflexible. I want to learn how it works, behind the scenes. Before WordPress, I was learning about navigation using Server Side Includes and other such tricks. When I played with PhpBoards, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, wiki software, and more I managed to use them as a user, and they did want I wanted, but I never looked behind the curtains so I could use WordPress, but I couldn’t create my own themes, etc, and to some degree, I still can’t.


I have spent time trying to make it so that I can share my instagram archive on my website without using Instagram, and I managed with WordPress. Recently I tried using Vanilla Javascript and I found manipulating the DOM to be challenging. This is precisely why learning to code with Vanilla JS is so important. It shows you the complexities, and with time you learn how things work together.


One of the jokes is that if you get stuck you should RTFM and with frameworks that’s often quite easy. With Vanilla JavaScript RTFM doesn’t mean read just one manual. It means read about a variety of concepts until you understand enough to get it to work by yourself.


So far I can show a random post after each reload, or show the ten most recent posts and their caption. The next three challenges are:


  1. Go through the posts at a time
  2. Add crud capability using JavaScript. At first I will try with an empty json file, and then move on. CRUD requires understanding of the fs library (I need to double check the term)
  3. Add the ability to transfer data from the json to an SQL or NoSQL database.
  4. Experiment with Houdini and responsive design with a wall of pictures.


We’ll see what else I can think of. The point of this is to take skills I learn in courses and apply them to a project without having someone else provide me with the list of necessary steps.


That’s it for now.

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Four Reasons to be Happy

Byrichard

There are four reasons to be happy today. The first of these is that my MBP is finally in Geneva therefore it is a short matter of days before I get it into my hands and start playing with the computer and the new software.

The laptop will be used for all video editing and multimedia work I have whilst the iBook will be used for daily tasks such as surfing the web, mobility, and more. I’m going to have two apple laptops capable of video editing at my disposal which is quite a luxury.

The second reason I should be happy is that google Adsense, over the past week has doubled in income, meaning that I should get my next check twice as fast as the last one. I added a few more AdSense adverts on sections where advertising had not been and as a result, many more eyes are seeing and clicking on the advert. I’m still a long way from earning enough money to live off my website but any income is good.

The third reason is that my website is being migrated to Drupal, a database-driven CMS solution for web mastering rather than the outdated HTML pages that it has been over the past decade.

The advantage of the Content Management System (CMS) is that the layout is the same for every page whilst the content is held within a database. As a result, when you want to change something on multiple pages all you need to do is move blocks around. Blocks, when applied to drupal are how modules are manipulated to space them in specific areas on the website. As a result, whenever a website is re-worked it takes a matter of minutes rather than hours to change.

As a side note, I’ve also updated both the PHP and MySQL database to version 5 and it’s working smoothly for the time being.

The final reason to be happy is that a friend has received the edited DVD that I worked on a few weeks ago and finalised within the past few days. As a result, I’ve managed to finish what I had to do a matter of days rather than hours before it was due.

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