I downloaded the latest version of the broadcast machine, changed one file and my videos are available to download through itunes for viewing on your video ipods if you have one or on your laptop should this not be the case.
This means that if you want to see all my latest work it’s as simple as subscribing to the feed and you’ll get to see my videos whenever I update them next.
Over the past twelve months over 28 gigs of data transfer have occured through 400,000 visitors and one and a half million hits.
There have been 746 downloads of the Paddington station video as I write this. On youtube the same video has only had 30 views. This makes me happy because I see that you can make videos high profile from personal webpages and links added in the right place.
Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there
As I followed two or more courses on the topic there was quite a bit of repetition. Another word for repetition is consolidation. By studying the same topics, taught by different people I consolidated my knowledge. I filled in the knowledge gaps and eventually I began to understand how the code works, even if I can’t write it from scratch yet.
The aim isn’t necessarily to be able to write a web app from scratch. The aim is to understand how all the elements work individually, as well as how they work together in an app.
Today for example in the Let’s Learn Laravel course I followed the lesson on form validation, with mention of Bcrypt and Node.js. This feels good, because I see how frameworks help to save time. For years I was happy to use WordPress as a user, because it works well as a blog and CMS. Now I have studied enough to build my own, although my greatest concern is safety. I want to migrate the static part of my website to Laravel, but I want to do so when I feel confident that it will not be hacked. I also want to do this without destroying the rest of the site in the process.
That’s where the current course comes in. I need help in understanding the process and the steps for setting up a project in Laravel, taking advantage of the tasks that it does for me. When the effort is ready I will deploy it to a web server and see how well it works.
One of the reasons to follow courses, even if they are filled with plenty of repetition, is to learn about concepts. I knew about include but I didn’t know about layout. By understanding layout you can prepare a template, where the elements that change are individual pages, and the layout does the rest, to keep the entire site looking the same. This will become my “portfolio”.
For a while, I have been thinking about creating my own WordPress themes, but I didn’t know where to start or how many hours it would take. I always assumed that it would take many hours and that I would have to create templates, style sheets and more for a number of pages. In reality, you need an index.php page and a stylesheet. Anything else is a bonus.
A shortcut is to find a theme that you like and to see which fields you want to modify and just modify that behaviour. Choosing to use another font requires one or two lines of code. With minimal effort, you can personalise a theme.
The course I watched is “WordPress: Building Child Themes” and within two hours you will see how to use CSS, functions and templates to change one or more aspects, using the themes that you select. Personalising your own theme, can take seconds rather than hours.
It also gives you an opportunity to learn with a small challenge, and as you grow more confident you can try more and more ambitious projects.
You have the Theme Developer Handbook to help you along.
What I would like to do is find a way to create themes by subject for pages so that I can make my website fully dynamic, and bring the static pages into the 21st century. This will require some trial and error, hence the value in playing and experimenting, until it works.
Today I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that.
What makes today’s learning and experimenting interesting is that the time I spent creating PHP arrays for my website content is now easy to transfer to json files for use with dynamic websites. What this means is that content that was stuck on individual pages is now organised by website section. I am now free to do more.
The primary goal is to convert the static part of my website into a flexible content management system as well as to possibly swallow up the WordPress powered blogs. For at least a year I have disliked that Wordpress uses react, so if I can replace WordPress with Laravel then I will be happy. All websites that use React look the same to me, and I don’t want to use technology that was developed by Facebook, no matter how popular.
Having a website is not just about writing blog posts and creating content. It is also about playing with technology and learning new skills. I want to understand how laravel works, and to have a way to demonstrate that I have learned relevant skills for future job applications. This website isn’t small. It has quite a few sections, topics, content and more. It’s worth working on and improving this website.
I am curious about playing with ActivityPub. It is still in early days but if and when it is ready, it will be a more advanced of interactive RSS. I want to see what possibilities it will open up.
With the decline in the value of social media so the value of blogging has come back up. By blogging, rather than using social media, for at least an hour or two I am forcing myself to think, and to elaborate on ideas that would otherwise go without conclusion. Having a thought that is shared in 140 characters is easy. Having a thought that is three hundred words long is not.
Although three hundred words doesn’t sound like much, and takes a few seconds to skim through it can take an hour or two to write. Today I wrote about chatGPT and why I didn’t like this move, but decided to leave that post as a draft, rather than publish it. I want blog posts to be positive, when possible.
The issue with social media, in recent years, is that it has forgotten that it should be about individuals and communities, rather than advertisers. If individuals and communities are scuppered by the social media giants then it makes sense to return to the metaphorical village of personal blogs and websites.
Now that social media has become a waste of time I enjoy investing that time in blogging. For an hour or two I spend time thinking, elaborating ideas and then writing a blog post. Most of these posts are never read. Blogging isn’t about being seen or read. I think blogging is akin to mindfulness or meditation.
I use meditate in the French sense of the word, deep thinking, or to prepare something after a lot of thought. Blogging is the result of reflection, although it might not feel like it, when read. Blogging is a break from the world, to elaborate an idea, before posting it and forgetting about it.
Most blog posts are not read. I’m developing a writing habit, and my writing skills, in a public place that no one visits.
Three years ago I stopped using Instagram because I was tired of seeing influencers and adverts rather than by the people I chose to follow. The cherry on the cake, that pushed me to dump Instagram is when they changed the location of the Post button from the left corner to the top right and changed the default from photo to story.
For ten years or more I used instagram and shared photos, and I enjoyed capturing at least an image or two every single day. It’s because Instagram was bought by Facebook that I fell out of love with the site and decided not to use it anymore. The community had been lost, so what good was there in sticking around?
Instagram to WordPress
In 2020 I played around for two days and I developed a work flow to take my posts json file, and convert it to CSV before importing it to wordpress via a plugin. It worked well, but I never used it.
The Laravel Concept
For a short time I was thinking of trying to get Laravel to drive the Instagram clone but soon changed my mind, due to the amount of learning it would required. I settled on a simpler, yet practical solution. The PHP Array. I had used PHP arrays for one or two sections of my page, as well as individual pages. It’s simple and intuitive to use, with few complications to debug.
JSON to PHP array
Recently I saw discussions about how pixelfed made it possible to import the instagram json file to pixelfed and that’s what encouraged me to play with the Instagram json file. This time I tried a different tact.
The first step was to download the most recent json file and save it locally. Once this was done I converted the json file
I asked chatGPT for help. I asked it how to convert from json to php array. The answer summarised is “$json = json_encode($array);”
I then asked how I would generate a file:
$json = json_encode($array);
$file = ‘data.json’;
file_put_contents($file, $json);
After this It was a matter of trial and error to read the php array data. My idea was to create a loop that would cycle through each post individually and display the image, as well as the related data. Usually I would achieve this by trial and error, as I have done, in the past, with other projects.
chatGPT Helps to Access Array Data
By myself I was able to retrieve the URI and display it. I struggled with the timestamp and exif data so I asked chatGPT to help me. It gave me examples of how to get the URI, the iso info, and the title. The arrays contain more info but I extrapolated that from the example chatGPT had provided me with.
At this point the page was ready to experiment with displaying the content. At first it was just text. I then added the required html to display the image properly and to size it correctly. When that was working properly it was time to add pagination.
In the past I would have spent time Googling for examples of pagination and selecting one that worked well but this time I asked chatGPT for help.
It helped me with pagination, except that the pagination was from page one to one thousand six hundred or more. That’s excellent, if you want that, but I didn’t. I wanted the pagination to be paginated, so I asked chat GPT to help with this too. It did. I then noticed that I needed back and forth, so I asked chatGPT for help yet again.
EXIF volatility
When the site was loading individual images and the relevant information I flicked through the images and noticed that some did not have exif data so I asked chatGPT to write an if else loop that would display exif info if it was available, and ignore it if it wasn’t. This worked well.
Time Taken
chatGPT is a fantastic tool, when you know what you want, and you understand how to get it to work, but you’re not 100 percent on the code aspect. I had the basic functionality of the json to PHP site functional within an hour to an hour and a half. I then spent hours tidying things up, adding a little functionality here and there. With chatGPT if you know what you want to do but you’re not certain of how to do it, then it shines.
During this process I asked a question, it gave an answer, when I saw the answer I tweaked my question, until the result was what I wanted.
Adding CSS
When I was happy with how the site was behaving I changed from displaying three images, to five and then I added styling. For styling you can copy and paste from old projects, or various sources, or you can ask chatGPT to give you a black background with white text and white borders and it will provide you with the code. Within seconds your theme is ready.
And Finally
I am comfortable with PHP. I have been redesigning my website to run off of PHP rather than html or a CMS and it works well. chatGPT didn’t provide me with the concept or direction. I did that. I thought of the steps and workflow, and got chatGPT to provide me with reminders of how to do things. It’s because I knew what I wanted to do, that I achieved my goal within a short amount of time. This is really a post about how I used prompt engineering to get chatGPT to help me achieve the goal I wanted to reach, within minutes, rather than hours, or days.
i went from having a big, clunky wordpress blog, to a few lines of php, to do the same thing. I can add functionality with time. For now it shows my instagram photos efficiently.