This is a little trick that allows you to do pretty much whatever you like in a Visual Studio Code task. If you can put it in a batch file, you can do with VSCode. All you need is this “I’ll run a batch file for you” task (and possibly add a problem matcher so […]
I recently migrated my website to a different platform. I anticipated that this would require some redirection rules to send people to the correct content on the new website, but I failed to anticipate that number of links to legacy files (like some jQuery plugins and their static HTML example pages). As a result, I […]
If you, like me, find yourself staring at the network traffic spewing out of your website you will have noticed the JavaScript problem. No matter what plugin you use, it seems to require three or four JavaScript files. Want to show a picture of a cat on your website? You’ll need jQuery, React, and Meteor. […]
I was asked how to create a custom task in Visual Studio Code. It comes with a bunch of built-in tasks that you can add to the tasks.json file – but what if you need something else… The example below enables PHPLint (in a not-very-sophisticated way) – but the technique would work for anything you […]
Everyone is keen on writing apps these days. For an organisation, apps are the buzz. For consumers, apps are the convenience. The only problem is that writing apps that target every operating system (and then every version of an operating system that has a wide distribution between versions) can be quite a task. This is […]
Dependency Injection solves the problem of dependencies in complex applications. Because we want to re-use our code rather than duplicate it in many places, we end up with more dependencies in our code, but Dependency Injection can ease the pain of dependencies and also make your code easier to test. One of the most popular […]
I’m currently contributing to an open source framework, written in PHP. I really want to be a good boy and do everything by the book, but I am really struggling with PHP Doc comments. The idea behind PHP Doc comments is alright. Any public API should be well documented, but when comment blocks account for […]
I recently encountered an issue on an otherwise perfectly functioning .htaccess file, which contained mod_rewrite rules. The rules had been working for several years (since 2008 to be precise) but some patch or change on the web server suddenly caused all pages except for the home page to be unavailable. The error suggested that the […]
While working on the Swift Point Content Mangement System project I had the chance to delve deep into the fantastic world of PHP. One aspect of PHP we worked a lot on was optimisation. This went to low level details, such as the difference between single and double quotes, right through to making you web […]
I write a lot of code in a lot of different languages – but there is one common rule I apply to all of them… when you use an “if” block, always put in the curly braces even if you don’t need them. I have now lost count of the number of times I have […]