I’m working on a project, part time, in my spare time. As part of that project I have Jenkins for continual building when I publish anything into the master branch in git. I’ve not done much for a month or so, but logged in to it today to be given a lovely warning that the disk space is nearly full.
My First Attempt at Open-Source Contribution
I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open source project, so I thought it was time to finally start. I’ve been investigating different CSS frameworks, and came across Bulma. I saw the contribute link and figured I’d see what issues there were in Github for it, and there was an issue about some typos. I figured that was a good place to start; check if any more remained. I forked and clones the repo to my machine and blasted it through “Inspect Code” option in PhpStorm, but found a different issue to look into, a one not raised currently as an issue, but still as part of the title.sass file. It was to do with the following on line 14:
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Automating the simple stuff
We all use computers for one thing or another, and in most cases we’ll do the same things on them over and over. Part of being a developer is realising the things which need doing a lot, and automating them to increase productivity. Doesn’t matter what it is, there’s generally a way to automate things.
Encrypting the site
I’ve just moved my site from HTTP over to HTTPS. It’s not a huge deal for something like this, but it’s something which I’ve really needed to do for a while, and something which is becoming more and more popular. For most people this won’t mean much, and for this site it doesn’t amke much difference, but given that encrypting web pages is a simple process, there’s no real reason not to be doing it.
Introducing Charon File Uploader
I’ve wanted to build a useful javascript library for a while, but never found any of the ones out there lacking. I’ve been working on a new project recently and one of the things I needed to do for that was be able to upload an image via AJAX, along with the alt-text and other information for the image. There’s libraries out there for uploading files and images, but I’ve not found one which lets you add other information to the post easily. That’s when I figured I could build it myself. Charon was born!
Database Connection Mis-information
Whilst on my usual rounds on StackOverflow to help spred useful knowledge of computing and web development I came across the following comments on a thread:
Um… mysql doesn’t connect over http… nor to a directory
Neither should it be an url. Usually it’s
localhostor the IP address of the remote mysql server
Check, test and check again
I noticed today as I was about to start a different article that my website was looking a bit, well, funny. The layout was wrong, some of the colours were off, the whole thing was a mess. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not at the forefront of design, and won’t win any beauty awards, but it looked awful!
Joomla 3.5.1 released
Joomla has announced the release of their open source CMS system, version v3.5.1. The latest version fixes the following issues which were found in v3.5:
- Fix root url sometimes returning empty in canonical URLs
- Fix having to log in twice when user session expires
- Some SMTP emails could no longer be sent due to a bug in the SMTP email server setup
- Session restarts caused PHP Errors
- Fix insertid() returning 0 for the PDO MySQL driver
- Fix the Empty trash and unarchive button not existing for com_banners
Joomla 3.5 Released
A little over a week ago, the Joomla! Project anounced the release of Joomla 3.5. The major advantage this has is that the widely used CMS has PHP7 support, allowing webmasters to upgrade their server installations and take advantage of the performance improvements that PHP7 brings.
The new version comes with an e-mail update plugin to allow site admins to know when there are patches and bug fixes; hopefully they will then patch their sites to the benefit of everyone.
A run down of the listed major changes are:
NEVER trust user input
I’ve had the joys recently of being part of a code audit for a potential client for a change or re-build of a system. The code in itself was complete textbook…of how not to code a system. It looked like it had been built long long ago when OO principles didn’t exist, and when no-one knew about security unless they were in that field. Certainly developers knew nothing about security.