I'm a huge fan of open-source! One of the little ways I've supported the cause is by keeping this blog open since the very beginning. You can always browse the full source code here. The reason is partly to let people see the history of changes behind each page. But also because I didn't find many open-source Jekyll blogs to learn from when I started down this road. So I keep this website open in the hopes that my trials and errors will save someone else a lot of time. I was recently asked by someone (shout-out to Seth!) to send them the Markdown source of one of my articles. This gave me the idea to add a permanent "View source" button to the footer of every article page. I'll walk you through the process of adding this to your own Jekyll website.

On the php[architect] site they've posted a full article from their July 2018 issue sharing information about a new kind of data store in MySQL. Do you work on projects where you begin coding before knowing what your data looks like? Or are you part of the vast majority of developers who have had little or no training in database theory, relational calculus, Structured Query Language, or sets? Could you be working on a project without a database administrator to set up relational tables, indexes, and schemas? Or are you tired of embedding ugly lines of SQL in your pristine PHP code? There is new hope for you. In the article Dave Stokes (of MySQL/Oracle) covers the new native JSON data type that was added in MySQL 5.7 but enhanced in MySQL 8 as a document store. He shows how to use this new functionality from the command line, what a "document" is and how to install and use the X DevAPI PECL extension to make use of it from your PHP code.

Eric, again not mincin’ no words with blog post titles. This is me: The most common CSS declaration organization technique I come across is none whatsoever. Almost none, anyway. I tend to group them by whatever dumps out of my … The post Organize your CSS declarations alphabetically appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

Icons are very versatile and they can be used in different parts of a website, from headers and menus to lists and content. Because they have a condensed size and increased versatility, they have been used more and more to transmit information in an effective manner. Icons are usually small pictures or symbols that intuitively show the […] The post How to Use Icons in Web Design | 20 Examples appeared first on Line25.

Imagine this: You've just written some code for a new feature. You're wrapping up writing some unit tests. As you're writing your tests, you begin to have an existential crisis. "Why am I writing these tests?" you ask yourself. "I've already manually verified that my code works, and I even had another developer test it out themselves as well. What's the point?" The answer lies in one crucial realization: Your tests are for the future.

In my guide to start testing your Laravel applications I mentioned two barriers to testing: time and skill. In this post, I want to address time. A?A?A? I'm someone who values time over anything else. From my perspective, time is the only thing I'll never have more of. It annoys me when something ...

After 5 years of development, 3,000,000 downloads, and 58 releases, I'm extremely pleased to announce that league/commonmark version 1.0.0 has been released! What is league/commonmark? league/commonmark is a highly-extensible PHP Markdown parser which is fully compliant with the CommonMark spec. ...

In a post to his site Ben Sampson shows how to mask IDs in URLs using hashids in a Laravel-based application. Hashids converts values into strings that can then be decoded back to their original values. By default a URL generated by a Laravel app will contain the ID of a model like this https://app.name/users/1 where 1 is the ID of the item. Often this is absolutely fine, but sometimes you might want to hide it (or obfuscate it). The two main use cases for this I've come across so far are: Security [and it looks] More professional. He shows how to use this package to encode and decode ID values in your URLs. He also includes updates to the models, controllers and routing to use route model binding to handle the encode/decode process. He shows how to set up different salts for different data types, setting it on each model and how to correctly bind the functionality in the main route service provider.

Years ago, I wished I could work on advertising projects for household names because I thought that above-the-line work would bring creative satisfaction. I've been lucky to work with many well-known businesses and charities, but looking back, my smaller projects were the most satisfying creatively. Often, big brands have already established guidelines which mean there's less room for me to experiment and exercise my creative muscles. I'm not saying brand guidelines are unimportant, but I prefer to work on projects where I feel I add the most value and a little of myself.

Building a fully functional REST API from the ground up is a large project for any developer and even more challenging for IT professionals unfamiliar with the nuances of how APIs are coded, deployed, and maintained. There's is an opportunity for low-code tools to reduce the time spent on API integrations. These tools can lighten your load and manage most of the complexity for you, allowing developers to work on other aspects of their stack.