Without Google Fonts, our typography would be in limbo! Now, I’m neither a web designer nor have an eye for the pixel perfect and aesthetic design which a pro designer usually does. Instead, my usual workflow is to cobble together web components like bootstrap, jquery, codeigniter, etc. and try to...
Read more →I wanted to implement a comment hosting system for my static blog—something as simple as the basic WordPress.org commenting feature, with fields for the user’s name, website, etc. No complicated logins, sign-ups, or third-party platforms. The user reads your blog, posts a comment, and you approve it from the backend...
Read more →PHP 8.x is filled with hidden land mines which can suddenly trip the unaware PHP coder, especially when porting from legacy frameworks like CodeIgniter or CakePHP to PHP 8.x systems. One such issue is PDO’s default exception handling method. Prior to PHP 8, PDO’s default exception handling mode was PDO::ERRMODE_SILENT...
Read more →The usual way of installing composer packages with composer require <foo> is the standard. But occasionally, we might want to install the packages from our local computer to save Internet bandwidth or some other reason. Unlike Python’s pip, PHP’s composer doesn’t offer us a straightforward path to install from an...
Read more →Routing is a tricky business in PHP simply because there is no one standard way of doing it. Starting from the most simple and benign (but inflexible) routing strategy of handling every incoming request in the index.php script to the highly flexible (but arcane and opinionated) routing libraries of Symfony,...
Read more →Running multi-queries (a bunch of text containing arbitrary DML/DDL statements) is highly unreliable and not an exact science in CodeIgniter or even PHP for that matter. The Internet is filled with posts like this, this, and this but you can’t depend on these solutions in most situations due to the...
Read more →When you try to manually install an Android APK on your phone, you are typically stuck with an error similar to this: Stack Overflow is filled with posts like this, this and this one but apparently, there seems to be no consensus regarding the cause or even a generally accepted...
Read more →Generating PDF documents from your HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this in PHP. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly...
Read more →Arts, crafts, literature, even things like computer programming have been the domain of humans since time immemorial. Machines were historically meant to do menial tasks where the human couldn’t afford the time or resources. The classic example here is the type-writer, a remarkable machine that helped humans draft letters in...
Read more →In many ways, the classical paradigm of the “WEB” as a mere portal or information resource was the most likable and valuable one in the utilitarian sense. These were the earliest days of the Internet when most of the actual Human-Computer interaction took place in the form of a Windows...
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