Pragmatism in the real world

Embedding Notist slides

This site uses WordPress under the hood as I find the flexibility that a good CMS provides quite useful. For the talks section, I use a custom post type so that I can set additional properties on the post and customise the display. With my usual lack of imagination, my custom post type is called talk. When Notist was released, I've been uploading the PDFs for my presentations there so that I have a nicely… continue reading.

HTML encode selected text on Mac

When writing blog posts, I write directly in HTML, mostly from habit and because I've not set up mark-up text processing on WordPress. I'm comfortable enough with simple HTML that it's never seemed important enough to sort out, especially with MarsEdit's macros for common HTML tags. One thing that I need to do relatively regularly is to HTML encode code snippets for use in <tt> and <pre> tags. I have been doing this via a… continue reading.

Custom error rendering in Slim 4

One of the nice things about Slim 4 is that it's easier to customise the HTML generated on error without having to worry about the rest of the error handling mechanism. This is because we have separated error rendering from error handling. Slim's default ErrorHandler maintains a list of renderers, one for each content-type and will delegate the creation of the error payload (HTML, JSON, XML, etc) to the renderer. Out of the Box, the… continue reading.

Folder types in AppleScript

I've recently moved to Adobe Lightroom Classic for photo editing, but am still using Apple Photos for viewing my photos on my iPhone and iPad. As such, I wanted an easy way to import photos exported from Lightroom into Photos, so I turned to AppleScript. My requirements are that I want to import all the photos in each sub-folder of a root folder called "ToPhotos" into Folders and Albums in Photos that are a child… continue reading.

Dependency Injection in Slim 4

In contrast with Slim 2 and Slim 3, Slim 4 does not ship with a DI container, but instead, supports any PSR-11 compatibly DI container that you provide. This is part of Slim 4's commitment to interoperability via the PHP-FIG standards. The easiest way to add a container to your Slim application is to call AppFactory::setContainer() before you call AppFactory::create(). The setContainer() method expects any PSR-11 container. Register the container with Slim Let's look at… continue reading.

Running Slim 4 in a subdirectory

If you want to run Slim 4 in a subdirectory of your website, then you have a few things you need to do. Let's consider the situation: Your main website is in the directory /var/www/html and is accessed at https://example.com/. You want your new Slim 4 app to be in the directory /var/www/html/myapp and to be accessed at https://example.com/myapp. Your Slim 4 index.php file is stored in /var/www/html/myapp. There are two things you need to… continue reading.

Slim4-empty: minimal Slim 4 starting point

To simplify creating a new Slim 4 project, I've created slim4-empty which does this for me. To use it: $ composer create-project akrabat/slim4-empty my-new-project and you're done! The my-new-project directory is created and contains Slim 4 along with a minimally viable public/index.php to get you going. You can then run it with the PHP built-in server: php -S 0.0.0.0:8888 -t public/ And navigate to https://localhost:8888 to view "Hello World" in your browser. What does it… continue reading.

Receiving input into a Slim 4 application

A Slim 4 (and Slim 3) application receives data from three places: Any query parameters on the URL (the key-value pairs after the ?) The HTTP message's body (usually for POST and PUT) messages Parameters in the URL (such as the 3 in https://example.com/users/3 Within the application, these are available within the PSR-7 Request object. Let's start with a simple Slim 4 application. Firstly we require the Slim framework and a PSR-7 implementation: $ composer… continue reading.

Automatically mounting a network drive on Mac

I have so many photos that I can't store them all on my hard drive and keep them on my NAS. While on my home network, it would be convenient to automatically mount the NAS folder onto my Mac as I keep forgetting before I open Lightroom. Usually I would use automount to do this, but Lightroom cannot see automounted folders, so I decided to use a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. Mount a… continue reading.

A first look at Slim 4

With Slim 4 we have continued the tradition of allowing you to use the framework in the way that best fits you and your project. You can create a Slim application entirely in a single file suitable for prototyping through to a few files for a simple web hook or serverless action all the way to fully-decoupled application suitable for the enterprise. From my point of view, the big changes with Slim 4 are: Support… continue reading.