ChatGPT as a Replacement Programmer

March 9, 2024 | Comment

When I left university I did so with a good grounding in several programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran and Pascal. Then, at my first job, I was given training in the language Application Master, part of ICL’s VME operating system. One of the things I was told about Application Master was that it was a “fourth generation language (4GL)” and that this would be the last generation that required a developer to write the code.

This was the late eighties and until very recently we have been still waiting for this transition to happen.

ChatGPT has Entered

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A Minor Update to my Bluesky Library

February 26, 2024 | Comment

A quick post to say that my Bluesky library has had a small update. This is to take into account that from version two of Clark’s library that handles the calls to Bluesky the connection method has changed. Therefore, if you have updated to version two then remember also to update the PHP2Bluesky code which can be found here.

You can read all the posts on the PHP2Bluesky library here and get in touch if you find any issues or have an enhancement suggestion.… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Eight – Retrieving a Post

January 26, 2024 | Comment

Once again I have been looking at the Bluesky API as part of a question posted on my Github respository. This time the question was “Can I specify one URL and use PHP to retrieve only one bluesky post by someone else?”. You don’t actually need my library to do that but I thought it would be useful to post details here as it’s not immediately obvious.

Identifying an Individual Post

The first thing to consider is how to identfy an individual post. Consider that we want to retrieve the following post progamatically.

Looking at the URL for this … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Seven – Handling Multiple Images

January 10, 2024 | Comment

It really is very gratifying when people use your code in their own projects and get in touch to ask questions, suggest changes or, heaven forbid, highlight bugs! Yesterday, someone raised an issue asking if it was possible to upload four images to a post. Let’s take a look and see…

Who Wants Multiple Images Anyway?

To be honest, when I wrote PHP2Bluesky it was very much for my own project and that only required one image per post. However, Bluesky allows up to four images to be uploaded per post and so I can understand why others would want … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Six – Handling Handles and Oversized Images

January 3, 2024 | Comment

I wrote a series of posts towards the end of the year that took you step-by-step through using the Bluesky API to post to the social network. Having used the code Patrick Delahanty got in touch to say that he had found a couple of issues. Firstly, handling user handles and secondly dealing with large images. Let’s take a look at both of those.

Handling User Handles

As with every social network, Bluesky allows you to select (or assigns for you) a unique user handle. As we saw in the last post I have changed mine to be my … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Five – Putting it all Together

November 10, 2023 | Comment

In this series of posts we have looked at:

In this final post we are looking at putting it all together. This includes a worked example plus a complete library of functions that will allow you to easily interact with the Bluesky API.

The Prerequisites

What this project has predominately been about is the correct formatting of the parameters that need to be passed to the Bluesky API. This code does not directly call the API but uses BlueskyApi by Clark Rasmussen to do that.

Here’s … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Four – Link Cards

November 9, 2023 | Comment

In this we post we are continuing to look at accessing Bluesky from the API via PHP. Previously we looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text, images and handling links and in this post we take a look at Link Cards.

What Even IS a Link Card?

Link Cards are the snippets of a website that is linked to a post that you will no doubt be familiar with seeing elsewhere. Typically, elsewhere these are handled for you but not in Bluesky – here you do all the heavy lifting.

Fetching Details

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Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Three – Links

November 8, 2023 | Comment

So far we have looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text and images. In this post I want to look at how links are handled. Unlike X and Mastodon on Bluesky when you post text that includes one or more links these are not parsed and activated. You have to tell Bluesky that you have links in your text and where they are.

Parsing for Links

In order for links to be handled correctly by Bluesky in addition to the text itself you also need to pass an array as part of the parameters giving the start … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Two – Images

November 7, 2023 | Comment

In the first of these posts we looked at creating the connection to the Bluesky API and posting a text post. In this second post we are going to extend that out to post images as well as text.

The code posted here are snippets from a larger library of functions that you can drop in and use to post to Bluesky. If some parts look more complex than they need to all will be revealed in the final version.

Uploading Images

In order to post an image to Bluesky you have to take a few steps:

open and ingest

… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part One

November 6, 2023 | 1 comment

With all the uncertainty surrounding the future of X (née Twitter), I decided to take a look at Bluesky which somewhat ironically has its roots in Twitter where it was started as an internal project. Bluesky is still in beta and is invite-only. I worry about its long-term given that ultimately it too has to make money, something that Twitter has singularly failed to do. None of this, of course, affects the topic today which is posting to Bluesky via the API.

Basic Concepts

The first thing to say is that I am using the following library to actually post … Read the rest