Accessing Local Resources over the Internet with Packetriot

November 1, 2019 | Comment

When I am doing any development, such as for PostRecycler, I do the coding on my laptop running Apache, PHP and MySQL locally via MAMP. This is fine until I need to share work with others which means I have to either upload the work onto a public server or do it via screen sharing. Neither are particularly ideal.

I was vaguely aware of the service ngrok which allows you to expose your local services on the web and then, via Reddit, saw the similar service Packetriot which does a similar thing so I thought I would give … Read the rest

How to run code before every controller in CodeIgniter

September 13, 2019 | Comment

I have been working on my side project PostRecycler recently which I have re-written to use the CodeIgniter framework. I came across an interesting challenge where I needed to run some code before every other controller.

What I wanted was to prevent a user from moving away from the dashboard page if their account had expired but what I didn’t want to do was to have to remember to put that into every controller. I guess I could have done it as a helper function but that still would have meant putting a call to it in every controller. MY_Controller … Read the rest

How to store UNICODE in a non-UNICODE database

August 9, 2019 | Comment

For a side project I am working on (Glad you asked! PostRecycler which makes the most of your social posts) I needed to all entry of unicode characters for just one field.

This left me in a bit of a quandary as I really didn’t want to have to convert the whole of my database to UTF-8 just so I could have this one column accept unicode characters.

Then I remembered something I had discovered in our companies web app which accepted unicode characters but I knew the database wasn’t unicode enabled. However, I knew that this column was encrypted … Read the rest

Setting the Codeigniter Environment for both CLI and Browser

July 26, 2019 | Comment

I’ve recently been getting to grips with the Codeigniter framework after years of using a home-grown monstrosity. I was becoming more and more concerned about the level of security in my own framework and decided I would be better off with something that’s maintained.

I researched the many PHP frameworks to find one that was going to work for me. I toyed with the idea of using Symfony, which is what our products are based on, but the time to get up-to-speed with it was greater than I wanted to invest. I therefore settled on Codeigniter which looked easier … Read the rest