Weblog

When I first started with this WordPress blog, I installed the Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) plugin to help me manage custom content types. Although this has been perfectly adequate for my needs, I’ve been looking to migrate over to the Pods plugin for a while now, if only because it seems to offer a bunch of additional features (relationships, a REST API…) and a nicer interface. And recently, when CCTM appeared to have crashed on me for a couple of days (turned out to be a stale cache), I decided to take the plunge. ...

Many, many years ago, I wrote an article about building a timesheet system to track and analyze work hours with PHP 4.x. It was a fairly useful little application, one that I ended up using quite a bit in my daily work as a consultant. As my requirements increased, I moved on to other project management systems…but I always had a soft spot for this, the one I used with my first few clients. ...

Continuous delivery is pretty awesome. There’s no fiddling about manually packaging or transferring code; instead, your code is automatically packaged and deployed on an ongoing basis, and you can see (and test) the results within a few minutes of making a change. Up until recently, if you were using Bluemix, you needed to rely on external or third-party services coupled with various custom scripts to implement continuous delivery for your Bluemix applications. To make things easier, a Bluemix Continuous Delivery service was recently introduced, which comes tightly integrated with Bluemix out of the box and which provides a secure, automated way to build, test, and deploy your Bluemix applications. ...

I’ll be speaking at the IBM Bluemix Dubai user group meeting next week. Using PHP with IBM Bluemix (Mon Aug 28 2017 at 19:00) This session covers the basics of developing and deploying PHP applications on IBM Bluemix. It will be based heavily on my experiences working with different IBM Bluemix services, which I’ve also described in various articles. It will include a hands-on coding demonstration that you can follow along with on your laptop. ...

I’ll be speaking at the IBM Cloud user group meeting in two days. Using PHP with IBM Bluemix (Sat Jul 29 2017 at 10:00) This session covers the basics of developing and deploying PHP applications on IBM Bluemix. It will be based heavily on my experiences working with different IBM Bluemix services, which I’ve also described in various articles. It will include a hands-on coding demonstration that you can follow along with on your laptop. ...

If you work as an independent recruiter or an in-house HR manager, you’re probably inundated with CVs from aspiring job candidates. You’re also probably collecting data from other sources: social media, LinkedIn profiles and your own interview notes. And the more data you collect, the harder it becomes to spot the right candidate for a particular requirement. If that sounds familiar to you, relax. There are better ways of matching job candidates with business needs, especially if you let technology help you. Close your eyes and imagine an application that lets you upload all those CVs and notes, scans and indexes them, and gives you a way to search them using skill keywords like “PHP” or “aerospace engineer”. ...

At the end of every month, I sit down for a couple of hours to create and send out invoices to my customers. Up until very recently, this involved opening up an invoice template in a word processor, entering the date and invoice number, adding up the hours worked, and calculating the total and any taxes. I’d then export each invoice as a PDF and email it out. As if that wasn’t bad enough, at the end of each accounting year, I had to review a directory full of PDF files to calculate how much I’d earned, if any invoices were unpaid, and how many projects I’d completed. ...

Ever seen an injured stray on the side of the road and wished you could help, but didn’t know who to call? A couple of months ago, I started thinking about how technology could help address this problem. I began to imagine a mobile application which anyone could use to quickly report injured or ill strays to a central database, including photos and GPS locations. This information could then be used by rescue agencies dedicated to stray assistance. ...

Like most people, I send and receive a lot of documents over email, and the vast majority of those are in PDF format. Over the last few months, I’ve been playing with the idea of moving all these documents into a single location and building an application to automatically index them. This would not only make it easier to find a specific one quickly, but also simplify backing things ups. ...

I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with MongoLab’s DBaaS for a while…so when I had to choose a database for my latest IBM Bluemix application, MongoDB was first on my list. I like the idea of a document-oriented database as an alternative to the traditional RDBMS, and I was keen to try this in a real-world context. As it turned out, MongoDB’s document-oriented structure was a great fit for my idea of a fast, searchable, color-coded notepad in the cloud. Each “note” is modeled as a document in a MongoDB collection, and full-text searches across the documents in the collection are extremely efficient. Thanks to MongoLab’s browser-based management, it was also very easy to configure and connect the MongoDB database to the PHP application running on Bluemix. ...