Finally, after much deliberation, I decided to move my blog to https. For the past few months I had encountered articles pointing that google gives a higher ranking for sites served over https. I had decided against https as I was afraid it may slow down by blog. However, the following message from google forced me to take the issue seriously and finally move to https.
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Introducing Ponzu: a CMS and Server Framework in Go
Here’s a scenario: you’ve been tasked with the creation of a modern app or website for a client or your company. You know you’ll need a dashboard for administrators to add content, manage links and otherwise fairly simple data, and a front-end that turns that data into a brilliant, usable design. You may naturally turn to WordPress for its famous CMS, but you don’t really want to set up all those custom fields for content types other than Post or Page, plus you’re going to need some JSON data for the React/Angular/Vue JS front-end. Considering Ruby on Rails is an option, but the available CMS’s aren’t the easiest to use, and deploying one can be even harder. What should you do?
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Scraping Uber ride history data
This month I’ll complete 1 year riding with Uber. The process of booking a ride and the response time has been amazing. This post however is on a different matter. As a data aficionado I was curious on the various locations I had travelled over the year and the cost each month. Heading over to the Uber API docs was a disappointment as Uber does not provide any api for getting the ride history data. My next plan was to scrape the data from Uber pages using PHP or Python. Just when I was going to start the project to scrape Uber trip data, a little Google search returned a nice bookmarklet by @ummjackson that scrapes the data and exports it to a CSV file.
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Accessing Google Page Insights in PHP
Google Page Insights is a required tool to have when analyzing the speed and usability of your site. As you may know these metrics influence how google ranks your page in search results. If you frequently make changes to your web site designs than it becomes mandatory to check the metrics after each change to make sure that the design changes has not affected the score in any negative way. If you have many pages to test than manual testing can quickly become cumbersome.
Thankfully there are libraries that you can use to automate this process. Once such is given in this post which allows you to get Google Page Insight metrics using PHP.
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Data Quality in web applications
There is nothing painful than having to rebuild a database after you find that the records in the database are corrupted. Data corruption in databases can take many forms – from allowing inaccurate data to be entered to data field truncation due to inadequate field length. This post gives an introduction to the data quality issues you will encounter when designing database applications.
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Handling multiple exceptions in PHP 7.1
Exception handling is one of the ways in which modern languages handle errors. PHP usually handles exception in a separate catch block for each different type of exception. Below is a example exception code that uses three custom exceptions ‘MyFooException’, ‘MyBarException’ and ‘MyBazException’ that is later handled in a ‘try’ block.
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6 visual regression testing tools for UI design
Responsive layouts are very difficult to test. It is more tedious to design and test all of a project’s screen elements at every breakpoint than it is to code them in the first place. Visual regression allows you to make visual comparisons between the baseline versions of the site and the version in development. The complete process is nothing but taking the screenshot of the original design and comparing it with the new, looking for pixel differences. Visual regression comes in various flavors, using a variety of technologies and workflows as mentioned below. Pick any one to suit your purpose.
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