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Tag: php

  • Heatmap showing spots across England and Ireland.

    Top 100 Geohasher

    I'm now in the top-hundred geohashers! But the exciting achievement is that I upgraded geohashing.site from MediaWiki 1.31 to 1.43, after leaving it somewhat technically-neglected for about seven years!

    Read more - about 4 minutes (723 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 28 September, 2026
  • Re: How I made...

    Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (982 words)

    • Reply
    • posted 14 September, 2026
  • Screenshot of a MacOS terminal running commands to set up Caddy and PHP8.4 on a Debian server.

    PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13... in Three Minutes

    I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS.

    Read more (253 words)

    • Article
    • 4 comments
    • posted 21 January, 2026
  • I reimplemented Al Sweigart's "Pipe Swap" scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP Refresh header:

    https://textplain.blog/scroll-art-viewer/pipe-swap

    This was a stupid idea, but it was about the level of code sophistication that my illness-brainfog can handle today.

    • Note
    • posted 20 October, 2025
  • Animated GIF showing Sublime Text editor flicking through six different languages, with equivalent code showing in each.

    I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!

    Could I rock an interview tech-test in a programming language I haven't touched in a decade? I wanted to know, so I found a tech-test... then solved it in six different programming languages in a single sitting.

    Read more - about 9 minutes (2125 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 7 June, 2025
  • Reply to: Rant about claims that LLMs will make you lose your programming skills


    SΓ©rgio Isidoro said:

    Ok, I'm NOT an immediate fan of "vibe coding" and overusing LLMs in programming. I have a healthy amount of skepticism about the use of these tools, mostly related to the maintainability of the code, security, privacy, and a dozen other more factors.

    But some arguments I've seen from developers …

    Read more (403 words)

    • Reply
    • 4 comments
    • posted 16 April, 2025
  • An arrow points from a WordPress logo to a ClassicPress logo, with the stylised/sliced 'Q' that is the icon of DanQ.me sitting atop the arrow.

    WordPress to ClassicPress

    A few weeks ago I switched this blog to ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress. Here's a deep dive into how (and why) I did it, as well as a look into what my experience so-far has been with this (mostly-)cut-down version of the world's most popular CMS.

    Read more - about 10 minutes (2205 words)

    • Article
    • 5 comments
    • posted 18 February, 2025
  • Wide diagram consisting of 2,062 vertical lines in a variety of different colours, each representing a different blog post.

    The Continuum

    Inspired by Geneveive Raine's "The Continuum", I turned all of my blog post's featured images into a stripy picture.

    Read more (237 words)

    • Article
    • posted 10 February, 2025
  • Even when it's technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

    Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that... but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.

    Full image of A filled contact form alongside a Slack message and a resulting ticketing system message.
    Alt

    A filled contact form alongside a Slack message and a resulting ticketing system message.

    • Note
    • posted 5 December, 2024
  • Clearly-spammy message shown in a ticket management system.

    Roll Your Own Antispam

    The Web contact form of a nonprofit I founded started attracting a huge volume of spam, and conventional tools weren't helping. But a little analysis allowed us to block almost all of it without compromising on accessibility, privacy, or the false-positive rate.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (710 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 29 August, 2024
  • Dan, a microphone in front of him, smiles at the camera.

    So... I'm A Podcast

    As you might have already noticed, I started a podcast. Let's take a look (or listen!) into how and why I adapted my WordPress installation to double as a podcast host, and discuss what kind of content you're likely to find on it...

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1390 words)

    • Article
    • with an accompanying podcast
    • 1 comment
    • posted 22 August, 2024
  • A blog comment by Pablo Picasso, in his blue period, of a ladybird saying "hi".

    Draw Me a Comment!

    Instead of typing a comment for me to read, you can now draw one! Please don't make me regret this, Internet (πŸ†).

    Read more (300 words)

    • Article
    • 44 comments
    • posted 15 August, 2024
  • Source code for a post on DanQ.me, being searched for unnecessary HTML closing tags. No results are found.

    Tidying WordPress's HTML

    My blog theme runs Tidy on the HTML output to help standardise it and make it more human-readable. I thought I might be the only person to care about such things, but it turns out that Terence Eden does too, so I've open-sourced my approach.

    Read more - about 4 minutes (740 words)

    • Article
    • posted 31 July, 2024
  • Screenshot showing my blog rendered just as text.

    A completely plaintext WordPress Theme

    Terence Eden took my idea for a completely plain text blog, ran with it, and just kept running. Now it's a WordPress theme!

    Read more (90 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 9 May, 2024
  • textplain.blog in Lynx

    Does a blog have to be HTML?

    Does a blog post need a title? Does a blog have to be delivered in HTML? In launching textplain.blog, I'd like to argue that the answer is... no!

    Read more - about 3 minutes (608 words)

    • Article
    • 12 comments
    • posted 3 May, 2024

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