MaPit Lookup released
I’ve just released the first version of MaPit Lookup, a PHP library for MaPit, the mapping information service from the chaps at mySociety. It’s a simple wrapper which turns MaPit requests into PHP...
View Articleflickr Lookup released
Over the weekend I released the first version of flickr Lookup, a PHP library for accessing flickr via its API. It’s a simple wrapper which turns API requests into PHP functions which return an array...
View ArticlePostcode validation and verification
If you run a UK website which collects any sort of address information, you will no doubt have come across the potentially thorny subject of postcodes. Specifically, you will want to perform the two...
View ArticleUK Company Data library
As part of the work for Filing Reminders, I needed to fetch company data (specifically filing dates) from data.companieshouse.gov.uk. In order to do this, I wrote a small wrapper class which normalises...
View ArticleRead and write Excel spreadsheets in PHP
If you’ve ever need to read and write Excel spreadsheets in PHP, there is an excellent library available called (unsurprisingly) PHPExcel. I have been using it for over a year in production systems to...
View ArticleDebian Packaging Tutorial
On Saturday I gave a tutorial on Debian packaging at the Manchester Linux Users Group, using Twig as the example package. For anyone who didn’t manage to make the session, or wants to go through the...
View ArticleHello World spreadsheet with PHPExcel
Back in October I posted about PHPExcel, a library which allows you to read and write Excel spreadsheets in PHP with minimum fuss. Today I’m going to show you a simple Hello World example for creating...
View ArticleMultiple CV formats using Pandoc
Until recently, my CV was produced in PDF format from a LaTeX source file, using a template I’d found after some extensive searching. Whilst the output looked professional when viewed on screen and in...
View ArticleOpen dompdf files in the browser instead of downloading
I use dompdf in a number of sites to produce PDF documents from HTML and CSS. It works brilliantly most of the time, but one slight annoyance I’ve experienced recently is that the file is always...
View ArticleSorting arrays in Twig
Several projects I work on use the Twig templating system to separate the look of a site from the backend logic. One change I was asked for recently was to display a list of products in descending...
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