Month: August 2015

photo by pixabay

Passing Referrer data from SSL

Google is now recommending all sites to start moving to HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate. The benefits include a more secure experience and a rumored slight bump in SEO. I implemented Stripe payments on a site which required an SSL certificate and made the decision to go ahead and make the whole site run over HTTPS. One of the downsides to doing this is I noticed that referral data was no longer sent to sites I linked to.

For some, this may not matter but to me I look at referrer data as a form of marketing. When I link to a site and they see traffic from my site then they will not know I appreciate their work, and hopefully be interested enough to visit my site.

Sending Referrer Data

After a bit of research, I found a draft W3C spec on just this issue and it includes a simple fix in the meta section. By simply adding the following to your HTML you can send this data automatically:

<meta name="referrer" content="unsafe-url">

The W3C document outlines all the available options here and if you would like to have this more restricted please look at those options. For the purpose here unsafe-url, or all in older specs, will send a Referer HTTP header to any URL you link to. One thing to note is, “this will leak origins and paths from TLS-protected resources to insecure origins”. So if you are in admin area or something that shouldn’t be known to the outside world you would never want to use this.

In my case, the site is just a blog and I’m not concerned about leaking any information.

As a final caveat, this W3C spec is a draft. Some browsers Chrome and Firefox are already included support for this meta tag, but others might not be. So if that is important to you, then you will need to figure out a more advanced way of passing this data.

A first look at the Flarum Forum Software

Flarum is a new open source PHP forum system developed by Toby Zerner and Franz Liedke. Toby and Franz both have history in creating forum software and with Flarum they decided to join forces and reimagine the forum landscape.

Gone are the days of the old style forums that has been popular for the past 20 years. With Flarum, it takes a fresh look and is both nice to look at and fully functional.

Let’s take a quick look at these new forums and see what all the excitement is about. Just note that Flarum is currently in beta, and any of this information can change.

Continue reading “A first look at the Flarum Forum Software”

Ninjagrl Art

A few months back I decided to rework my entire office. I had grown tired of a tiny corner desk that would only hold a desktop computer and a keyboard. It felt cramped and left little room for writing or planning with real paper and pencil. This desk also featured a large hutch that took up almost an entire wall. Sitting across the room was a large bookcase that also took much of the wall space.

To rearrange, I purchased a new kitchen table to act as a desk that supplied ample room for a desktop computer, a large external monitor, and plenty of extra space for writing. Transforming the table into a desk was a fantastic idea but removing the old desk left an empty bare wall. It needed some pictures or art, and I just couldn’t decide what to get. This changed when I seen the following painting titled “Lumen”:

 

lumen
Lumen

 

This painting is from ninjagrl, an artist who started an open source collection making paintings of various projects and sayings within the open source community.

The Lumen piece certainly struck a chord with me because all through high school I would draw this same Anglerfish. I’m not sure what specifically I like about it other than it can represent so many things.

After reaching out she was pretty booked up, but I commissioned two paintings for my now empty wall. One to represent my Laravel News project and another with my two daughters.

I was probably her worst client. I had a vague idea of what I wanted and struggled to articulate clearly what that idea was. After a few emails and asking friends we came up with the idea of a reporter interviewing an elephant. For those not familiar, an elephant is the PHP mascot that Laravel is written in. Then for “Daddy’s Girls” I sent her a picture that she said would be perfect and it just went from there.

Here is what the final product of the two commissions looks like:

Daddy's Girls
Daddy’s Girls
laravelnews
Laravel News

In the one with my girls notice the rabbit. That is her favorite stuffed animal that she made at one of those “build an animal” places. What is great is that inside its paw is a contraption that when pushed causes the bunny to roar like a dinosaur.

I think they turned out fantastic and can’t wait to hang them on my wall.

The Martian Trailer

I haven’t been this excited to see a movie in a long time. I just finished the book last weekend and it’s all still fresh in mind. When thinking about the movie I was wondering how they were going to do the first half before Watney contacts NASA. Having the SOL logs be in video format is a great idea.

If you haven’t read the book you should. Although be warned it does have some language.

How to set up your Mac for local PHP Development

As a developer I spend countless hours on the computer. Over time I accumulate a ton of cruft. Everything from old forgotten files, unused apps, and worst of all hidden junk that has been installed by following some random tutorial.

This past weekend I decided it was finally time to wipe my Macbook’s hard drive and start fresh. I have used it daily for several years now and still had artifacts from when I used Mamp. Since then Vagrant has turned to my local server of choice and one of the reasons is how clean you can keep your machine by utilizing it.

After finishing the new Mac OS X install it felt like a new beginning. So clean, so minimal. I’ve missed that.

This go around I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible and only install things I know I need and use. This tutorial covers how I set up my Mac for local PHP Development. Continue reading “How to set up your Mac for local PHP Development”