In today’s digital era, where everything is becoming smarter and faster, and everyone is about doing things that make them look smart, PayPal is absolutely invaluable. It’s a payment platform that stores all of our payment information across different cards and banks, so we don’t have to remember and re-enter pesky things like credit card numbers everytime we purchase something. Just click on PayPal’s big yellow checkout button! It’s the smart thing to do, right?
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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been tinkering with PHP’s gettext to set up internationalisation for one of my web apps (i.e. getting it ready for translation into different languages). Even though there were many step-by-step guides and Stack Overflow topics on the web, all detailing a similar set of instructions, following them did not work things out for me.
After some frustration and a lot of time tinkering, it turns out that these guides were missing some pieces of information.
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17 July 2020: Updated the class provided in this article to make it easier to use.
For those of you using Google reCAPTCHA to weed out spam on your websites, here’s a code snippet for verifying the reCAPTCHA v2 tickbox response on the server-side using PHP.
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If you host a website on one of those shared web hosts with cPanel installed, such as those offered by GoDaddy, Bluehost or Exabytes, here’s a snippet of .htaccess code that can be useful for you.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /your-subdirectory/$1 [L]
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If you manage a Unix-like server, every now and then, you might get an email from the server notifying you of important errors that occur in your server. Here’s one that I got earlier today from an Ubuntu 18.04 server of mine:
Cron <root@terresquall> test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts –report /etc/cron.daily )
/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
Mail sent at 06:39
error: error running shared postrotate script for ‘/var/log/apache2/*.log ‘
run-parts: /etc/cron.daily/logrotate exited with return code 1
It’s never fun to receive server admin emails like this, because it means that your server has issues, but the message tends to be really ambiguous, so it’s really hard to figure out what the issue is. Obviously, I didn’t know what the issues were, so I had to do some research.
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If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, chances are — at some point or another — you’ll have to work with digital images. For most people, it’s more than enough to know how to save images into the right formats. If you’re a game developer though, it’ll help to have a bit more in-depth knowledge, since you’ll be working with game engines that like to throw around obscure terms like true color, bit-depth or ARGB-16.
I struggled a lot with images during my early days in game development precisely because of these terms — Google searches and Wikipedia articles only led me to pages with big words that confused me even more. With time, I eventually figured things out — hence this primer. Hopefully, reading this means you won’t take as long as I did to figure things out.
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