Volume 0: New Year, New Newsletter!
Hey there,
Happy New Year! Hope you're enjoying the first few days of 2024.
This is the first edition of my "Web Development and Related Things" newsletter, a semi-regular newsletter sharing what I'm working on, and links to things I've found that I think you might like to know about.
For those of who you'd previously subscribed and never heard from me, I apologize. I'd hoped to start something last year, but did not. To start the year off, I moved my newsletter from MailChimp to Buttondown. Your subscriptions have been moved over too. Glad to have you here!
Anyhow, here's the links I want to share with you to get the year started off right.
What I'm Up To
WordPress Security Talk: Next Monday evening, January 8th, I'll be speaking to the Rochester WordPress Meetup about keeping your WordPress site secure. There will be a little bit in this talk for all kinds of users including site owners and developers. Find out more here: https://www.meetup.com/rochester-wordpress-users-meetup/events/298346676
WordCamp Canada 2024: There's discussion in the works for a WordCamp Canada hosted in Ottawa in this summer. If you're interested, join the camp's mailing list: https://canada.wordcamp.org/2024/
Blog Posts
Creating Isolatable Commands in Laravel: Laravel 9.38 introduced the concept of Isolatable commands, console commands which cannot be run if another instance of the command is already running. I finally had the opportunity to test this out this week, and it works great! https://shawnhooper.ca/2024/01/04/creating-isolatable-commands-in-laravel/
News
RIP Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal programming language, author of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", and more, passed away on January 1st.
Goodbye Google Podcasts: After April 2, 2024, you'll no longer be able to listen to podcasts using Google Podcasts.
Laravel
Spatie has released a new package for creating PDFs in Laravel. The coolest thing about this package is their support for generating the PDF serverless with AWS Lambda. https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-pdf/v1/introduction
Laravel 11, coming in February, is getting rid of a lot of the boilerplate framework code. This blog post by Grant is a graet explanation of how Middleware will be declared in this new version. https://dev.to/grantholle/exploring-middleware-in-laravel-11-2e10
Security
The I in LLM stands for Intelligence: Blog post from the maintainer of curl explaining how LLM's are causing work for open source project maintainers with bug bounty programs. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/
Tools
If you're on Mastodon, there's now a bot that can follow any RSS feed for you. Check out https://rss-parrot.net/
Waystation allows you to archive a site hosted on GitHub Pages to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. https://caltechlibrary.github.io/waystation/
That's it for now. Thank you for reading.
Wishing you all the best for the coming year.
Shawn