Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

PHP overwrite of built-in constants (true is false)

Here is a scary thing I picked up on Reddit PHP:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

Until PHP 5.6 this was throwing a parse error, but from then on – it’s just fine.  Scary, right?

The comments on the Reddit thread are quite helpful.  Technically, this is not overwriting (shadowing?) since the original constant is still available:

<?php
use const true as false;
if (\false) {
    echo "uh-oh";
}

If you are a fan of nightmares, there is also this link, which will shake your religious beliefs …

Web design : from zero experience to a high paying job

Richard Yang, a UX designer at Sony, shares his path from a guy with zero experience in design to a respected professional with a high paying job.  Much like with any professional, in the past, present or future, it wasn’t an overnight success, but an inhuman amount of work and dedication, with plenty of failure.

Continue reading Web design : from zero experience to a high paying job

Downdetector – a weatherman for the digital world

Downdetector is yet another one of those services that monitor major web services and provides and lets you see if any of them is experiencing any issues or outages.

You can search for specific providers or browse by company or issue type.  There’s also a weekly top 10.  What I like in particular are comments for each report, where you can get some feedback from other users experiencing the problem.

 

Creative Commons beta tests new search

Creative Commons is beta testing a new search implementation.  It helps with finding creative work (mostly images for now) that one can use commercially, modify, adapt, and build upon.  For now, it brings the results from a few different sources that you’d have to search separately before – 500px, Flickr, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and Rijksmuseum.

I’m sure once the functionality and performance are stabilized, more resources and types of creatives will be added.  After all, Creative Commons works with quite a few platforms.

Oh, and if you’ve spent the last few years in a cave and don’t know what Creative Commons is all about, here are a couple of links for you:

Via WordPress Tavern.