Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Phake – PHP task management software

Phake – PHP task management software.  This Phake is a clone of Ruby’s rake, not to be confused with Phake – PHP Mocking Framework.  Think Phing, not PHPUnit.  Use Phake for process automation such as, for example, project deployment.

Goodbye Easy Forex, hello Qobo

I’ve spent the last two and a half years working for Easy Forex.  I went from a consultant through senior web developer, team leader to the director of web development.  I’ve worked on a variety of projects and managed several teams.  I’ve had great fun and I’ve learned a lot.  (Thank you all!  You guys are awesome!)

But the time has come to make a change.  Today is my last day at Easy Forex.  Tomorrow is the first day of my new adventure – Qobo, where I will assume the position of the Chief Technical Officer.  Qobo is a Nicosia-based company that develops mostly web-based software for the enterprise needs.

I worked in this industry before, and I think now is a good time for me to return.

ftfy – fixes text for you

ftfy – fixes text for you

ftfy makes Unicode text less broken and more consistent. It works in Python 2.7, Python 3.2, or later.

The most interesting kind of brokenness that this resolves is when someone has encoded Unicode with one standard and decoded it with a different one. This often shows up as characters that turn into nonsense sequences

HTTPS availability affects website’s Google ranking

Google has been pushing for wider HTTPS adoption for a while now – converting its own services, working on the SPDY/HTTP 2.0 protocols, etc.  Now, it seems, they want other people to start adopting HTTPS too.  And what’s better way than add it as a signal to Google Search rankings?

[…] over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal—affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content—while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Nice!  Especially for those selling SSL certificates…