Parsing Markdown with PHP: Autolinking and Strikethrough
Let's take a look at how you can extend the CommonMark converter to make working with links easier and allow you to strikethrough text.
Published 3 weeks agoGreetings! I'm Ryan.
I'm a web developer, wannabe writer and space geek based in Essex, United Kingdom.
I currently work at Surewise where I build and maintain insurance systems.
Articles
A collection of tutorials, thoughts and brain dumps.
Parsing Markdown with PHP: Getting Started
Markdown is a great way of making notes, writing articles and generally managing content. Let's take a look at how quickly you can begin using Markdown in your PHP applications.
Published 3 weeks ago | Updated 3 weeks agoBuild a Remaining Character Count Component with Alpine.js
Learn how to build a remaining character counter in Alpine.js using only a few lines of code.
Published 1 month ago | Updated 1 month agoUnconventional Laravel: Responsable classes
Sometimes your controllers can get rather large, especially if you have lots of conditions and data formatting. Have you ever considered moving some of that complexity out into a dedicated response class?
Published 1 month ago | Updated 1 month agoUnconventional Laravel: Middleware-as-a-Service-Provider
Have you ever used a service provider to set a default value for a third-party library? Have you ever done this based on the current request or URL? Have you ever considered doing this inside of middleware instead?
Published 2 months ago | Updated 2 months agoRunning GitHub Actions for Certain Commit Messages
A quick look at how you can configure your GitHub Actions workflows to only run when a certain phrase is present in the commit message.
Published 2 months ago | Updated 2 months agoUnconventional Laravel: Custom Pipeline Classes
Laravel makes use of the internal `Pipeline` class and it's more common in userland too, but have you ever considered tidying up these pipeline processes with custom pipeline classes?
Published 2 months ago | Updated 2 months agoWriting Reusable Alpine Components
Reusability is important when it comes to scaling projects and future-proofing the maintainability of a project. Let's take a look at how you can write more re-usable components in Alpine.
Published 3 months ago | Updated 3 months agoAccessing Helper Methods in Your Livewire Components
Helper methods can be, well, helpful. Did you know that you can actually write helper methods in your Livewire classes and use them really easily in your Blade views?
Published 3 months ago | Updated 3 months agoCreating Custom Magic Variables in Alpine.js
We all come across tasks that are repetitive and probably struggle to find ways of making them more re-usable in our Alpine components. Since v2.5 we can register custom magic variables that can help us out with that.
Published 3 months ago | Updated 3 months agoReplicating `$.slideToggle` with Tailwind CSS & Alpine.js
One of jQuery's most powerful and popular features is the `slide` helpers and lots of people would like to replicate these in Alpine, so let's take a look at how we can do just that.
Published 3 months ago | Updated 3 months agoUnconventional Laravel: Route groups and `$router`
When registering grouped routes using `Route::group()`, it's normal to register those nested routes using the `Route` facade, but have you ever used the `$router` variable?
Published 4 months ago | Updated 4 months agoUnconventional Laravel: Synchronous jobs for reusability
Code reusability is a big thing to consider when working on larger applications, but have you ever considered using synchronous jobs?
Published 4 months agoUnconventional Laravel: Auto-validating models
Join me as I go through some strange and unconventional things that you can do in your Laravel applications, starting with auto-validating Laravel models.
Published 4 months agoAdd Classes to Active Link in Laravel
Adding a class to make the current page "active" in your application's navigation is a simple UI improvement. Let me show you how I typically do this in my apps.
Published 5 months ago | Updated 5 months agoShare Data With Your Frontend in Laravel
Sharing data with your frontend doesn't need to be difficult, let's look at a couple of way of doing it.
Published 5 months ago | Updated 5 months agoManually Refreshing a Livewire Component
Livewire provides a clean API for automatically polling and refreshing a component, but what if you want to manually refresh a component?
Published 5 months ago | Updated 5 months agoClearer Time Values with Carbon
How often do you see something like `2 * 24 * 60 * 60` and wonder what that value actually represents and what those magical numbers mean? Don't worry, Carbon's constants are here to help you out.
Published 5 months ago | Updated 5 months agoGenerate an Array of Dates Using Carbon
I find myself needing to loop over an array of dates quite often for forms at work. It's surprisingly easy thanks to Carbon.
Published 5 months agoSimple Repositories in Laravel
Abstracting common queries in your Laravel applications can be done in many ways. Let's take a look at the simplest way using the "Repository pattern".
Published 6 months ago | Updated 1 month agoDirective precedence in Alpine
Lots of people get caught out by the fact that Alpine evaluates each directive in a particular order. Let's look at the order it uses,
Published 6 months ago | Updated 6 months agoHiding elements until Alpine loads with `x-cloak`
`x-cloak` can be used to hide elements until Alpine has initialised all components and has control of them.
Published 6 months ago | Updated 6 months agoMaintainable Alpine Components
Writing maintainable code is an important part of any software project. Let's take a look at some ways you can make your Alpine components more maintainable.
Published 6 months ago | Sponsors onlyTrack Your Users Last Activity in Laravel
It's quite common to keep tabs on when an authenticated user last used your web application. The information can be really useful when calculating software adoption, usage frequency and return rate.
Published 7 months ago | Updated 6 months agoAn Alternative Approach to Computed Properties in Alpine.js
I previously wrote about using functions as computed properties in Alpine, but what if there was a better way?
Published 7 months ago | Updated 6 months agoAnonymous Alpine Components
One of Alpine's main selling points is that it provides most of the reactive goodies that Vue and React do at a much lower cost. What if you don't need reactivity for your site? Well, Alpine can definitely still fit into your stack!
Published 7 months ago | Updated 6 months agoPseudo Computed Properties in Alpine
One feature that I love in Vue is computed properties. You access them in the same way as normal data properties, but you can dynamically generate the value. Let's take a look at how we can do this in Alpine.
Published 7 months ago | Updated 6 months agoGet an Array of Unique Values in JavaScript
PHP has a function to pull the unique values out of an array, but why doesn't JavaScript?
Published 7 months ago | Updated 6 months agoPrevent Updating or Saving of Laravel Models
Recently I've needed to disable particular methods and mutations on my Laravel models.
Published 8 months ago | Updated 6 months agoWhat is Alpine.js?
A brief look at the new Vue-inspired JavaScript framework, with no virtual DOM.
Published 8 months ago | Updated 6 months ago