jonathanbell

How to Connect PHP to LDAP

The other day I needed to connect PHP to my organization's LDAP/Active Directory server. I hadn't done this before and found it pretty difficult/annoying.

Hopefully, this will help someone else in the future or even just the future version of me if I have to do this again. I've heavily commented the code below for clairity. We are just outputing a form that asks for the LDAP credentials. If we do not have any relevant $_POST values submitted to our webpage/server we output the form. Otherwise, we will attempt to login to the LDAP server with the credentials provided and retrive some of the user's information.

Now that the user has passed authentication, you could check to see if the user is part of a certain group or has certain value(s) associated with their account.

jonathanbell

Obtaining a Perfect Score with Google PageSpeed Insights (in WordPress or other systems)

My personal blog (http://30.jonathanbell.ca) just got a little uglier and a little faster.

I recently set a lofty goal for my blog. I wanted the site to achieve a perfect score (100/100) with Google PageSpeed Insights. Google PageSpeed Insights is a (very picky) tool to help front-end people make their pages load quickly in the browser.

A lot of people will tell you that you don't need a perfect score from Google to have a fast and performant website. I would tend to agree – especially after executing these changes 😓. You don't need to have a 100/100 score in order to have a speedy, modern, and accessible website. Still, I was hungry to try for the 100/100 score! After I got going on this idea 100 seemed like the holy grail. I wanted it. I hungered for it. After a lot of fussing, I got it. Well, ok.. I scored 99/100 but you'll see why I lost one point

jonathanbell

Microsoft to End Support of IE 8,9,10 & 11 = Happy Birthday to Me!

Microsoft has announced that it will end support for Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, 10, and 11 on January 12th 2016! That’s just one more reason to celebrate my birthday!! (My birthday is pretty close to this date).

I feel like Microsoft has given me an early birthday gift, just by making this announcement. Long have I toiled with this inconsistent, piece-of-poop browser. No longer! I am officially dropping my support (in all future web projects) for IE 8, 9, 10 & (even) 11! It’s been way too long – and IE has always caused me so much grief. I'm done – I'm not accepting any new projects that want to support these ancient and unreliable browsers. There will still be IE Edge to contend with but, from what I hear, that browser is quite standards compliant and modern. We shall see! 😉

It's been a long road to travel with you, IE - but now I must bid you adieu. Happy

jonathanbell

New Theme: 30.jonathanbell.ca

My site has a new look and feel! I thought I should update its theme to a more modern one. I’m growing, along with my blog’s theme (awwww, how cute) 😂.

Generally, what I write on my blog is pretty personal and I write as if no one is reading. I like to do that because it keeps it personal and honest and I can be myself.

However, in my professional life I always write code as if another developer will be (at some point) reading it. Doing this, can take more time than just haphazardly writing functions and selectors that won't scale or make sense in the future. And, while I have no plans of releasing the new theme to the open source community at this time, I tried to write the theme so that it could be used on anyone else's site with minimal headache. One item that is currently hard-coded is the photo and the personal "greeting message" at the top of the homepage.

jonathanbell

Instarss

I was looking around for a way to get a user's public Instagram feed as an RSS feed without using the Instagram API when I came across this question on Stack Overflow.

Probably the best way to do this, would be to use the Instagram API. However, I had no desire to sign up for an Instagram account.

Initially, this answer on Stack Overflow suited my needs quite well. However, as fate would have it, Instagram changed its HTML output and the page's JSON data structure changed. Since the idea is quite simple (we're just screen scrapping here) I decided to write my own script. If this works well for you, consider upvoting my answer on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25559442/1171790

EDIT August 2017: I no longer support this scipt. The Instagram HTML output of any given user page changes often and it's been a fun game of cat and mouse but I no longer have a need for an I