I've nearly finished the native multi-lingual branch of Tuskfish. It turned out to be much more complex than I thought, touching nearly every operation. Extensive review and testing will be necessary, as it is quite a large divergence. I found myself wondering if I really want to rebase future Tuskfish development on the multilang branch or not, and the answer seems to be that I need to think about it. Maybe I'll keep it as a parallel project that I wheel out when needed, for a while. We'll see.

I will add a couple more block options for V2.1 to enable placement of a feature video block, and maybe a feature audio block as well.

I will also add a few attractive open-source themes. I always thought that everyone would want to use their own custom theme, but turns out no, most people just want something they can use out of the box. The default bootstrap starter theme is a bit grim (black and white), so I'll add a couple of nice themes you can tweak without having to replace them. Shout out to Bootswatch and Start Bootstrap for offering open source themes, thank you!

If you don't have Crohn's disease you can skip this article, it's not relevant to you. 

TLDR: Ketogenic diets turn out to have real and substantial anti-inflammatory properties. If you have an inflammatory condition you might consider trying it.

If you have a Microsoft 365 Family subscription, you probably got an email notifiying you of a 30% price increase. This is bullshit and you don't have to pay it. The truth is, you are being silently upgraded to a higher subscription tier with the same name. The new tier includes Copilot AI integration, and that's what you are being charged for on the sly. To avoid the price increase, you can opt out of Copilot integration. Instructions inside.

I thought I had the flu. But on day 5 I opened a fresh bag of coffee beans and stuck my nose in which is normally an "invigorating" experience. I couldn't smell anything. It was as if the bag was empty. After a few moments wondering what the hell was wrong with my coffee, I did a RAT test and found a very, very faint positive.

I started wondering if it knocks out your smell completely, or if it's somehow selective, and could this be used as some kind of proxy diagnostic tool? Anyway, after going through the kitchen draw, this is what I can and can't smell...

I was tempted to call this the "2025 update" but since I usually take leave in December and spend most of it tinkering, quite likely I'll do some of this before new year or at least by the end of January. The next Tuskfish CMS release will be version 2.1. Core functionality will remain unchanged, but I will add support for blocks, and if I can sort out a couple of issues, native multilanguage. Not a crappy hacked up multilanguage, but one that is baked into the core and seamless. I'll be making use of some of the more recent language features in PHP, which will raise the minimum version required to PHP 8.3. Please note that the contemporary versions of PHP are now V8.3 and V8.4, with V8.2 now end of life.

Optional support for ImageMagick V6 is now available. This gives much better quality thumbnails than PHP's native GD2 library, but at the cost of some manual configuration. You need to:

• Have ImageMagic installed on your webserver (most hosting companies provide this).
• Access to PHP's exec() function must be enabled (it is often disabled by default through the disable_functions setting in php.ini).
• Swap in an alternative ResizeImage.php trait file (provided).
• Configure the file path to an sRGB.icc colour profile on your server (you can download one if necessary).
• Clear the image cache (html/cache), which will cause thumbnails to be rebuilt.

You can adjust the level of compression and sharpening in the trait file method createThumbnailWithExec().

Update 2: I got annoyed and added optional support for ImageMagick V6, some manual configuration is required.

Update: The PECL extension for ImageMagick is broken for PHP 8.3. It has been busted for over a year and nobody seems to give a damn, so this work is shelved until it gets fixed.

I've never been happy with thumbnails generated by PHP's native GD2 library, so I'm adding optional support for ImageMagick in the next release. If ImageMagick is installed, Tuskfish will use it by default, and if not, it will fall back to GD2. ImageMagick is widely available on most, if not all, commercial web hosts.

ImageMagick offers two benefits over GD2:

• It generates much better quality thumbnails than PHP's native GD2 library. The thumbnails generated by GD2 are a bit fuzzy, and larger images can actually look pretty bad.
• ImageMagick is aware of colour profiles and will preserve colour space information. GD2 is not only unaware of colour profiles, but actually discards them, which causes colour shifts in images that can render them drab and washed out.

To keep things simple, I will only be supporting the sRGB colour profile, which is the default for the web. You should already be converting your master images in sRGB before using them on websites anyway, because browsers generally will not be able to render other profiles correctly.

My Ryzen 5950x became unstable and started throwing random reboots. No errors are reported, and Windows logs just shows a kernel power loss event. The distinguishing feature is that the reboots usually happen when the CPU is lightly loaded or idle, or a few seconds after leaving a heavy workload. The machine passes stress tests without an issue. The consensus seems to be that the CPU is undervolting a bit too far under light/idle workloads. So people are experimenting with many different BIOS settings to try and fix it.

TLDR: After trying every BIOS adjustment under the sun, installing a different OS, and rotating every component bar the motherboard with old spare parts, I was left with only one option: It had to be the motherboard. So I bought a new one, and yes, everything just works great now.

I was going to write a guide to security-related HTTP headers, but it turns out that someone has already done it. So here you go, it's worth a read. I have locked down the out-of-the box Tuskfish headers a bit tighter. The content security policy header can break a lot of stuff (read 'any inline script or style sheet') and requires manual tweaking, depending on what you're doing.

Tuskfish 2.0.7 is a minor update to fix small bugs and add htmx support. Back end toggling of content on/offline now uses a htmx call to avoid reloading the whole page. This makes management easier when you have a large amount of content. The htmx library is now available in /vendor, but it is only used in the back end administrative theme.

Tuskfish 2.0.6 introduces automatic content expiry and sitemap update functionality, via a daily cron job script, updates third party libraries (jQuery 3.7.0, FontAwesome 6.4.0 and TinyMCE 6.4.2). A few bugs were fixed including custom RSS feed error if ID was empty, and indexing of soft 404 and enclosure links has been allowed.

In a blog post annoying titled Heroku's Next Chapter, Heroku's General Manager has announced they will discontinue their free plans. On 28 November they will reduce free resources to zero and start deleting hobby-dev databases. Yep, they are going to bin your data with no warning other than an email, to "manage fraud and abuse". The good news is that you don't need them. Get your virtual machines from a cloud provider and containerise your apps with Docker instead. You'll never look back.

No longer recommended. Trying to find truly free stock photos has always been painful. Usually, the available 'free' resources come with unwieldly terms such as the requirement to publicly attribute the source or acknowledge the author. Now I fully support the Creative Commons licenses for literary works, but you just can't plaster attributions across the artwork for a brochure, website banner or logo. It's not an appropriate model. Recently I stumbled upon unsplash.com, a stock photo site that is actually free, has a remarkably permissive license, and is also excellent.

A user management system is available as of Tuskfish v2.0.4, which allows trusted users to be enrolled as Editors who can create and edit content. The user management system is only accessible to the site Administrator, who is the gatekeeper for whom is allowed editorial privileges. Editors do not have access to the site preferences, but it is still a very sensitive role.

A demonstration of Tuskfish's mapping capabilities. This track was recorded on my Garmin Forerunner 245 watch, as I drove back from Batemans Bay on the south coast to Canberra. The map is automatically generated from an exported .kml file of the track, which Google Maps can put bounds around. The tracks are downloadable so others can use them on their own devices if they wish. You can also prepare maps in Google Earth or Google Maps itself.

Tuskfish 2.0.3 brings compatibility with PHP 8.1, so if you want to wring the last few milliseconds of performance out of your site, use this version. New features include support for embedding Youtube videos, a sitemap generation facility, a 'minimum views' preference before displaying the views counter, and a live character counter for the meta description field. Third party libraries have also been updated, including adoption of Bootstrap 5.1.

Tuskfish 2 is a rewrite of Tuskfish CMS to adopt a strict model-view-viewmodel (+ controller) architecture. You can think of it as traditional MVC except the view is split into a view and a viewModel to abstract the model/view relationship, which improves flexibility and reuse of components. A front end controller and static router has been added to allow custom URL schemes. With the adoption of namespaces, Tuskfish 2 is now a very modern (if small) PHP application.

Just a short note to say Tuskfish 2 is in the works. It's going to be a partial re-write of the back end, but there will be minimal changes on the front end or from a user experience point of view. The database schema will also remain unchanged to allow seamless upgrade. Tuskfish 2 will be designed as a strict MVC architecture to improved separation of concerns, rather than the loose MVC it currently has. Components will be assembled through composition and inheritance will be fully dispensed with.

I'm very happy about Github's decision to grant unlimited free private repositories. It's not that I objected to Github charging people for the services they provide, but to qualify for free access you had to make all of your repositories open source and public. The problem with that was that the world is actually better off with some repositories remaining private. Do you really want access to the scratch pad repository I'm using to learn a new language? I think not.

Sick of low quality clickbait articles about "the best" and " most popular" programming languages? Everyone seems to play this game, even otherwise reputable sites. I suppose they do it because "what language should I learn" is a question that every aspiring programmer has to ask. There's a lot of traffic in it.

Nearly all of these articles are bad, because they are based on irrelevant metrics such as trends in keyword searches, recent Github activity, average salaries or similar. For example, if a lot of people search for "Javascript" clickbait articles often extrapolate this into "popular" and/or "the best", and slap it into a "top 10" list of languages you should learn!