The other day I was tasked with creating the weekly quiz for my family. I decided it would be good to do a section that would consist of 10 words that were spelled using symbols of the chemical elements. The questions would be presented as a list of element names, like this.

This breaks down to the element symbols in the following way.

Barium = Ba
Carbon = C
Potassium = K
Tungsten = W
Argon = Ar
Darmstadtium = Ds

Putting that all together we spell out a word.

Deployer is a PHP based deployment tool that I have been using very successfully for a number of months now. It comes with a number of different recipes to deploy a variety of PHP based applications, including Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Drupal.

I first found Deployer when looking for a deployment package that suited my needs. Phing had been my tool of choice for a number of years, but it had proved problematic trying to debug the XML syntax when things needed tweaking. As I was deploying PHP applications it made sense to me to use a PHP based system to do the deployment. I looked at tools like Capistrano, but as I wasn't that familiar with Ruby I was worried that I wouldn't be able to debug mistakes or customise the deployment process easily.

Having a chat feature on your website (commonly called 'live chat') is useful when helping your users overcome any difficulties they are having. You can pop up a little chat window in the page and ask if they need any help finding what they need. This can be especially useful on large commerce sites where users might get stuck looking for things.

The addition of a chatbot also allows you to automatically answer some of more common questions. For example, if a user asks where they can find the delivery and returns policy then a chatbot can automatically respond with a response. These rules can get more complicated, but it depends on what you instruct the bot to answer to.

The other day I was trying to print some output to the command line and then overwrite the output afterwards. It turns out that there are a couple of ways to do this so I thought I would detail a few of them here.

By far the simplest way of doing this is to run the "clear" command, which we can run via the system() function in PHP. This will clear the output of the command line ready for you to print out whatever you need. The downside to this is that the entire terminal window is cleared. Another downside is that once the output is complete scrolling up will reveal the output that was cleared out.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of the Mathematician John Horton Conway today so I decided to put together a post on his 'game of life' simulator.

This game of life, more commonly called Conway's game of life, was devised by John Conway in 1970 and is a way of modelling very simple cell population dynamics. The game takes place on a two dimensional board containing a grid of orthogonal cells. The game is technically a zero player game in that the initial setup of the game dictates the eventual evolution of the board.

The rules of the game (taken from wikipedia) are as follows.

Creating branches in git basically free and is easy to do. This has lead to the development of techniques like git flow and other branch related work streams, which are now commonplace in development.

If you have a project being worked on by many developers you can get into the situation where there are many branches in the project. Some will be merged, some will be worked on currently and some more will be branches that were worked on, but never finished (for one reason or another). This can lead to some confusion over what branches are being worked on, especially if you want an oversight on the current health of the project.

Drupal Views is a great way of exposing data to users via a search interface. This can be done directly via the database or via a Solr server. Plenty of Views plugins exist to allow reacting to the search input and output in a variety of different ways.

The other day I needed to add a personalised message to Views output to inform a user that their search keyword didn't find any results. There is a plugin for Views that allows this, but it only shows a basic search string.

What I needed was a way to print out the following block of HTML, containing the search term that the user searched for.

DrupalCamp London was held on the 14th and 15th March 2020 and I went down to City University London to partake in the event. I wasn't talking this year, so I was there purely to enjoy the conference.