Category Archives: Programming

Go Program for a Unique Twitter Profile Banner

Do you think your Twitter profile banner is boring? Do you wish there was something that could rotate your Twitter banner images? Maybe what you want is to brag about your Twitter account statistics on your profile banner to make a unique Twitter profile banner. This article showcases a Go program that does just that.

Landscape image showing clouds and grass generated by the program. Statistics: 217 Following, 68 Followers, 461 Tweets, In 0 lists, Located in London, UK, 2021-11-26 23:27 UTC, https://git.io/JMOjc
A Twitter Banner generated and uploaded by the program

Retrieve User Statistics from Twitter

We will authenticate with Twitter API using OAuth 2.0 to retrieve the statistics for the given Twitter profile. To achieve this, we need the Go oauth2 package.

You can find the code for user data in user_data.go.

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Expert Update Statements with Joins on MariaDB

You can use UPDATE statement in Structured Query Language (SQL) to modify values in the matching rows. However, only some people know that you can use JOINs in UPDATE queries. For example, by using JOINs we can retrieve additional data from other tables or exclude some rows from our update. Soon you will learn how to write update statements with joins on MariaDB / MySQL.

Update statement with multiple joins shown in a database manager
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PHP Dos and Don’ts aka Programmers I Don’t Like

I will find you meme - Taken (2008)

I am sure every PHP developer has a colleague they hate because he/she coded the application they started maintaining. This is mostly because the code is old. New standards become common, they learn what they used to do was inefficient, unreadable, or complicated. As PHP is a language that changed significantly over the years, code written a few years ago will certainly look outdated.

That being said, this post is not about the old PHP code. This post shows how to be a bad programmer even when following standards. Please don’t be this person.

  1. Too many nested if statements
  2. Extra brackets and braces
  3. Unnecessary casting
  4. Useless checks
  5. Slow PHP built-in functions
  6. Long functions
  7. Too many function arguments
  8. Long lines
  9. Long if-else blocks
  10. Wrong function / class name casing
  11. Lack of coding standards

Too many nested if statements

This is probably the one I hate the most. It also makes the lines too long because of the indentation caused by each of the nested if statements.

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ISO-3166 Country List for MySQL

Country tables are useful when you need a select box containing the countries in your application. It is a must have when you have multiple rows with country fields. ISO-3166 is the standard for 2-letter country codes so this post will show how to import ISO-3166 Country List for MySQL.

I showed every way possible to import the table. Hopefully everyone can benefit from this post.

phpMyAdmin screenshot of ISO-3166 Country List for MySQL
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Load Twitter Follow Button Asynchronously

The default Twitter Follow code, the script loads the like button synchronously. When you add the synchronous Twitter Follow button to your website, Page Speed Online will tell you to prefer asynchronous resources. When I tried to use it on a minimal HTML page score goes down by 8 points. If you are like me and want to get the best score possible in Page Speed you would want to know how to make it asynchronous.

Prefer asynchronous resources - Fetching resources asynchronously prevents those resources from blocking the page load. - Page Speed Insights
Prefer asynchronous resources message on Page Speed for Twitter Follow Button

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Load Facebook Like Button Asynchronously

As some of you developers might know when you get the default Facebook Like code, the script loads the like button synchronously. When you add the synchronous Facebook Like button to your website, Page Speed Online will tell you to prefer asynchronous resources. If you are like me and want to get the best score possible in Page Speed you would want to know how to make it asynchronous.

Prefer asynchronous resources - Fetching resources asynchronously prevents those resources from blocking the page load. - Page Speed Insights
Prefer asynchronous resources message on Page Speed for Facebook Like Button

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