If you want to apply, you’ll have to be quick – the closing date is Wednesday 17th April. Full details, including a job specification, can be found on the Staffnet advertisement.

Until recently, I had been using Feed on Feeds, but I was growing unhappy with its performance and concerned about potential security bugs, as it hasn’t been updated since 2007. I was looking for a replacement which would fulfil the following criteria:

1. Self-hosted, as I don’t like third party websites keeping a track of what I’m reading the main reason for leaving Google Reader many years ago).
2. Can run either in a web browser or a screen session, so I can access my subscriptions on multiple machines.

Quite by chance, I came across a post entitled RSS with Newsbeuter, which recommended a piece of software claiming to be the Mutt of feed readers. I took it for a spin and was very pleased with the results, for the following reasons:

1. Newsbeuter runs on the console, so I can add it to the screen session on my virtual machine and access it from anywhere over SSH. This is better than a web-based reader, as I can detach the screen session at any time and it will pick up wherever I left off next time I connect.
2. It’s available as a Debian package, so installation was a simple matter of running apt-get install newsbeuter.
3. Subscriptions are stored in a plain text file, so you can add a new feed by concatenating the URL to the end of the file, and easily store it in version control.
4. Newsbeuter is a client application, so it’s not accessible to the outside world and therefore is unlikely to be exploited – unlike a self-hosted PHP application.

Of course, a console-based reader isn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes. However, if you use Mutt or slrn then you’ll feel right at home.

The podcast is also well worth subscribing to if you have interests beyond PHP. There’s a Google Speadsheet showing upcoming episodes, and previous episodes can be downloaded from Twit.

There is no indication of what the vulnerability relates to, and the PostgreSQL team have taken the slightly unusual step of keeping the commits which fix the vulnerability private until the release is available.

You may also want to keep a close eye on your database logs for the next few days – not that you shouldn’t be doing this all the time – just in case someone manages to discover the vulnerability and publish an exploit before the security release is ready.

Contract length: 2-3 months to begin with.

Location: Manchester City Centre (next to Urbis)

Daily rate: £100-250/day.

Project: Working on a bespoke PHP website built alongside 2 developers, an SEO executive and a project manager.

Experience: Would need to have worked with fairly advanced object oriented frameworks before, experience with creating simple solutions to complex problems. Would need to have a decent eye for aesthetics if possible.

More large projects are coming in, so there is a possibility of the contract being extended.

If you’re interested, please email Tom Lambert (tom@candidsky.com) for further details. Direct contacts only – no agencies.

1. Whilst most computers will have a PDF reader of some sort, it’s not guaranteed, especially if someone is viewing on a device other than a typical desktop (e.g. a mobile phone).
2. PDF files don’t open consistently across platforms – some browsers will try and open the file inline, others will save the file to disc or start a copy of a PDF reader.
3. Although the PDF file was small, it was still considerably larger than the equivalent HTML file.
4. Recruitment consultants often want to see CVs in Word format, so they can edit them (e.g. removing your contact details or placing the content in their own house style).

As a result, I wanted to also offer HTML (cross-platform) and Word (for recruiters) versions. In order to maintain consistency between the different formats, I needed a piece of software which would take a single input format and produce multiple output formats. At first I tried to use the Plain Old Documentation (POD) markup language, which is used for Perl documentation, but the PDF output didn’t look as professional as the one created from my LaTeX source file. Someone on IRC mentioned Pandoc, which was developed explicitly for converting files between different formats. I spent some time trying to create a satisfactory template – including the use of some mind-boggling Perl regular expressions – before I came across an existing template on GitHub which, with a few tweaks, produced what I was looking for. I can now edit a single source file, run the make command and output my CV in PDF, HTML and Word formats.

The basic steps for creating a file are:

1. Include the relevant Writer class (depending on the file version you want – Excel 2003, 2007 etc.)
2. Create a spreadsheet object.
3. Select the first worksheet (you can add more if required, but one always exists to begin with).
4. Set the values of cells in the worksheet.
5. Create a writer object containing the spreadsheet object.
6. Save the writer object to disc.

A simple Hello World example follows:

<?php

require_once 'PHPExcel.php';
require_once 'PHPExcel/Writer/Excel2007.php';

$spreadsheet = new PHPExcel();
$spreadsheet->setActiveSheetIndex(0);
$worksheet = $spreadsheet->getActiveSheet();
$worksheet->SetCellValueByColumnAndRow(0, 1, 'Hello World');

$writer = new PHPExcel_Writer_Excel2007($spreadsheet);
$writer->save('hello-world.xlsx');

?>

As you can hopefully see from the example, writing basic data is a simple task, and the ability to set cell values by numeric column/row indexes makes iteration easy. The only thing to be aware of is that column numbering starts at 0, but rows start at 1. For example, a cell reference of A1 (top-left cell) is 0,1, not 0,0 or 1,1.

Please let me know if you find the tutorial useful. Patches are also welcome – doubly so if made as pull requests as that makes the review/merge process much easier for me.

Full details: Web Developer job advert