Updates on personal IT projects


posted | about 3 minutes to read

tags: projects web development

Over the last few blog posts, I’ve talked a lot about what I’ve learned about PHP. I know I’ve probably been getting a bit preachy on the topic, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what more I’ve learned before I move on to other cool stuff.

I’ve been working on the gallery application, and finally got it in a working enough state (and added enough functionality) that I feel comfortable making my Bitbucket repository public. Since the last time I posted about this, I’ve added a viewer for easily browsing the folder (which ended up working really well) and a page that downloads every image in a folder as an archive (which was a really fun project). I won’t get too much into the coding aspects of this one in the blog, but I’d certainly appreciate any feedback over on my repository. Also, feel free to download the code and try it out yourself! I’m really happy with the way it’s been working so far.

Before I move on from PHP, I wanted to talk about some cool stuff that I’ve been learning about hooking the CloudFlare API into some stuff here at work. Most recently, I wrote a script using this API to download backup zone files that can be restored in CloudFlare at a later date. (I was also working on a way to delete zones using the Host API, but migrating all the domains here to a partner account ended up being a silly thing to think about – that one got shelved, but I still have the code if anyone’s interested). I’ll include the code for backing up DNS zones at the end of the blog post, simply because I think people might find it useful at some point. Let me know if you use this script or if you improve it (The best thing I can think of offhand is asking for user input rather than reading from a text file)!

Alright, now I can talk about some other fun stuff. I’ve continued working on my Raspberry Pi, and have really been enjoying my time with that device. I’ve tried a couple of different operating systems (and even gotten it working as a thin client at one point), but eventually I settled on using it as a media center runningRaspbmc as well as including support for streaming from myPlex server hosted on my desktop computer. So far, I’ve been really impressed with the board and am looking forward to trying new things with it as well! I’ll be sure to post pictures once I’ve got it up and running full time, but that won’t be until I get a television to hook it up to.