Blog layout

In my previous post I added a PS to create a theme.

The reason for this was i didn't have much control over it I thought.
I was wrong.

What I wanted

• code highlighting
• scrollbar if the code width is bigger than the content area

As this is a blog about code the examples should stand out.
I could use gists for every code example but for the examples in my previous article it seems like overkill.

What i did

Being lazy i changed my theme to a dynamic blogger theme. That kept my code in the content area, but it's an ugly theme.
And i didn't have syntax highlighting. So I changed back to my old theme.

Having a scrollbar isn't that hard in css. I just needed to know the content area width.

pre { overflow-x: auto; width: 700px; }

The side effect is that the gists all have a scrollbar or two, but scrollbars are fun.

Syntax highlighting isn't a big problem either because a lot of programmers blog, and they also want that.

When you search for syntax highlighting on blogger the first results are about SyntaxHighlighter.
My gripe with it is that it uses colons in classnames. I know from experience it causes troubles.

So I used shjs.
The installation requires you to add at least 3 files, two javascript files and a css file.

On the bog dashboard there is a template link and when you go there you find a button 'edit html'.
After a warning you see blogger xml code. I added following just before the ean head tag.

<link href='http://shjs.sourceforge.net/sh_style.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<script src='http://shjs.sourceforge.net/sh_main.min.js'/>
<script src='http://shjs.sourceforge.net/lang/sh_php.min.js'/>

You may notice script is a self closing tag, this doesn't work in html.

the body tag needed the onload attribute to call the sh_highlightDocument function.
There are better ways to do this but I'm not using any other javascript that needs to be run on page load.

And now I have what i needed with the theme I like.

idiomatic php

It has been over a year since i blogged. It seems work is always taking over my free time. But I will never let my blog die.

Today i read an article about idiomatic python and I thought lets reproduce the code in php as an exercise. Working with .NET languages makes me rusty.
I will stay away from the style examples to avoid discussions that go nowhere.

I'm going to take the subtitles of the article and add the php code, enjoy!

Avoid using a temporary variable when swapping two variables

$a = 'a'; $b = 'b';
list($foo,$bar) = array($bar,$foo);

Use tuples to unpack data

There are no tuples in php, an array will do.

$list_from_comma_seperated_value_file = array('dog','Fido',10);
list($animal, $name, $age) = $list_from_comma_seperated_value_file;

Use ''.join when creating a single string for list elements

Join in php is an alias for implode. In php 5.4 square brackets can be used to create an array.

$result_list = ['True','False','File not found'];
$result_string = join('',$result_list);

Use the 'default' parameter of dict.get() to provide default values

The closest thing in php is the ternary operator.

$log_severity = isset($configuration['severity']) 
                    ? $configuration['severity'] : $loginfo;

Use Context Managers to ensure resources are properly cleaned up

It would be nice to have this in php.

Avoid repeating variable name in compound if Statement

if(array_search($name,['Tom', 'Dick', 'Harry']) !== false) {
    $generic_name = true;
}

Use list comprehensions to create lists that are subsets of existing data

The closest thing in php is to use an anonymous function and array_map.

$some_other_list = range(1,100);
$my_weird_list_of_numbers = array_map(
                              function($element){ 
                                if(is_prime($element){ return $element + 5; }                             
                              }
                            ,$some_other_list);

Use the 'in' keyword to iterate over an Iterable

The foreach loop in php uses the keyword as

$my_list = [ 'Larry' , 'Moe' , 'Curly' ];
foreach($my_list as $element){
    echo $element;
}

Use the enumerate function in loops instead of creating an 'index' variable

No need to use a function in a foreach loop to do this. It feels good to write that.

foreach($my_list as $index=>$element){
    echo $element;
}

PS note to self: create own blogger theme and never use blogger compose again.