Blog Archives - The Friendly Developer

Using a custom AMI with Elastic Beanstalk

2018-03-032018-03-03 by John Cooper

Using Elastic Beanstalk is the easiest and fastest way to deploy an application on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It takes care of everything from spinning up EC2 instances, to setting up monitoring. All you need to do is pass it your application and a few details. By making things simple, there are a lot of … Read moreUsing a custom AMI with Elastic Beanstalk

Scrape the web with Goutte

2017-05-022014-02-20 by John Cooper

A month ago’s adventures including building a web scraper. Working to a tight schedule, I poked around the tubes and decided to give Goutte a whirl. Goutte is a simple wrapper around Guzzle and a bunch of Symfony components (such as BrowserKit and DomCrawler). In theory this makes grabbing a webpage as simple as:

use Goutte\Client;

$client = new Client();
$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'http://www.symfony.com/blog/');
$titles = $crawler->filter('h2.post > a')->each(function ($node) {
    return $node->text();
});

use Goutte\Client;

$client = new Client();

$crawler = $client->request('GET', 'http://www.symfony.com/blog/');

$titles = $crawler->filter('h2.post > a')->each(function ($node) {

return $node->text();

});

… Read moreScrape the web with Goutte

Disable the JIRA reindex button

2017-05-022013-11-07 by John Cooper

Atlassian’s issue tracker JIRA maintains file based indexes to make looking up issues faster. Certain changes (such as adding or changes custom fields) will make JIRA prompt administrators to rebuild these indexes. Unfortunately, this process makes JIRA inaccessible until it is complete (up to 20 minutes for a medium sized instance on version 5, less … Read moreDisable the JIRA reindex button

PHP Soap Server – Procedure not present

2017-04-302013-05-09 by John Cooper

While developing a PHP SOAP service, I ran across this error after doing some updates to a WSDL: Procedure ‘[name]’ not present This seems to suggest a problem with the class loaded into the SOAP server, but in fact it is typically more of a problem with the WSDL. There are a number of causes … Read morePHP Soap Server – Procedure not present

Comment Spam Sucks

2017-04-302013-03-26 by John Cooper

I have spent considerable time over the past week going through the backlog of unapproved comments on my blog (yes, which had one post until now). Somewhere upwards of 500 comments, every single one of them spam. Mostly drug related posts with the occasional fake designer shoes or handbags thrown in. Last time it was … Read moreComment Spam Sucks