Uly.me

cloud engineer

Archives for January 2015

YouTube HTML5 Video Player

YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video player instead of Flash. The new player takes advantage of MediaSource extensions for its Adaptive Bitrate streaming allowing viewers to quickly and seamlessly switch resolutions. The new player also uses a new video codec called VP9 which gives you higher resolution with low bandwidth. YouTube will also start using WebRTC for recording videos and for live streaming capabilities. Read more.

Laravel 5

It looks like Laravel 5 will be released sometime next week. Laravel is a PHP framework which uses simple RESTful routing, Eloquent ORM and Blade templating. It’s built on top of Symfony and Composer. It comes with PHPUnit for testing, and of course, it has migrations built in the package. If you’re curious about what Laravel 5 can do and some of its features, there are several free videos available at Laracasts about Laravel 5.

laravel

Run Code At Specific Times

If you need to run some code at certain times of the week, a weekly sale for example, PHP gives you that flexibility. In the example below, we will display an image on our website every Wednesday afternoon between 1pm and 5pm to display a sale.

Let’s create a new function called wednesday_afternoon(). We can use this function to check the date and time. The function checks for the current time and compares it if it’s Wednesday afternoon. It returns a true if it is, and a false if it falls outside those times.

function wednesday_afternoon() {
  date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
  $start_time = strtotime('Wednesday 1pm');
  $stop_time = strtotime('Wednesday 5pm');
  $current_time = strtotime('now');
  // return true if between start and stop times
  if ( $current_time > $start_time && $current_time < $stop_time ) {
    return true;
  }
}

A simple if statement decides what image to display based if it’s Wednesday afternoon.

if (wednesday_afternoon()) {
  <div class="wednesday_sale">
    <img src="/path/to/our/image.png"/>
  </div>
} else {
  <div class="no_sale">
    <img src="/path/to/our/no/sale/image.png"/>
  </div>
}

I have posted a similar code GitHubGist.