Panic! At The December 2020 Core Update

I’ve actually got a draft post which I started yesterday about Technical SEO to finish, but something caught my interest today - Google announced the roll out of their December 2020 Core Update. The December 2020 Core Update is now rolling out live. As is typical with these updates, it will typically take about one to two weeks to fully roll out. — Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 3, 2020 Like any Core Update, this is going to be a large change to their search and ranking algorithm, and the Panic! has already begun 😁 ...

December 5, 2023 · 1 min · 213 words · Sammy Fox

php-ast on PHP 8.2 (Windows)

php-ast by nikic exposes the abstract syntax tree generated by PHP 7 and 8 — nikic currently only provides pre-built Windows DLLs up to PHP v8.1, and building it yourself can be a minor hassle. So here’s a collection of pre-built DLLs for PHP 8.0 - 8.2 (ts/nts) https://github.com/theresnotime/php-ast-windows-build/releases/tag/1.0.4

December 5, 2023 · 1 min · 49 words · Sammy Fox

Upgrading Apache from PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4

Okay, I know we’re not upgrading Apache, but y’know what I mean - let’s upgrade a Debian web server using PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4! I’ll also cover some pointers on if that web server is running WordPress. 0) Assumptions I’m assuming: The server runs Debian 9 (Stretch) or Debian 10 (Buster) with Apache version 2.4.38* (though it should work for other versions) Apache is using the PHP module, not PHP-FPM You have sudo and SSH access You’ve made backups and any sites you’re hosting can tolerate downtime 😉 * You can get this info by running /usr/sbin/apache2 -v ...

December 5, 2023 · 5 min · 930 words · Sammy Fox

Using PHP 8 with Laragon

Laragon is local WAMP development server (and a much better one than XAMMP..) - I use it for most of my development work. Recently I’ve moved a couple of my ongoing projects over to PHP 8, and was caught out slightly by some unexpected behaviour. Laragon makes it pretty easy to add a new PHP/Apache version, but it makes a slight mistake when generating the mod_php config. You need to change ...

December 5, 2023 · 1 min · 88 words · Sammy Fox