News

On 07/10/2025, improvement of the presentation of the website

Over the past few days, I've been busy redesigning the blog. Its visual aspect is rendered by the framework of Bulma style sheets. The Tags page grouping articles by tags or categories has also changed its appearance. I still have to set up an automatic management of posts in the index page.

On 03/10/2025, simplification of the automatic generation of website pages

Previously, the pages of the site were written in HTML and converted from custom templates to pages in PHP. To facilitate the maintenance of the site, I have integrated the Twig template engine which allows to generate HTML or PHP pages from templates and a controller.

With Twig, it is enough to write a basic template and other templates whose function is to compose a part of the page. For example, one template will form the header, another the footer, ... These models are then assembled by integrating into each other.

The difficulty is to inject with the controller the data required to form the page, such as the title, the HTML content, the labels and categories, information about the author etc.
It all depends on what we have decided to consider as variable from one page to another. At a minimum, we need to inject the HTML content if we don't want to have to write a Twig template per page of the site!
My data is all placed in PHP tables and including the HTML content. Of course I don't compose this HTML content directly in a PHP table but in a file in HTML format which is automatically inserted into a table with a program in PHP.

The 27/09/2025, Launch of the new Preferencesoft website.

I have not completely completed the conversion of the website and some software. Some controls, including internal links, have not yet been carried out and there are still some residuals from the old CSS framework in the tags. But I was looking forward to changing the appearance of the old site and doing some cleaning.

The 15/09/2025, update in progress of the site to Yii3

The Preferencesoft site is designed from the Yii2 framework software. But the latter comes at the end of maintenance and Yii3 becomes the recommended version. This time the update is not automatic because of a different design. But an AI helps to generate conversion scripts and allows me to overcome these arduous tasks.

The 10/08/2025, end of the translation of Bracketext into C++

As a utility, I wanted it to be available on the largest number of operating systems. and I rewritten everything in C++, the C# language being a programming language that lacks portability.

Alternatively, the programming language of macro-commands is now Lua (instead of JavaScript). On the other hand I wanted to keep the JavaScript that is much more known than Lua, but the Lua language is a lot easier to integrate into an application.

I still have a work of writing macro-commands for converting documents to HTML and bootstrap 5. I also need to complete the Bracketext documentation. The software is free of charge on Github.

On 07/08/2025, improved presentation of the site preferencesoft.com

I deleted a few pages from the site, including those pointing to my software contained in Microsoft and Google stores for Android.

I temporarily set aside software development for these platforms which bring much more money to their owner than to software authors. But the main reason for this stop is that these platforms have become years in years increasingly binding, both for software development, for software integration and updating.

On the other hand, I have created pages for possible software for Linux and BSD systems.

I will upgrade some of my software online and add others (PHP-JavaScript). The PHP language is the one that is installed by default on my VPS server.

The 17/06/2025, project of writing new articles in the blog

To improve the ranking of a site, it is recommended by SEO experts to write a number of articles relevant to the theme of the site. It is clear that this principle mainly disadvantages commercial sites, since there is not much material to write articles. Especially since these articles, often placed in a blog, are supposed to attract visitors. So very specialized, too technical, uninteresting items will not significantly increase site traffic.

In short, writing new articles is not a priority over my work of creating software (commercializable) or books.