News — Preferencessoft: Updates & Software News

1. On 16/10/2025: Last updates to the site

I made breadcrumb management global, which makes it easier to add breadcrumbs to articles. I fixed a few dead links and enabled sharing on social networks (X and VK).

Social networks no longer significantly increase website traffic as they used to, possibly because of the advertising systems implemented on these platforms. I still need to update the content of some pages and refresh the software that will be available for download from the website.

2. On 07/10/2025: Improved presentation of the website

Over the past few days, I redesigned the blog. Its visual style is built using the Bulma CSS framework. The Tags page, which groups articles by tags and categories, has also changed its appearance.

I still need to implement automatic post management on the index page.

3. On 03/10/2025: Simplified automatic generation of website pages

Previously, the site pages were written in HTML and then converted from custom templates into PHP pages. To make the site easier to maintain, I integrated the Twig template engine, which lets me generate HTML or PHP pages from templates and a controller.

With Twig, it’s enough to create a basic template and additional templates that assemble parts of the page. For example: one template renders the header, another renders the footer, and so on.

These building blocks are then composed by including them inside each other.

The main challenge is to inject, via the controller, the data needed to render each page—such as the title, HTML content, labels and categories, author information, etc. Everything depends on what we decide to treat as variable from page to page. At a minimum, I need to inject the HTML content; otherwise, I would end up creating a dedicated Twig template for every page.

My data is stored in PHP arrays, including the HTML content. Of course, I don’t write the HTML directly inside a PHP array. Instead, I load an HTML file and automatically insert it into the PHP data structure.

4. On 27/09/2025: Launch of the new preferencesoft website

I haven’t finished converting the website yet, and some software is still pending. A few controls—including internal links—haven’t been updated, and there are still remnants from the old CSS framework in the tags.

That said, I was eager to update the look of the old site and do some cleanup.

5. On 15/09/2025: Work in progress—upgrading the site to Yii3

The Preferencesoft website is built on the Yii2 framework. However, Yii2 is nearing end of maintenance, and Yii3 is now the recommended version.

This upgrade is not fully automated because of differences in the design. Still, an AI helps generate conversion scripts, which allows me to handle the most tedious parts of the migration.

6. On 10/08/2025: End of the translation of Bracketext into C++

As a utility, I wanted it to run on as many operating systems as possible. So I rewrote everything in C++, because C# lacks portability.

In addition, the macro-command language is now Lua (instead of JavaScript). I originally wanted to keep JavaScript because it’s more widely known than Lua. But Lua is much easier to embed into an application, which made it the better choice.

I still have work to do: writing macro-commands to convert documents to HTML and to Bootstrap 5. I also need to complete the Bracketext documentation. The software is free of charge and available on GitHub.

7. On 07/08/2025: Improved presentation of preferencesoft.com

I removed a few pages from the site, including those that pointed to my Android software hosted in the Microsoft and Google stores. I temporarily put development for those platforms on hold, since they generate far more revenue for their owners than for the software authors.

The main reason for this stop, however, is that these platforms have become increasingly restrictive over the years—both for software development and for integration and updates.

On the other hand, I created pages for potential Linux and BSD versions. I will upgrade some of my software online and add more (PHP–JavaScript). PHP is the language already installed by default on my VPS server.

8. On 17/06/2025: Project—writing new blog articles

To improve a site’s ranking, SEO experts recommend publishing a number of articles related to the site’s theme. In practice, this approach mainly disadvantages commercial websites, because there isn’t much material to write about—especially when those articles, often posted in a blog, are meant to attract visitors.

That means content that is overly specialized, too technical, or simply not very interesting won’t significantly increase traffic.

In short: writing new articles is not my top priority, compared with the ongoing work of creating software (that can be commercialized) and books.