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freek.dev turns five!

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

How time flies. My blog is again one year older. I've been running it now for five years. Like all the previous years, I'd like to give an overview of everything that's happened on this blog in the past year.

A lot of things have changed

This year a couple of significant changes happened. I've changed the domain of the blog from murze.be to freek.dev. I think for most people it easier to remember that URL, since it's my first bit. A cool bit of trivia: murze is the short version of my third name, which is Murzuplus. Yeah, my parents named by after a Byzantian emperor. Lucky, they chose it as my third name and not the first.

The second big change that happened in 2018 is the refreshed look. I'm very grateful for the work my colleague Sebastian put into this. He also refreshed the look of my newsletter template.

A smaller change that happened a couple of months ago is the removal of Disqus powered comments. Even though functionally Disqus does the job, I felt that, because comments couldn't be styled, the comments felt out of place. They have been replaced by webmentions. Here's how you can add them to your Laravel powered blog.

Around August, I played a bit with LiveWire by Caleb Porzio, a cool way of adding dynamic content without the need of having to write JavaScript yourself. Here's the commit that replaces the previous JS powered search with a Livewire component.

freek.dev by the numbers

The past 365 days, the blog served about 903 064, which is a nice 20% increase compared to last year. In the past 12 months, I published 292 posts of which I've written 45 myself. In total, there are now 1509 posts, and of 240 of those, I'm the author.

Here's the top 10 most visited posts:

  1. Introducing laravel-websockets, an easy to use WebSocket server implemented in PHP
  2. Searching models using a where like query in Laravel
  3. My current setup (2019 edition)
  4. Refactoring to actions
  5. The value of the void typehint in PHP
  6. Simplifying controllers
  7. Ignition: a new error page for Laravel
  8. Getting started with Domain Oriented Laravel
  9. Tools to automatically format PHP, JavaScript and CSS files
  10. Configuring PhpStorms code generation

Original content

Here are links to 45 posts I wrote in the past year.

In closing

I hope you've enjoyed freek.dev and that you'll continue reading it in the next 12 months.

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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