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Getting and keeping your career on track takes careful planning. Approaching your career proactively and being able to recognize opportunities to move ahead are key to smart career management. This course guides you through the process of taking stock of your present situation and determining the best way ahead. It starts with taking inventory of your values, interests, skills, and needs. Then based on these findings, you can determine your strengths. This course provides examples of roles in which you could use those strengths. It also provides tips on how to deal with any weaknesses that are holding you back.
This is course number: pd_10_a01_bs_enus
Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.
For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.
To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.
The Government Linked Data Working Group has published today three Proposed Recommendations.
Learn more about the Data Activity.
]]>Sending emails is crucial for any web application. Usually, an email is sent to notify the user of some kind of activity that has taken place on the site, for example, such as when updates have been made or when new friends have been found. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to send emails with Gmail quickly from within a Laravel sample application by extending the functionality that we built in my last tutorial, Authentication With Laravel 4.
So, we’ll take that authentication application (you can download the previous tutorial’s source code on Github to give you a starting point) that we ended with last time and add in a new feature so that whenever a user registers for the site, we’ll send them a confirmation email, welcoming them to the app!
Before we can send emails with Laravel 4 we need to configure the app/config/mail.php file. In this file we can set the following options:
| Option | Description |
driver |
The mailing driver you’d like to use. By default, this is set to SMTP, but you can also change it to use PHPs mail feature or Sendmail instead. |
host |
This is your SMTP server’s host address. |
port |
Your SMTPs port. |
from |
This allows you to set the from field in your email, so that all emails are sent from the same address. |
encryption |
This is the encryption protocol that will be used whenever emails are sent. |
username |
This is your SMTP username. |
password |
This is your SMTP password. |
sendmail |
This is the path to where Sendmail can be found on the server, when using the sendmail driver. |
pretend |
When set to true, emails will be logged to a log file, rather than actually sending a real email message. |
For this tutorial I’m going to be using Gmail to send my email messages as it’s super simple to use. All you need in order to send mail with Gmail is to have an active Gmail account, with a username and password. I’ll provide you with everything else. Let’s edit our app/config/mail.php file to look something like this (I removed the comments to make the code more compact):
return array(
'driver' => 'smtp',
'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
'port' => 587,
'from' => array('address' => 'authapp@awesomeauthapp. com', 'name' => 'Awesome Laravel 4 Auth App'),
'encryption' => 'tls',
'username' => 'your_gmail_username',
'password' => 'your_gmail_password',
'sendmail' => '/usr/sbin/sendmail -bs',
'pretend' => false,
);
Here I’ve left the driver set to smtp. I set the host to use smtp.gmail.com which is Gmail’s SMTP server. I set the port to 587, the from to a fake email address which sounds fitting for our application. I left the encryption set to tls and finally you’ll then want to enter in your own Gmail username and password for your account and leave pretend set to false.
For this application, whenever a user successfully registers, we want to send them an email welcoming them to the site. Sending emails with Laravel is done by using the Mail::send() method. Here’s a small snippet of code, for example purposes:
Mail::send('folder.view', $data, function($message) {
$message->to('registered-user@gmail. com', 'Jon Doe')->subject('Welcome to the Laravel 4 Auth App!');
});
The first argument is the view file we’d like to use in order to format our email message. The second argument is any data that we’d like to pass to that view file. The third argument is a closure which accepts a $message object that we can use to tell the mailer who we’re sending the email to and what the subject of this email will be. In this closure, you can also specify other options such as attachments, etc. This will then send out the email to the user.
Pretty easy right?
Let’s now modify our UsersController‘s postCreate() action and take what we’ve learned about sending emails to send a welcome email message to our users, whenever they register for the app.
Within our postCreate() action’s if statement, where we check if the validation has passed, right after where we save the user into the database, let’s add in the following code:
if ($validator->passes()) {
$user = new User;
$user->firstname = Input::get('firstname');
$user->lastname = Input::get('lastname');
$user->email = Input::get('email');
$user->password = Hash::make(Input::get('password'));
$user->save();
Mail::send('users.mails.welcome', array('firstname'=>Input::get('firstname')), function($message){
$message->to(Input::get('email'), Input::get('firstname').' '.Input::get('lastname'))->subject('Welcome to the Laravel 4 Auth App!');
});
return Redirect::to('users/login')->with('message', 'Thanks for registering!');
} else {
return Redirect::to('users/register')->with('message', 'The following errors occurred')->withErrors($validator)->withInput();
}
Here we’ve called the Mail::send() method and told it to use a users.mails.welcome view file. We then pass in an array as the data that should be available within the view file, in this case we just sent in the users first name, using the Input::get('firstname') method. Next, we create our closure and set this to send the email to the user’s email address. We also set the name using the user’s first and last name from the form. Lastly, we just give this a pretty generic subject(you can use whatever subject you’d like), so the user knows what all the fuss is about.
Now we need to create our welcome email view file. Under app/views/users create a new folder named mails and inside of it create a new file named welcome.blade.php and add in the following code:
<h1>Hi, {{ $firstname }}!</h1>
<p>We'd like to personally welcome you to the Laravel 4 Authentication Application. Thank you for registering!</p>
In this view file we just have some basic HTML, using the $firstname variable that we passed as data from our controller to the view, welcoming the user to the application. There’s not much to it, you can use your view files for emails just like you do for any other view.
Make sure to start up your webserver using php artisan serve and we can visit localhost:8000/users/register, then create a new user:
… and then check that user’s email account to verify that the email was sent successfully:
Perfect! Our email was sent.
And that’s all there is to sending email messages with Laravel 4 and Gmail. You can of course customize your email messages as much as you’d like to make the mail more appealing.
Now this is the most basic way to send mail with Laravel and it can slow your app down, as it sends the email, but you do have other options. You’ll continue to use Laravel’s mail class but instead of sending it immediately, you can queue up your emails to have them sent out in the background, without making your users wait. But this topic is best saved for a separate article.
For more information on sending email with Laravel check out the online documentation. Thanks for reading.
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Today the RDF Working Group published three First Public Working Drafts; they are all expected to become W3C Notes:
Learn more about W3C’s new Data Activity, launched to help people share data as far as possible using their existing tools and working practices but in a way that enables others to derive and add value, and to utilize it in ways that suit them.
]]>The Web Applications Working Group published three documents today:
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Stunning new revelations about wide-ranging surveillance by the NSA. The government is amassing a staggering amount of information from cell phones, and that’s drawing sharp criticism from privacy advocates.
They’ve also been boon to several Maryland businesses.
Mike Hellgren breaks down the concerns.
If your cell phone is on, chances are it’s emitting a wealth of information about your location — information the government is now collecting with wide-ranging consequences.
Your phone sends a wealth of location data, mapping where you are, when you’re there and for how long.
New documents leaked from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal the government is storing staggering amounts of that personal information — much of it on ordinary citizens — in a quest to protect against terrorist attacks.
All the concern over security has turned into big business for companies like Maryland-based Koolspan, which makes chips and apps that secure calls, taxes and other data.
“We’ll grow probably 1,000 percent this year, with Snowden being just one key component ,” said Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith. “Most of the countries where you have the ability to travel to today have some type of listening capabilities or eavesdropping capabilities.”
The CEO says while privacy is a valid concern, your phone’s GPS system plays an important safety role.
“If you happen to hit 911 and you have an emergency, you want the first responders to find you,” he said.
With the U.S. accused of spying on foreign leaders — even cardinals at the Vatican — the data tracking has drawn scrutiny from Congress.
Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski is one of several lawmakers pushing for better disclosure from the government.
They want to amend a defense spending bill to require the NSA to say whether it “has ever collected the cell-site location information of a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.”
It’s part of a continuing debate over whether U.S. intelligence has gone too far.
“The NSA’s mission is to collect and analyze foreign intelligence in order to protect our country and its national security. NSA does not have any program to collect bulk locational metadata from mobile devices inside the United States. If the NSA incidentally collects metadata on a U.S. person, there are privacy protections and minimization procedures in place,” said Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger in a statement. “It is also important we remember that the Intelligence Community has been working hard, and within the bounds of the law, to keep the country and our allies safe. We must continue to support its lawful means of doing so. The threat is very real and reinforces the need for robust foreign collection.”
The Washington Post reports the NSA has vast access to carriers’ networks, pulling in location data from around the world.
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