It’s Tuesday which means that the Treehouse Show is back! In episode 70 of The Treehouse Show, Nick and Jason (@jseifer) talk about URL rewriting, responsive emails, QR code generation, and more.

This Week’s Links

• URL Rewriting for the Fearful ◆ 24 ways

• GitHub Résumé

• AutoJS by atmb4u

• Ink: A Responsive Email Framework from ZURB

• qrcode.js

• The HTML5 meter Element | CSS-Tricks

• Prism

• A Collection of Section Separators

The post URL Rewriting, Responsive Emails, QR Codes | The Treehouse Show Episode 70 appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Sunil Dasgupta, director of UMBC’s political science program at the Universities of Shady Grove, was recently interviewed for a Q&A on the status of Iran/Indian relations in the United States Institute of Peace “The Iran Primer.”

Of the course of the interview, Dasgupta provides insight into the complex relationship between Iran and India and how it has evolved over the last three decades.

“New Delhi has had relatively close ties to Tehran since the mid-1980s, but India has recalibrated relations over the last few years as Iran became the litmus test for its ties with Washington,” Dasgupta said.

He also describes how Tehran’s controversial nuclear program has affected ties between the two countries.

“New Delhi welcomed the nuclear deal struck by Iran and the world’s six major powers in November 2013, which it hopes will eventually lead to the lifting of sanctions. India’s one concern, however, is that Iran’s return to the global oil market will cut its interest in trading oil with New Delhi in Indian rupees — on terms favorable to India,” Dasgupta said.

You can read the full Q&A on the USIP website here.

The Indian Supreme Court last week upheld a ban on gay sex, a ban that was instituted more than 150 years ago and had been repealed in 2009. The law is known as Section 377 and makes homosexual acts in India punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Mathematics professor Manil Suri wrote for NPR Books about the subject and recommended reading Jeremy Seabrook’s Love in a Different Climate: Men Who Have Sex with Men in India, as a good way to understand the impact of the ruling.

“To understand the significance of a law like Section 377, one has to first have an understanding about the people it affects. Indian society is amazingly diverse in terms of class, language, caste, skin color, religion, among other factors, and its homosexual population is no different,” Suri writes.

You can read Suri’s full article on the NPR Books website here.

The mobile Web browsing of three million people reveals how pervasive ad tracking technology is and shows that Google’s is dominant.

Analysis of the mobile Web browsing habits of over three million people has revealed previously unseen patterns in how the major advertising companies carve up the Internet. Among the findings of a new study is that Google’s advertising tentacles extend to at least 80 percent of online publishers. It also found that if only a small fraction of Web surfers opted out of being shown shown ads based their previous online behavior, it would significantly decrease the industry’s profits.

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.

• Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. This document defines the schema and provides examples for its use. By using DCAT to describe datasets in data catalogs, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications easily to consume metadata from multiple catalogs. It further enables decentralized publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across sites. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file to facilitate digital preservation.
• The Organization Ontology, which describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organizations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, which provides a means, by using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard, to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts.

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!

Mail Configuration

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:

Sending Mail With Gmail

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.

Sending Mail

Example Code

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?

Sending Emails Upon Successful Registration

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.

Creating the Email View File

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.

Let’s Try It Out

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.

In Conclusion

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.