Richard Blechinger (pretzelhands)

2021

How we made $2,500 by playing Animal Crossing
17th June 2021 The story of how my wife and I went from an idea to profitable side business in two months

Selling one-time purchase products with Paddle
12th February 2021 | Series: Integrating Paddle Learn how to setup Paddle and use it to let users to buy a one-time payment product (e.g. a video course)

Build your own PSR-4 autoloader
26th January 2021 Learn how to build your own autoloader and de-mystify what Composer actually does behind the scenes

Establishing a base for the future
25th January 2021 Setting up a basic PHP project for future posts on this blog. So we're all talking about the same thing

Build a Telegram bot in PHP
19th January 2021 | Series: Chat bots with Telegram Learn how to set up your own Telegram bot, respond to commands and handle arguments. A quick tour of the Telegram Bot API!

Restarting the blog
12th January 2021 Returning to proper blogging after two years of it laying dormant. What could possibly go wrong?

2020

Au Revoir: The End of Notebag
27th October 2020 Giving insights and reasons as to why I put Notebag to rest and what is coming from here on out

Scratching my own itch: Building Notebag
2nd May 2020 The story of my annoyance with other note taking tools and finally pulling the trigger to scratch my own itch.

2019

Managing WordPress from your terminal
29th January 2019 A quick tour of WP CLI to make WordPress management fun!

Live streaming as productivity multiplier
20th January 2019 A short tale about how live streaming helps me get more done in less time

Breaking the rules to keep programming fun and experimental
15th January 2019 A dive into how I sometimes deliberately ignore coding standards just to enjoy myself.

Building responsive email with MJML
14th January 2019 | Series: Dealing with email A short introduction to the state of HTML email and how to build one easily

My approach to mentoring junior team members
12th January 2019 Thoughts and musings on mentoring others and always trying to do my best

How I got into freelancing
9th January 2019 The story how I got into freelancing and managed to get to the point I'm at today.

Releasing jinx - a magical wrapper around nginx
7th January 2019 Find out about this new streamlined tool to help you get your nginx workflows done more quickly.

Bringing your entire infrastructure down using Caddy
5th January 2019 Read my cautionary tale about accidentally crashing my entire server using Let's Encrypt and Caddy.

Parsing command-line arguments and flags
4th January 2019 | Series: Shell scripting Learn how to parse flags in your command-line script in a beautiful way.

Non-obvious behaviors of shell syntax
3rd January 2019 | Series: Shell scripting Learn about the pitfalls and tricks behind some of the unusual shell syntax.

Coloring text in your terminal
2nd January 2019 | Series: Shell scripting Learn how to color your output with native shell scripts to give better feedback to your users.