Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Where you can (and can't) use Emoji in PHP

· 4 comments · 50 words · Viewed ~451 times


Group of emoji.

I was noodling around in PHP the other day and discovered that this works: <?php $🍞 = "bread"; echo "Some delicious " . $🍞; I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. An emoji is just a Unicode character (OK, not just a character - but we'll get on to that), so it should be fine to use anywhere. Emoji work perfectly well as function names: function 😺🐶() { echo "catdog!"; } 😺🐶(); De…

Use CSS to boost the font size of emoji with no extra markup

· 10 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~989 times


Group of emoji.

I want to make emoji bigger than the text that surrounds them. At my age and eyesight, it can be difficult to tell the difference between 😃, 😄, and 😊 when they are as small as the text. Is there a way to use CSS to increase the font size of specific characters without having to wrap them in an extra <span> or similar? Yes! Although it is a bit of a hack. This relies on 3 CSS features: src: lo…

Not Quite Emoji Domain Names

· 1 comment · 800 words · Viewed ~442 times


A bright red power symbol.

Like all good geeks, I have far too many domain names that I acquired for interesting projects which never took off. My latest is a bit different though. https://⏻.ga/🔗 That's "Unicode Power Symbol Dot Gabon". Because why not. Regular readers will know that I helped get ⏻ and several power symbols into Unicode. When I do talks about this, I usually refer to them as Emoji because, to most peo…

Emoji Tetris Pieces

· 100 words · Viewed ~2,065 times


Blocky Tetris pieces.

These tetrominoes are built from emoji and have roughly the same colour as the pieces from Tetris. They are not accessible to people with screen readers. But they're quite fun if you want to play Tetris via a text-only medium. ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️🟦 ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️🟦 ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️🟦 ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️🟦 ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ 🟩⬛️🟧⬛️⬛️🟥🟥⬛️⬛️⬛️ 🟩🟩🟧⬛️🟨🟨🟥🟥⬛️⬛️ 🟫🟩🟧🟧🟨🟨⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ 🟫🟫🟫🟧🟪🟫🟫🟥🟦⬛️ 🟦🟧🟧🟧🟪🟪🟥🟥🟦⬛️ 🟦…

Set your own emoji shortcuts in Ubuntu / Pop_OS

· 250 words · Viewed ~363 times


List of symbols.

How do you quickly insert a 💩 emoji when using your laptop? I just type ScrLck, p, o, o! What is this 🧙‍♀️ craft? In your keyboard settings, you should see an option like this: You can set the "Compose" key to be anything you like. Personally, I use the otherwise-useless Scroll Lock button. Now, once you press ScrLck you'll see this symbol . The next few letters you type will be "absorbed" …

Replacing broken avatar images with background SVG Emoji

· 1 comment · 350 words


Group of emoji.

When someone on Twitter mentions my blog, the WordPress WebMentions plugin automatically fetches those Tweets and turns them into comments on the blog post. It looks something like this: That is pretty cool - but has one slight problem. If someone changes their Twitter avatar, or deletes their account, the image disappears and I'm left with a broken image. Booo! So, how do we fix this?…

🔥.me.ss! You can't register emoji domains in South Sudan

· 4 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~321 times


Dear Terence, We have contacted the registry and they said they don't allow 2 successive dashes.

It's useful to share negative results. Not every experiment has an amazing or successful outcome. tl;dr you can't register Punycode .ss domains. This also means Internet users in South Sudan can't register domains using their own writing system. Background The Republic of South Sudan became independent and joined the United Nations back in 2011. A decade later, and it's now possible to…

Easy Emoji in Ubuntu / Pop OS

· 1 comment · 150 words · Viewed ~1,738 times


Searching for cat emoji brings up lots of cats.

All the Cool Kids™ use emoji. On Android, they're usually built right in to the keyboard. But that's not the case on desktops and laptops. Well, unless you build a dedicated emoji keyboard. So I was delighted to find this brilliant little Gnome Extension called Emoji Selector. It sits in your dash, until you click it or press 💠+e. Then you get this pop up. The search bar focuses as soon as …

Emoji Passwords and BitWarden

· 4 comments · 150 words · Viewed ~336 times


Screenshot of the Bitwarden Android interface. Emoji are showing as question marks.

Let me start by saying that Emoji Passwords are probably a really daft idea. I want to use emoji in my passwords. They're easy to type on a mobile keyboard, easy to remember, and a lot more fun than boring ASCII characters. Let's go with ✅🐎🔋📎 (As close as possible to Correct Horse Battery Staple) I use BitWarden as my password manager. It saves emoji passwords into its database, but has troub…

A QR code built from Emoji

· 10 comments · 2,950 words · Viewed ~16,495 times


A QR built from emoji squares.

It's possible to encode QR images as text. In this case, Emoji! (more…) …

iOS 14 gets support for the Unicode Power Symbol!

· 1 comment · 300 words · Viewed ~296 times


Power symbols displayed on the screen.

It has been four years since Unicode officially accepted our Power Symbols proposal into the standard. Now I’m delighted to announce that users on iOS 14 are finally able to use the full set of Power Symbols. ⏻ ⏼ ⭘ ⏽ ⏾ They’re available to use in the browser, in emails, and messages. Here’s how they look, in both dark and light mode: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentAnyone with iOS 14 able to …

Bitly Emoji Links

· 2 comments · 150 words · Viewed ~635 times


Weird symbols in the bitly dashboard.

Popular URl shortner Bitly allows users to customise its links. This means you can have all sorty of weird and wonderful character in there. For example: bit.ly/󾰀󾰀 You can also use Emoji! bit.ly/☹ bit.ly/♐ Well, OK, not all Emoji. If you try to use most of them, the Bitly system craps out and generates broken URls, like so: But you can use most Unicode Miscellaneous symbols - so…