How to Archives - GoPHP.io

Customer Feedback via SMS using Go and Slack

Using an SMS Gateway called 46elks and some Go we can automate a customer feedback process which is usually done manually by calling a customer. This was an idea I had when I worked at a large sales company in Sweden a few years ago and my task was to find things that could be automated to save money and speed things up. To keep track of feedback and manually handle negative comments I also piped the messages to Slack which we will be doing in this guide as a bonus at the end. The following is a how to guide describing how you can create this yourself. You can find the full source code on Github.

SMS Gateway

The first thing we need to is find a SMS Gateway for sending our text messages to our customers. I met 46elks at HackForSweden this year and it seems to perform really well when I used them for this guide. However, you could go with any SMS Gateway and some of the more popular options are Twilio, Amazon or ClockworkSMS. Most gateways will provide similar APIs so it shouldn’t be too hard to replace my 46elks implementation with another provider.

Sending texts and receiving customer feedback

How to use Pi-hole to block all ads on your local network

Recently I decided to set up a Pi-hole installation on my local network. Initially I was going to use a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but the company I work for was replacing all the PCs and I was able to get my hands on one of them.

Pi-hole is a simple tool which can be configured to handle the DNS of all the devices on a network. It can be installed on a linux environment and is also available as a docker image. Basically it will check any DNS queries against various blacklists and block queries that match ad networks or tracking domains. The end result is that you get a browsing experience without advertisements and user tracking. Pi-hole is configurable and you can whitelist domains or even devices on the network if you would like. The admin interface shown in the image of this post shows the dashboard which gives a nice overview of queries that go through Pi-hole.

How to Install Go 1.12 on Ubuntu 18

This guide is also available as a video from Youtube.

Begin by running the following command to add the golang backports ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:longsleep/golang-backports

If you get an error such as “add-apt-repository command not found” then you need to run the following command to install add-apt-repository:

Developing Slack Bots with Go: Part 1

In my previous post I wrote a guide on how to post a simple Slack message using a bot with PHP. Now we will do the same thing but instead with Go. I have also decided to send a json request instead of a form-url encoded request like we did with PHP. There are some differences, let’s take a look.

Developing Slack Bots with PHP: Part 1

I have done a lot of work with slack bots in the past both professionally and in my spare time. In the past I build a plugin for WHMCS called WHMCS Slack which was originally a paid addon but is now open source and available for free on Github. This post is a first part in a series of posts i would like to write about both Go and PHP and how we can use these programming languages to create useful bots for Slack.

Add a custom bot integration to Slack

It’s possible to create bots for your Slack channels and workspaces via custom integrations. First you will need to create a bot for your Slack workspace. To do this you need permissions to add a custom configuration. Simply go to your workspace url and add admin at the end as shown in the picture