Month: October 2015

Bringing out the best in people

So I managed to complete the Birmingham half-marathon in 2 hours and 17 minutes. One of the things that has been imprinted on my memory is how the day seemed to bring out the best in all people.People all along the 13.1 mile route were handing out sweets, water, and shouts of encouragement directed at specific people – whether they were friends or not. Countless times I had people cheering me on from my name on my runners number.It makes all the difference.I especially found it great how even when running through areas of Birmingham that were less desirable – places where the people may normally be feared – had just the same encouragement and friendliness.

Four days until the big run

In four days time, I’ll be doing the Birmingham half marathon along with a mate from work.

The gravity of what I have said I’ll do didn’t really hit me until earlier today, when we were looking over the route map and elevation.

13.1 miles it is and I know I’m going to feel every step. I’m both nervous and excited in equal measure.

I’m now starting to wish I had prepared more. The longest run I’ve done — at a steady pace — has been about 8 miles or so and since paintballing last weekend has given me achy muscles, I’ve had no option but to rest up.

I’m quietly confident that the cheering of the crowds and general good feelings of all involved will help me — and indeed everybody else — to make it through the race.

I just hope I have prepared enough.

Bypassing Laravel’s CSRF Middleware on selected routes (from 5.1)

A handy way to have some of your routes skip the middleware for CSRF protection. Handy in some situations.

Laravel does a great job at protecting us from cross-site request forgeries – or C.S.R.F. for short.But sometimes you may not wish to have that layer present. Well with Laravel 5.1 you can very easily bypass this middleware, simply by populating an array in the following file:

app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php

Within this class you can add a protected property — an array — called $except, which will tell Laravel to use this middleware except for the ones you specify here.

A complete example could be:

protected $except = [
    'ignore/this/url',
    'this/one/too',
    'and/this',
];

So for those three URLs, the CSRF middleware would be skipped.