Andy Heathershaw

It’s 3 years to the day since I made the first commit to what would become Blue Twilight – my open-source PHP photo gallery. Today I’m delighted to announce the availability of Blue Twilight Cloud. Blue Twilight Cloud allows you to run your own photo gallery as an alternative to sharing your photos on Instagram, […]

Google is the registry behind the new .dev TLD – the ultimate vanity domain for developers. The .dev extension has historically been used by developers fudging their host files to create realistic-looking development environments. Now, .dev is open in Early Access Preview to allow the world to register their .dev domains. It’s actually been open […]

My first post of 2019 is a tutorial that’s all about the cloud.

I’m going to show you how to use the RunCloud control panel to deploy a PHP application with a MySQL database on a cloud server from UpCloud.

My friends at UpCloud have also provided a promo-code to get ample free credit to try out their service. Check out the tutorial for the details.

It’s almost two years since I published the post on the Visual Studio IDE information message: “delegate invocation can be simplified.” It is now the second most visited article on my blog! While reviewing some error messages in a new MVC project, I recently learnt something equally as simple and eye-opening. This time, the suggestion […]

My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week: 16th October, 22:00 – 02:00 17th October, 00:00 – 00:30 The first window specifically targets the VPS platform, and will see my server powered down and migrated to new infrastructure. The second window will see an […]

The Ubuntu team will this week release Ubuntu Server 18.04.1, the first minor revision to 18.04 since its release on April 26th.

In this article, I’ll show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 using the command-line. This can be used on all Ubuntu derivatives, but is mostly aimed at Server installs that do not have a graphical interface.

The new EU data protection legislation, GDPR, mandates that every reasonable effort and technology is used to protect personal data. It even goes as far as specifying encryption. The open-source database MariaDB (a drop-in, compatible replacement for MySQL) has supported “encryption at rest” since version 10.1. Use MariaDB encryption to satisify the GDPR recommendation of […]

Florida is my go-to destination for a holiday. I’ve been several times since our honeymoon in 2012 and yet I still manage to find something new to see or do each time. When I fly into MCO airport and walk through the stunning atrium, I know I’m back in my happy place! Whether you’ve never […]

Ubuntu Server is a Linux distribution that is ideally suited to server workloads. For example: hosting websites and web applications.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install a LAMP stack – that’s Apache, MariaDB (in place of MySQL) and PHP – on Ubuntu Server using the latest available releases, and how to keep it up-to-date.

… but I’m OK with it. A few days ago I sat in an airport lounge in Gatwick, waiting for our flight to Florida. I had finished a diet Coke and was chewing on a piece of yoghurt-covered honeycomb (which was delicious, FYI) when I read a news article about Brexit that stunned me. Europe […]