Category: Software Development

  • Hello OctoberCMS and Laravel. Goodbye WordPress.

    This article – along with the rest of my website here at andysh.uk – is now being served from OctoberCMS.

    OctoberCMS is a proprietary content management system built on the amazing Laravel PHP framework. This is a significant change for me both personally, and technically, for 2 key reasons.

    Read on to find out more about OctoberCMS and Laravel.

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  • Upgrading an application from Bootstrap 4 to 5

    Over the past few weeks I’ve migrated my website to a new content management system – ExpressionEngine.

    I took the opportunity to upgrade my website’s front-end technologies to their latest releases – Bootstrap 5 and VueJS 3, for example.

    This post documents some of the changes I came across migrating Bootstrap 4 to 5.

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  • Microsoft releases new Edge browser based on Chrome

    Announced around a year ago, Microsoft today released their brand-new version of Edge – the default web browser since the Windows 10 release.

    The new Edge browser is based on Google’s Chromium project. Chromium is the “base” software that Google builds the Chrome browser on.

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  • Announcing the launch of Blue Twilight Cloud

    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.

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  • Developers – score yourself a .dev domain today

    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.

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  • Deploying PHP applications with RunCloud on UpCloud

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

    I’m going to show you how to deploy a PHP application with a MySQL database on a cloud server from UpCloud. I’ll be using the brilliant RunCloud control panel to deploy my PHP photo gallery – Blue Twilight – to an UpCloud server.

    My friends over at UpCloud have provided an awesome promo-code for free credit to try out their service. Details at the end of the article.

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  • Variable declaration can be inlined – C#

    It’s almost two years since I published the post on the Visual Studio IDE information message: “delegate invocation can be simplified.”

    While reviewing some error messages in a new MVC project, I recently learnt something equally as simple and eye-opening.

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  • Encrypt your database with MariaDB encryption at rest

    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 using encryption to protect your personal data.

    Let’s have a look at what it can do and how you can set it up. You won’t have to make a single change to your website or application!

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  • Install a LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP) on Ubuntu Server

    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.

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  • Redirect all visitors to a primary domain in Apache

    There are several scenarios in which you may want to redirect all your website visitors to a single, primary domain in Apache:

    • Redirect the www and non-www (root domain) hostnames of your domain to avoid duplicate content and improve SEO
    • Redirect an old domain to a new domain, maintaining links and search engine reputation
    • Redirect secondary domains (e.g. “spelling mistake” domains, or alternative-spelling domains) to your primary domain

    I have recently implemented the following on my own website, and I would like to share this Apache trick.

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