Website
All articles categorised as Website.
Upgrading an application from Bootstrap 4 to 5
Friday, 9th April 2021
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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Solid Tools for Developers gets a refresh
Sunday, 12th January 2020
It’s been over a year since the last update to Solid Tools for Developers – my suite of online tools for developers, system admins and network managers.Yesterday I published my latest release to soliddevtools.com which gives the suite a fresh makeover and a few improvements to the tools.GeneralImproved the display of the application on mobile phonesAdded all tools to a new top-level menu “All the Tools”Updated the supplier logos to include Fasthosts and ClouDNSAll third-party libraries…
Website maintenance: 16/17th October
Friday, 12th October 2018
My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week:16th October, 22:00 – 02:0017th October, 00:00 – 00:30The 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 upgrade to the core network adding additional capacity and DDOS protection.This outage will affect:andysh.ukphotos.andysh.ukapps.andysh.uk (web and git…
Install a LAMP stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP) on Ubuntu Server
Wednesday, 11th April 2018
Ubuntu Server is a Linux distribution that is ideally suited to server workloads. For example: hosting websites and web applications.One of the annoying things I find about some Linux distributions – Ubuntu included – is that packages are “frozen in time” through the life of a release. For example, Ubuntu 16.04 was released with PHP 7.0. However PHP 7.2 is now the latest release. Vendors typically apply security fixes to their packages, but you’re still missing out on new features.In…
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Brexit forced me to change my identity
Monday, 9th April 2018
… 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 dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit binA year to the day before the UK leaves the EU, the European Commission announced that all .eu domains registered to a UK address would be dropped.Horrified at…
Redirect all visitors to a primary domain in Apache
Sunday, 1st April 2018
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 SEORedirect an old domain to a new domain, maintaining links and search engine reputationRedirect secondary domains (e.g. “spelling mistake” domains, or alternative-spelling domains) to your primary domainI have recently implemented the following on my own…
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The Great Big Cloud Hosting Speed Test 2017
Sunday, 21st January 2018
2017 was an exciting year for the bigger players in the cloud hosting arena.Both Linode and DigitalOcean upgraded their network capacity.OVH opened new data centres in Germany and the UK.Bytemark launched an automated backup service for their cloud server platform.My own hosting provider, Memset, launched a new OpenStack region in their wholly-owned Dunsfold data centre. They also launched block storage for VPS and rebranded their product range to be more “cloud.”With all these improvements…
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Content Delivery Networks can improve your website’s performance
Monday, 27th November 2017
Content Delivery Networks were created for one reason: to speed up your websites and web applications. In this article, I explore how you can take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve your website performance for a small cost. The ProblemModern websites and web-based applications have a number of digital assets. These are the stylesheets, scripts and images that make up the websites you use. My website is no exception – it has 15 such assets.These assets are…
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Simply Remind Me: my first SaaS application
Saturday, 18th March 2017
It’s rare for commercial software developers, such as myself, to get to use the software we write. We rely on our users to report problems or suggest new features for the applications we develop.It’s also difficult to try out new technologies or methodologies without having a “real” application to build or experiment on.Just lately in my life, the days seem to rush by. So much so that important dates come and go without me even realising it. Important dates such as my car MOT’s…
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Hello, world!
Wednesday, 23rd September 2015
Fellow software developers will understand the meaning behind the title of this post."Hello, world!" is the typical statement used in programming tutorials when learning to write software – and it's usually the first words someone entering the wonderful world of software development will teach a computer application to say.It's therefore fitting that the title of the first post on the brand-new website of a software developer should be these hallowed words.Yes, welcome to my new website, built…