Category: Web Development

  • Why I love (and how I make) simple, static, minimal-tech websites

    2022-08-04

    There was some interesting chatter a while ago in my tech social bubbles about the tiny decline in WordPress’s CMS market share. This was followed by some interesting Twitter replies. But I chose to pick up on my friend Keith Devon’s response: And it caused me to reflect on how I now build small/quick sites […]

  • Raise your hands! It’s voice controlled WordPress!

    2022-05-14

    I love doing fun coding projects. I was listening to the Syntax podcast yesterday, they did a show about “Nifty Browser APIs“. That is, things you can get code to do in a browser, like locate where you are and play sounds and… do speech recognition…? “That sounds fun”, went my train of thought, “I’d […]

  • I know nothing, really, but could nav menus be a browser API?

    2022-04-26

    Let’s not start with nav menus. Let’s start somewhere else… What do Github, Laravel Forge, MacOS, VS Code, Sublime Text, JetBrains IDEs like PHPStorm, Google Chrome’s dev tools, Windows Terminal, the Warp terminal application, and Netlify all have in common? They all have “command palettes” – as do an increasing number of both native and […]

  • Browser Extensions: Self-hosted updates

    2021-05-31

    I’m currently developing a paid-for browser extension that will run on both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers. I’ll write more about this (very-involved!) process soon. But in the last couple of days, I just made the decision to self-host updates for the Firefox version rather than host it on addons.mozilla.org. This post details the steps to […]

  • Laravel 8, Jetstream and learning Laravel

    2020-09-08

    For experienced Laravel developers, version 8 and Jetstream are really exciting. But as someone who wants to introduce people to Laravel as a way to build cool stuff, I really feel like there are some issues here.

  • Laravel 5.7 upgrades break published email styles

    2020-03-28

    I’ve been updating some old Laravel apps and I just came across this issue with updating from 5.6 to 5.7. It’s noted in the upgrade docs (see “Template Theme”) but easy to miss. I know I’ll come across this again, so it’s worth noting here for the future. If you have published your mail templates […]