A series of short blog post covering software components / services I’ve used on projects to say thanks to the authors, and share them with others who might find them useful.
February 16, 2018
by Lee
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On a recent project we had a requirement to let users easily include social media such as YouTube videos, and Instagram posts in their content. We choose to follow the WordPress-embed style functionality where simply including a link to the … Continue reading
March 27, 2017
by Lee
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I’m the maintainer of a reasonably well-used WooCommerce plugin that currently generates a full set of product data from a store This is currently done on-demand to make sure the information is up to date. On smallish stores, everything works just … Continue reading
February 20, 2017
by Lee
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I’m just about to launch a brand new project to the world. As a small business, part of the work I’m doing on the project is looking at how I can use smart technology solutions to engage with new users automatically, and … Continue reading
January 18, 2017
by Lee
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The rest of this series has mostly covered things you’d use when building a site. Once you’ve finished building though, and your new site has gone live there are plenty more things you need to do. There’s hosting, SSL certificates, CDNs, and a … Continue reading
November 15, 2016
by Lee
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IP geolocation is something that’s needed more and more as people publish & trade internationally. Stores want to offer different pricing, currencies, shipping rules to different countries, or provide content in different languages. Many systems have something already baked in, … Continue reading
November 4, 2016
by Lee
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First, a question… When you find a piece of software to fill a specific need on a project, do you: Add it in straight away while proclaiming “Open source is awesome, on to the next feature everybody!” Proceed cautiously, taking a good … Continue reading
October 28, 2016
by Lee
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The last couple of Laravel projects I’ve worked on have all included important emails being delivered. It was important that the triggering of these emails could be tested. I also needed to make sure that the correct email was being sent, … Continue reading
October 27, 2016
by Lee
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If you’ve done much with PHP you’ve probably come across its image handling libraries. Normally this involves using either the GD, or ImageMagick. These work reasonably well, but there are a number of disadvantages: The APIs are thin wrappers around the … Continue reading
October 26, 2016
by Lee
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I’ve been working on a new service for the last month or so that enables people to log, track and share walks in the UK’s hills and mountains. The service is based on Laravel, and one of the things I … Continue reading
October 25, 2016
by Lee
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On a recent project, I needed to add some Google Maps functionality to a number of pages. The functionality I was looking for included: adding KML layers adding markers onto the maps with custom info windows layering photo thumbnails onto … Continue reading