Currently browsing category: Web Development

Previously, i lauded a lightweight carousel, Flickity, but on a current project, i inexplicably ran into an image loading issue that i spent about two hours trying to fix. No luck.

So, throwing my hands up in the air — literally — i googled “lightweight slider carousel” and the top hit was Siema.

Siema describes itself aptly as “a simple and very lightweight slider / carousel plugin written in pure vanilla JavaScript without any dependencies.”

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JavaScript Web Development

Off and on i’ve toyed with leaving Google Analytics. The primary reason for this is their unruly tracking practices not respecting user privacy — at all. Google hoards and controls a ton of user data; user data they grab while users travel around the Internet. And, even when consumers grant consent for some things, it’s a blurry line that Google toes. I don’t need all the stuff Google tracks, like gender, about my visitors. A […]

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Analytics Web Development

If you want to use a particular Google Font in a graphic, maybe a video overlay, or you want to self-host fonts on your own server to speed up your website, you’ll need a way to download the font and convert it to a web font. It can be a time-consuming endeavor. But it doesn’t have to be. A simple way to speed up the process is by using the web app Google Webfonts Helper […]

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App Development Web Development

I wanted to add SSL to a website i quickly spun up on a Lightsail instance. It was running on a subdomain. I ran into a hiccup with getting the domain verified via TXT entries in DNS when using Let’s Encrypt to setup SSL on a subdomain via GoDaddy DNS. In case you’re interested, here are the commands i used to manually add SSL with Let’s Encrypt with domain verification and prompts. Via CLI: mycli:~$ […]

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DNS Security Server Configuration Web Development

MailChimp has been far from cooperative with helping developers speed up website loading by simply minifying their mc-validate.js file. There’s a growing thread on Twitter started over two — yes, 2! — years ago!

Here’s what i did to stop receiving terrible grades on GT Metrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

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Email JavaScript Web Development

I had setup a new Apache server and needed an SSL certificate so i went with the tried and true, quick and easy LetsEncrypt/certbot route. While testing if gzip was installed, i received errors running apachectl configtest. First time receiving this error. It seemed to be caused by the LetsEncrypt install. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it for quite some time since the https:// version of the site i just put up on the new […]

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CLI Security Server Configuration Web Development

I first learned of the functionality plugin vs functions.php way of thinking either from a StackOverflow comment while searching for some elusive WP answer or via Dave Clements’s posts: Create Functions Plugin and Putting Things Where They Belong. Not sure it matters, but i like to attribute inspiration. Anywhoo… The more i’ve tackled WordPress projects, especially while working in-parallel on a few projects or back-to-back with little time to rest, i’ve come to look for more efficient […]

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Web Development WordPress

I’m using MAMP Pro and have a separate Host setup for each of my website projects. This let’s me navigate to https://local.mydomain.com instead of https://localhost:8888/mywebsitedirectory. You can easily set up local.mydomain.com to be a.b.c if you wanted; this is my convention for projects. I like to separate local dev with production and sandbox/staging sites. Since i decided to serve fonts locally as web fonts instead of grabbing them from Google or TypeKit or wherever, i noticed this […]

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Server Configuration Web Development

So if you’re like me, you do a lot of WordPress development locally and experience annoying issues. I use MAMP, personally, as do many others. One of these common headaches is the MySQL server not starting on MAMP for Mac; inexplicably stopping and whatever you try, it won’t start again. Here’s a fix that has worked all the time for me: Quit MAMP. In the Finder (or Terminal) go to Applications/MAMP/db/mysql56/ and delete the last log […]

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Server Configuration Web Development