Posted on , Development
Deploying production and staging sites using Docker is quick and simple, but having one repo, two servers that need two environments can be tricky. My Docker setup involves a container on AWS, and deployments from Cloud Docker. When I deploy a change or a new feature to production or staging the entire environment is pushed….
Posted on , Frontend
I have been using Laravel Mix or Elixer as it was once known with Laravel for a long time now and have recently started using it with my WordPress projects. I thought I would share how you can get up and running with as little hassle as possible. I also include my mix() method that…
Posted on , Development
I have an updated post on Super simple local wildcard SSL that will allow you to greatly simplify the certificate creation steps. Local SSL has always been something that I ignored. So I never gave it the time of day. That is until Google did the unthinkable. They bought the .dev TLD. And not only…
Posted on , General
My Dad told me a story many years ago when I was a wide-eyed kid looking up at him ( I was probably 9 ) that I think most people don’t really think about. He told me that honest employees will always make less money. He didn’t tell me this to set me off down…
Posted on , Inspiration
As if I didn’t have enough on my plate already. Managing a full-time job, family, and Freelance work. I also thought it would be fun to record some of the work I do in my free time. I would like to start a site soon where I will interview and showcase local makers. So far,…
Posted on , Development
This is part 2 of building a WordPress powered API with Laravel. If you are just joining me now then please read part 1 here to get caught up. In part 2 we are going to beef up our API and look at caching, How to purge the cache and create a few helpers to…
Posted on , Design
While I continually update Axe and Handle as I work on new projects, I had a request to add WebPack and thought rather than going into a complicated build process I would add Laravel Mix. Feel free to install Bootstrap, jQuery and other resources using NPM. But you now have the full power of Laravel…
Posted on , WordPress
The other day I realized that I had a lot of posts sitting in draft mode, but I wanted to have a look and see what the Blog loop looked like. Obviously viewing the draft post isn’t a big deal. I began to wonder if it was possible to display draft posts in the blog…
Posted on , Development
Flexible SSL is more than a fancy word. It’s an alternative to the more complicated and sometimes expensive method of adding a secure HTTPS connection to your site. Having a secure website isn’t just good for authentication, data integrity, or encryption. It is also something that Google will factor in when ranking your site. It…
Posted on , General
Like it or not, MAMP is an excellent tool for local development. If you work on multiple sites or projects at the same time across different frameworks and or CMS’s then MAMP will make your life simple. This MAMP development setup is what I have used for years while working on many freelance projects, personal…
Posted on , WordPress
Previously I wrote about Effective caching with WordPress and how I ended up improving the site speed by nearly 400%. I wanted to talk more about how you should never blindly trust that a caching solution will help make your site faster. The basic concept of caching is to save the server time by keeping…
Posted on , Content
The Facebook messenger chat plugin for websites is a great way of communicating with your audience and providing customer service. This will also tie into your Facebook page insights. Install the Facebook SDK Install the Facebook Javascript SDK and include the code just after the opening <body> tag. Find your App ID by visiting the…
Posted on , Development
Setup If you haven’t configured MAMP to use Xdebug yet then you can do so by reading this quick article. In addition, add the following just under zend_extension. It should be noted that Xdebug should not be on your production server and enabling the remote_connect_back flag is also not recommended for publicly accessible staging servers…
Posted on , Development
This is more of a simple note to self. But after setting up a fresh computer, all of those fuzzy little bits about getting MAMMP to work perfectly slip my mind. The one thing that can be a little confusing with MAMP is the multiple config locations. For example, I am running PHP 7.1.8 and…
Posted on , Development
Making your own API is probably faster and easier than you thought. By using Laravel with WordPress I will guide you through how I was able to make an API in a few hours that has served 40+ websites and dished out more than 2 million events a month. I will go over how to…
Adam Patterson
