SuperGeekery: A blog probably of interest only to nerds by John F Morton.

A blog prob­a­bly of inter­est only to nerds by John F Mor­ton.

End of the Twitter party

Deactivated twitter 15 NOV2024
Screenshot of my deactivated Twitter account

I’ve men­tioned on my blog pre­vi­ous­ly that I used to be a heavy Twit­ter user. I joined in 2007, and it became one of my favorite places to spend time online. Twit­ter gave me a feel­ing of com­mu­ni­ty. From nerds to news to real-life friends, my feed was fan­tas­tic. That began to change after Musk bought it. Over time, Twit­ter became increas­ing­ly unrec­og­niz­able, and I want­ed to leave but didn’t know where to go.Musk’s… + read on


Set Up Redis Caching in Craft CMS with DDEV: A Step-by-Step Guide

Start­ing a Craft CMS project is easy if you fol­low the Quick Start Guide in the doc­u­men­ta­tion. You’ll quick­ly be up and run­ning with a basic serv­er set­up for local devel­op­ment with DDEV​.In this post, I’ll expand on this starter set­up by includ­ing Redis to han­dle your cache.Why Would You Want Redis in Your Local Dev Environment?Redis does caching in mem­o­ry and reduces the load on your data­base. While this might not sig­nif­i­cant­ly impact… + read on


Never mistake your production, staging and local environments with Craft CMS

Have you ever acci­den­tal­ly changed some­thing in your stag­ing envi­ron­ment when you meant to make the change in pro­duc­tion? Let’s make sure that nev­er hap­pens again. In this post, I’ll share how I use Con­trol Pan­el CSS, a free Craft 5 plu­g­in, and some gar­ish design choic­es to make it bla­tant­ly obvi­ous which Craft CMS envi­ron­ment I am work­ing in.Just how dis­tress­ing can these designs be? Take a look at the screen­shots below. The… + read on


Customizing the CKEditor in Craft CMS

CKEditor UX interface

When I cre­ate a new rich text field in Craft CMS, I use the first-par­ty CKEd­i­tor plu­g­in. My nest task is to con­fig­ure the field with some stan­dard updates which is what we’ll cov­er in this post. Before div­ing in to my cus­tomiza­tions, check out the plug­in’s offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion to under­stand the basic usage of the field type and learn about one of its super­pow­ers, nest­ed entries, which I won’t cov­er here. You’re not… + read on


Fixing a SQL database to have only one type of collation, a Craft CMS story

Spiderman database collation

I’m in the process of updat­ing a site from Craft CMS 4 to Craft CMS 5. As I read through the detailed upgrade guide, I noticed some data­base relat­ed items that deserved close atten­tion. The char­ac­ter set and col­la­tion of the data­base will change dur­ing the upgrade. Before I did the upgrade, I dis­cov­ered an issue with the col­la­tion type issue in my exist­ing data­base. I had a mix­ture of two dif­fer­ent col­la­tions and… + read on


Deter Clickjacking When You Can’t Set Security Headers By Using Javascript

Dont clickjack me

In this post we’ll talk about click­jack­ing, how to pro­tect your site vis­i­tor’s with robust sol­tu­ions, and a fall­back method when you’re unable to do it the nor­mal way. The need for this fall­back solu­tion is what inspired by a real-world sce­nario that I faced when a client need­ed a quick fix while the longer-term solu­tion was imple­ment­ed. What is click­jack­ing How do you pro­tect your users from click­jack­ing? First, you have to be… + read on


Dark patterns by example. The inability to cancel the StatusCake service.

Dark patterns no exit

This post has two pur­pos­es. I want to help you under­stand a dark pat­tern” in UX design. I also want to use a real-world exam­ple of a dark pat­tern in active use. This post is inspired by per­son­al expe­ri­ence. I stum­bled upon this dark pat­tern when try­ing to can­cel the auto-renew­al of Sta­tus­Cake, a ser­vice I no longer need. Expos­ing the use of dark pat­terns is one of the only ways con­sumers have to… + read on


Sound like an audio professional with AI using Adobe Enhance Audio.

Transforming audio
A microphone transforming into a digital waveform surrounded by AI circuits and gears.

I record a lot of videos for my clients. For exam­ple, for a legal com­pli­ance review, I recent­ly had to demon­state how a form worked based on the user’s coun­try of ori­gin. That was a dif­fi­cult thing to com­mu­ni­cate in an email, but the screen­cast made the review go through eas­i­ly. I don’t have a pro­fes­sion­al record­ing stu­dio in my office, but I like to make my record­ing sound as good as pos­si­ble. There’s… + read on


Run your own uptime service: Uptime Kuma with Traefik on Laravel Forge

robot-staring-at-computer
A robot staring intently at a website. the robots has wide eyes like it has been staring at the screen all night long. (Stable Diffusion)

In this post, I will show you how to install Uptime Kuma, an open-source mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice, on your serv­er. The post assumes you’re using Lar­avel Forge, but you can adapt them for oth­er ser­vices. The basic work­flow will stay the same. Uptime Kuma can mon­i­tor a vari­ety of ser­vices. I use it to watch this site for down­time. If there is an issue, Uptime Kuma will sends a noti­fi­ca­tion to my phone via the… + read on


AI and your content. How to opt to opt-out.

A robot stealing an apple
A robot stealing an apple from an apple cart, generated by AI.

TLDR: This post will show you how to opt out of Ope­nAI’s large lan­guage mod­el (LLM) used for Chat­G­PT by updat­ing the robots.txt file. We’ll also dis­cuss ways to opt out of oth­er LLMs and web scrap­ers. The arti­cle starts by dis­cussing how the val­ue exchange is bro­ken between con­tent cre­ators and big tech after the intro­duc­tion of AI. If you cre­ate con­tent for a liv­ing or just as a hob­by, and that con­tent… + read on