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

Ink of the day: “MIXING…” 

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

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.… + read on

Customizing the CKEditor in Craft CMS

When I cre­ate a new rich text field in Craft CMS, I use the first-par­ty CKEd­i­tor plu­g­in. My next 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 going to miss Redac­tor.… + read on

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

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

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.

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

  • #ux

Sound like an audio professional with AI using Adobe Enhance 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

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 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

Analytics a different way. Plausible Analytics on Laravel Forge with Traefik and Docker.

Near­ly every­one uses Google Ana­lyt­ics. It’s the indus­try stan­dard for a rea­son. It’s an extreme­ly pow­er­ful tool, but legal and pri­va­cy issues may con­cern you. Want to try a dif­fer­ent route? Come along with me. TLDR: Install a self-host­ed instance of Plau­si­ble Ana­lyt­ics in a Dock­er con­tain­er with rout­ing by Trae­fik Proxy. Lar­avel Forge is used to pro­vi­sion the serv­er and deploy code. Where we’re head­ed We’re going to use Lar­avel Forge to cre­ate… + read on

Entry Editor Links, a new Craft CMS plugin

Example of the Entry Editor Links plugin. For authorized users, each entry title includes a link to edit the post.

I have pub­lished a new plu­g­in on the Craft CMS plu­g­in store: Entry Edi­tor Links. This plu­g­in is designed to help devel­op­ers quick­ly cre­ate links to an entry’s edit page in the con­trol pan­el for autho­rized users on the front end of a Craft site. Use Twig instead If you’re not sta­t­i­cal­ly caching your site, you can achieve a link in your Twig tem­plates and avoid adding anoth­er plu­g­in. One Darn­ley Road­’s starter tem­plate… + read on