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

I had a client who want­ed to embed YouTube videos in their Craft CMS site. It would have been eas­i­est for me to have them only include the YouTube video ID but the shar­ing box on YouTube gives you a full YouTube URL. You can see that URL in the image at the begin­ning of this post. I did­n’t want to add any plug-ins to my Craft CMS site to do this so I… + read on

I had to debug an issue with a site I built when a friend dis­cov­ered that the menu tog­gle icon dis­ap­peared only when vis­it­ing her site from with­in Insta­gram, specif­i­cal­ly, on her bio page where she has a link to her site. Since I built her site, this is my prob­lem to solve. Being an in-app brows­er with­in an appli­ca­tion I have no con­trol of, I strug­gled to debug this prob­lem. The user­A­gent string,… + read on

Note to self: Don’t erase your known­hosts file. (head­slap!) I pro­vi­sion servers with Lar­avel Forge and messed up my deploy­ment from Github recent­ly. I was mess­ing around in the .ssh fold­er on my serv­er and delet­ed the known_​hosts file. The next time I tried to deploy my code base from Github though, I got the fol­low­ing error. Host key ver­i­fi­ca­tion failed. fatal: Could not read from remote repos­i­to­ry. I need­ed to get my serv­er… + read on

I inher­it­ed a Craft CMS site that I now main­tain for a new client. When you inher­it oth­er peo­ple’s code, you need to see the project from their POV to get an under­stand­ing of they see things work­ing. Luck­i­ly Craft seems to encour­age log­i­cal struc­tures being built so I’ve not had too much trou­ble get­ting up to speed on this site. One of the prob­lems I did run into was with a sim­ple Plain… + read on

You like videos, right? Then you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with Hand­Brake, the open source video con­ver­sion tool. Encod­ing a sin­gle file is pret­ty straight­for­ward, but the pro­gram has the abil­i­ty to set up a cue and go through a bunch of shows while you are away from your com­put­er. Here’s a quick video walk­through on how to use this fea­ture I put togeth­er for a friend.

I’ve been teach­ing myself Gulp recent­ly. I found the basics easy to pick up. Although I didn’t con­sid­er myself a Grunt expert, I’d taught myself Grunt pre­vi­ous­ly and that helped with me with Gulp. Before we go fur­ther, check out the GitHub repos­i­to­ry that con­tains the fin­ished exam­ple project we’ll go over here: https://​github​.com/​j​o​h​n​f​m​o​r​t​o​n​/​u​s​i​n​g​-​g​u​l​p​-​h​t​m​l​p​r​o​c​e​s​s​-​e​x​ample One thing I have seen in both Grunt and Gulp work­flows I’ve used from their repos­i­to­ries was a script code… + read on

I recent­ly worked on a site which saved data in it’s local data­base which need­ed to be col­lect­ed and sent each day to a remote serv­er via SFTP for analy­sis. Need­less to say, I didn’t want to man­u­al­ly do this process every day, but I had nev­er ful­ly explored cron jobs, so I had to teach myself about cron jobs while I fig­ured out the prob­lem at hand. Here’s how I end­ed up automat­ing… + read on

At the time I write this post, Google Ana­lyt­ics has a new ver­sion in beta called ​“Uni­ver­sal Ana­lyt­ics”. It’s basi­cal­ly Google Ana­lyt­ics ver­sion 3. This means that code you may have relied on dur­ing the ver­sion 2 of Google ana­lyt­ics may no longer work. Google sug­gests that all new projects moved to ver­sion 3 now. It does offer ​“real time” ana­lyt­ics, so you can see who is on your site at that very moment.… + read on

Here’s a small code snip­pet that I use to incre­ment a val­ue between vis­its using a PHP cook­ie. I use it, for exam­ple, when I have 3 dif­fer­ent images that could go on a page, and I want to serve up the next one in the sequence on sub­se­quent vis­its to the page. I just use the “$num” where appro­pri­ate. You can edit the ​‘2’ in line 14 to change the wrap around val­ue… + read on

I’ve used Nav­i­cat for years. I’ve used MAMP Pro for years. Both tools are must-haves as far as I’m con­cerned, but I had been hav­ing prob­lems with spe­cial char­ac­ters being cor­rupt­ed for near­ly 6 months. Every curly quote, m‑dash or umlaut was tor­tur­ous. Briefly, the prob­lem was that those spe­cial char­ac­ters (like curly quotes) would be changed to ques­tion marks in my data­base after I had migrat­ed it to or from my local devel­op­ment… + read on