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.

Video with transparency in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android, circa 2022 (updated in late 2024)

This post on using video with a trans­par­ent back­ground will prob­a­bly not age well. At least, I hope that is the case! Ide­al­ly, in the future, you can use a sin­gle .webm video file with an alpha chan­nel and it will work every­where. But, as I write this post in Jan­u­ary 2022, and have updat­ed in 2024, after much research and try­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es, I have a <video> tag that will play a video… + read on

Tweaking site performance and configuring AWS

I’ve recent­ly updat­ed jmx2​.com. The site worked as it was and I did­n’t real­ly have the spare time to get to the ever-grow­ing list of updates I’d accu­mu­lat­ed. I had a week of rel­a­tive qui­et appear and I’ve final­ly worked on the site again. Here’s what I’ve been doing. Gen­er­al clean up of the code in the Craft Twig tem­plates. Built a new serv­er with PHP 8 and moved the site. I had already… + read on

The HTML email template in Craft CMS

The doc­u­men­ta­tion of Craft CMS improves con­stant­ly but for a CMS that evolves at the pace we’re used to with Craft, keep­ing up with doc­u­ment­ing every nook and cran­ny doesn’t always hap­pen. The HTML Email Tem­plate is pret­ty basic and has­n’t received much love in the docs yet. Search­ing the Craft doc­u­men­ta­tion does­n’t turn up much infor­ma­tion. If you search the Craft Dis­cord com­mu­ni­ty, you’ll find doc­u­men­ta­tion nuggets scat­tered in con­ver­sa­tions. In this post,… + read on

Docker, Craft, Forge, Arcustech, and Heroku

I have recent­ly embraced using Dock­er for my local devel­op­ment. To be clear, I’ve had stum­bles along the way. Luck­i­ly, I have a friend who is always there to help me out. (Thanks, Andrew!) As with almost every­thing I post on this site, this post serves as a note to my future self, but I hope you (you, being you, not me) gets some­thing out of it too. Why do this? Like many peo­ple… + read on

So long, Craft Link List, and hello again, Craft Link List

Hel­lo Craft friends! I’ve got news to share about Craft Link List, the Craft CMS-focused newslet­ter I’ve writ­ten since May 2015. Craft Link List #127 was the last issue I worked on before hand­ing over the newslet­ter to the Craft CMS team. The deci­sion to stop writ­ing the newslet­ter was dif­fi­cult. The dia­gram above is from this tweet that I stum­bled upon in ear­ly Decem­ber. I book­marked it and kept com­ing back to it… + read on

Adding Date Validation Logic when Creating an Event in Craft CMS 3

I have a Craft CMS site with two Date/​Time fields. One field is called cal­Start­Time and the oth­er is cal­End­Time. The goal is to check that cal­End­Time does not hap­pen before the cal­Start­Time. To do this, I have a cus­tom mod­ule. Head over to plug​in​fac​to​ry​.io to scaf­fold out a mod­ule. You could also do this in a plu­g­in, but a mod­ule is prob­a­bly eas­i­er. Lis­ten for the Entry::EVENT_BEFORE_SAVE event and then make sure the… + read on

A critical error: Chromium revision is not downloaded.

I have been try­ing to get crit­i­cal to work on my Mac but kept get­ting the fol­low­ing error when my web­pack con­fig­u­ra­tion hit the point where it was try­ing to con­fig­ure the Crit­i­cal CSS. Error: Chromi­um revi­sion is not down­loaded. Run ​“npm install” or ​“yarn install” at Launcher.launch (/Users/john/Sites/craft-w-webpack/node_modules/puppeteer/lib/Launcher.js:119:15) I tried fix­ing this by fol­low­ing the instruc­tions, npm install, but the error con­tin­ued to hap­pen. The path to get­ting this fixed had sev­er­al steps… + read on

Installing Imagick in Valet

When­ev­er I update to new ver­sions of PHP in my local instal­la­tion, I need to rein­stall Imag­ick. Since I look up these steps every time, I’m doc­u­ment­ing them here so future me can remem­ber this. Is Imag­ick real­ly not installed? First you might have it installed on your machine. Does this return a ver­sion num­ber? con­vert ‑ver­sion If so, you have it installed but it might not be wired up for your PHP ver­sion.… + read on

Fixing a MariaDB database that has a corrupted root user password.

In one ter­mi­nal win­dow I did this: echo $(brew –pre­fix Mari­aDB) That gave me the path to my Mari­aDB of: /​usr/​local/​opt/​mariadb Then I ran this in that same win­dow: /​usr/​local/​opt/​mariadb/​mysqld_​safe That start­ed Mari­aDB suc­cess­ful­ly. Then I opened a 2nd ter­mi­nal win­dow. sudo $(brew –pre­fix mariadb)/bin/mysqladmin ‑u root pass­word I fol­lowed the prompts to reset the pass­word to ”, i.e. blank. Then I killed the Mari­aDB cur­rent run­ning by enter­ing (in the same win­dow I… + read on

The Winding Down of Pic Puller

Insta­gram API changes and the wind­ing down of Pic Puller Here’s the short sto­ry. Pic Puller for Craft CMS ver­sion 3 will be avail­able for cur­rent users until the end of 2019. Pic Puller will be removed from sale from the Craft CMS Plu­g­in Store to pre­vent fur­ther sales as this ver­sion of the plu­g­in. This will give cur­rent users over 6 months to plan a tran­si­tion. Regard­ing future plans, there may be a… + read on