I’ve had a Synology for many years, and the interface has changed over time, obscuring useful information for installed apps. One of my favorite apps to run on it is Plex. In the Synology interface, it used to be easy to open Plex. The URL was shown in the “Package Center” when looking up the app. Below is a screenshot of how the interface used to look. This is not a screenshot I created.… + read on
I’ve used Laravel Forge for quite a while in my workflow. It’s a convenient way to set up servers, quickly add security certificates, and deploy sites. I’ve got a number of my own sites and client sites using it and I’ve been very pleased with it. The Laravel Forge deployment process The piece of the process I’ve been thinking about recently is the deployment method I’m using in Forge. The deployment method built into… + read on
I write and maintain a Yeoman generator called “Build A Banner”, aka BAB. As you might guess from the title, the generator helps in developing animated display ad banners. It creates a directory with customized HTML, JS and CSS starter files, builds a small development server with live-reloading, and has workflows for optimizing and delivering banners to a media company. We use it all the time at JMX2. Although I’ve been maintaining this repo… + read on
I was recently updating my site and decided to use Michael Rog’s Wordsmith plugin for some text manipulation. His Wordsmith plugin included some features that I liked that my own custom plugin, a simple port of Hacksaw, didn’t include. I had created this plugin when Craft 3 was early in development, a time when there were many fewer plugins available and no plugin store at all. Installing plugins through Craft 3’s Plugin Store makes… + read on
If you use the command line and you’re lazy, this is for you. I’ve picked up a lot of tips in customzing my command line over the course of many years. Most of them I abandon after the “new” wears off, but a few stick around. Specifically, I have some aliases that I find useful enough that they’re part of the set up process when I get a new Mac. (Yes, these are Mac… + read on
Like many of my posts here, this is another note to myself to help me when I have questions about getting things done. I recently finished Pic Puller for Craft 3, available in finer Craft 3 plugin stores everywhere. But the point of this post is how it actually got there. The conversion of the plugin from its Craft 2‑compatible version to Craft 3 was the first step of the process. Andrew Welch’s Pluginfactory.io… + read on
When I have a new project that requires some Amazon S3 storage, I try to do the “right thing” for security by creating a new user and a new bucket entirely. I don’t want to share any credentials across projects. That means after I have created my S3 bucket I neeed to assign a user with the appropriate permissions. For me, that typically means I want this new user to have full access to… + read on
On January 30, 2018, Instagram posted a deprecation notice for The Instagram API Platform. There is a newer API called the Instagram Graph API. The newer API’s focus is for businesses, not individual accounts though. This is the 2nd major change made to the API. The first major change was in November 2015. If you’re curious, here’s the announcment. The changes introduced a new app review process and limited 3rd party access to the… + read on
I have used MAMP for local development for a long time. Several people I know through the Craft CMS Slack group have professed the benefits of [Laravel Valet](https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/valet ‘Laravel Valet documentation’) so I decided to give it a spin as an alternative to MAMP. When it comes to Craft CMS there is a built-in driver that allows Valet to serve a Craft site without any additional configuration. You just place your Craft site in… + read on
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