Free Stock Images

Copyright trolls are hard at work exploring the web and demanding payments for improper use of copyrighted images. Make sure your site is clean by either using your own images or licensed photographs. An alternative is to use royalty-free images. There are several sources of royalty-free images on the web, including these organizations:  – [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/)–… Continue reading Free Stock Images

Typography

Using fonts effectively on websites is a real challenge for most web developers. In years past, fonts were a least-common-denominator kind of a consideration, since as a web developer you couldn’t count on users having the particular fonts you wanted to use. So, as often as not, you just went with the generic font categories,… Continue reading Typography

Published
Categorized as Webdev

Display Posts by Category

One of Drupal’s best features was the Views module which enabled robust selection criteria for displaying posts, so this starts my quest for similar functionality in WordPress. A quick google search turned up a number of articles mostly focused on putting a code snippet into my theme’s functions.php file. The function name can then be… Continue reading Display Posts by Category

WordPress 5.8

Installing WordPress This took a little bit of time, but Ubuntu has a nice step-by-step checklist here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-wordpress#3-install-wordpress All told, it probably took about an hour to get to a working installation. This post editor is quite nice and it’s pretty straight-forward to add an image and align it to the rights of text. The… Continue reading WordPress 5.8

Published
Categorized as WordPress

Live Browser Updates

Introduction Editing an HTML document frequently involves typing the code in an editor, saving and publishing it to a website and then refreshing your browser to see the latest updates. While really not particularly onerous, doing these steps save-after-save does get tedious. Here is a simpler approach using a JavaScript package called browser-sync that can… Continue reading Live Browser Updates

Emailing backup file

The bash script I wrote worked well, stepping through and backing up the 9 individual databases to a temporary directory, then archiving that directory. Unfortunately, the desired next step of emailing that file turned out to be an issue. The version of mail on the host company’s computer did not handle attachments and building the… Continue reading Emailing backup file

Backing Up MySQL

I have 9 databases in MySQL that need to be backed up, so I wrote a bash script that: Creates folder /backups/SQL_BACK-yymmdd For each of the databases, uses mysqldump to generate a backup file (in the above folder) named dbname-yymmdd.sql. After completing for all the databases, then generates a tar.gz of the folder. The compressed… Continue reading Backing Up MySQL

Initial Setup

I used Softaculous for a quick clean install of D7. A simple copy from backup of various directories (gallery, images, sites) plus the .htaccess file allowed quick setup of the gallery (unharmed in my database debacle) and the site banner image. Overnight, a bunch of jerks tried setting up logins for the site, but they… Continue reading Initial Setup

Published
Categorized as Webdev Tagged