The Web is an amazing open platform, but a few times in the history of The Web we have faced challenges keeping it in great shape. When Microsoft had a browser monopoly with Internet Explorer, they were required not only to allow competing browsers but to actively prompt users to select from competitor browsers. We […]
This is just a quick not on how to run a bash script with parameters in GitHub actions, and how to use the passed argument in the script. GitHub Action Here’s the jobs section of the GitHub action, but the last line is the interesting bit as this calls the script. The argument is simply […]
This is just a quick note on an adaptation of a great idea from Go Make Things (a site FILLED with great stuff, by the way). This defers loading all the YouTube stuff (the iframe and all it’s assets) until the user clicks to play it – basically avoiding loading the assets unless the user […]
This is the second old-school post this week. Hey, I’m clearing the decks of some odd stuff that I had to do. Today, it’s uploading all files in a folder (but not sub-folders) to FTP, if they have been updated in the past 24 hours. There’s not much to explain here. It’s a simple System.Net.WebClient […]
In a previous life, I used FILESTREAM to store images for product listings in a multi-tenant SaaS platform running about 1,000 websites. The sites listed “in stock” items along with a bunch of images showing pictures of the item to show all the features and any wear and tear. At the time we were running […]
I created this Extreme Programming practices diagram to try and represented Kent Beck’s hand-sketched diagram as honestly as possible with a bit more structure. Hopefully this is a useful version that can help you visualise all the interactions between practices that were observed by Kent, which he wrote about in Extreme Programming Explained (definitely worth […]
This question is rather fascinating, in part because of the misunderstandings that have arisen in respect of the famous George Miller paper about the magical number seven (plus or minus two). Some people apply the findings of Miller to team size, and they are wrong to do so. So, what is the optimal number of […]
I needed to update a WordPress taxonomy on a site with thousands of categories and tags. This is not a task for a human, so I created a bit of a gnarly SQL script to update the MySql table. As you can see from the script, it has limitations! Specifically, if you need it to […]
I’m using a Visual Studio Code extension that provides text-to-speech, which I use as part of my VS Code writing set up. It has a simple set of two options, speed (1.5x of course) and voice, which is a text field as different options exist on different operating systems. As I’m using Windows 11 on […]
I needed to take a bunch of markdown files and convert them into a PDF, with all images present and correct, and using a CSS-based stylesheet. Behind the scenes, this is usually done using an intermediate HTML step. My attempts to solve this issue took me down a few different paths, so I thought I’d […]