We have now reached the tipping point with dark mode on The World Wide Web. Support has reached the point of broadness that means users who are browsing on their mobile phones are going to notice what you are doing to their eyes if you don’t support it. We will soon pass from “users areContinue reading “It’s Time to Support CSS Dark Mode”
Author Archives: Steve Fenton
Adobe Analytics Segment Applicability
Adobe Analytics makes it super-easy to add segements, with a visual designer that will help you build the logic. As well as traditional and/or logical tests, you can use time based “then” tests to create segments where things happen in a specific order. For example, you might be interested in visitors who arrive from aContinue reading “Adobe Analytics Segment Applicability”
Rate Limiting Googlebot Across Many Websites
Googlebot is one of the good guys. It will check your robots.txt file and respect any crawl delays you’ve asked it to use. However, if you run hundreds or thousands of websites across your infrastructure you can encounter waves of Googlebot traffic due to it coincidentally selecting many of your websites to crawl at theContinue reading “Rate Limiting Googlebot Across Many Websites”
Change an Excel Cell’s Colour Based on Data
This might be a bit niche, but I needed to collect RGB values in an Excel spreadsheet and I though it would be neat to preview the colour in another cell. To cut a long story short, the only way I could make this happen was with a bit of Visual Basic for Applications. It’sContinue reading “Change an Excel Cell’s Colour Based on Data”
The Ethics of Scale
One of the tenets of automation is that while you can produce stuff faster, your mistakes will happen at the same speed. You might replace manually updating 100 files with a process that updates them all in the blink of an eye… but what if it updates more files than you intended. In developer terms,Continue reading “The Ethics of Scale”
Lookup DNS on a Specific Nameserver with NSLOOKUP
The nslookup command is really easy to use. You just type nslookup [host-name] and you get an answer. But what do you do when it looks like it is working, but your monitoring is detecting intermittent issues connecting to a website? The answer is, you check each nameserver individually to make sure they are allContinue reading “Lookup DNS on a Specific Nameserver with NSLOOKUP”
Awesome Microsoft Edge Vertical Tabs
I’ll be honest, it has taken a day or two to retrain my cerebellum for this one, but it is totally worth it. Modern day displays happen to be wider than you need. Horizontal real estate is in surplus and is cheap, but vertical space is more valuable. That’s why Microsoft Edge is getting aContinue reading “Awesome Microsoft Edge Vertical Tabs”
Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simpler Tasks
The full title of this article should really be “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simple Tasks; Protect Complex Task Productivity by Not Quantifying It”. This is the result of a study by Aruna Ranganathan, co-authored by Alan Benson, that studied workers in a garment factory and I’ve added my opinion because sometimes I’m a narcissist likeContinue reading “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simpler Tasks”
Skipping the Chasm: How a Crisis Accelerates Progress
Full credit to Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal “Crossing the Chasm” keeps proving to be a useful book thirty years after it was written. Credit also to Hans Baumhardt who introduced me to the book and who critically shaped my thinking about work and life. What I hope do, now that the credits are over, isContinue reading “Skipping the Chasm: How a Crisis Accelerates Progress”
Execute Raw SQL Scripts in Entity Framework Core
Most of the time, Entity Framework Core will just do the right thing. Every now and then, though, you’ll find that it’s doing something in a bit of a sticky way and you’ll want to take control. Usually it’s when you’re deleting a range on a table with cascading deletes. Here’s an example of theContinue reading “Execute Raw SQL Scripts in Entity Framework Core”