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Articles by tom

NLWeb – An Exciting Project, but Proceed with Caution

I was browsing Instagram recently and a reel popped up that grabbed my attention. It was all about NLWeb and how it was the future of the web. I don’t remember specifically why, but the more I heard about the project, the more it piqued my interest. I’d also seen another reel suggesting that websites […]

Author website development

Generating an Effective Content Security Policy with your Laravel React App

I recently had an interesting problem to solve. I’d built a brand new author website on a shiny installation of Laravel 10, utilising its out-of-the-box frontend start kit for React. Laravel Breeze offers React scaffolding via an Inertia frontend implementation. As the website explains “Inertia allows you to build modern, single-page React and Vue applications using classic server-side routing […]

ChatGPT or Bard: Which is the better coding assistant?

How developers code, is changing. We now have amazing 'assistants' in the form of AI models, able to generate code quickly and easily. But how good are they really? I've been playing around with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 quite a bit lately. But on receiving an invitation, I've now given Google's Bard a…

Enhancing User Experience with Performance Metrics

If you've noticed a drop in traffic lately and you rely on Google for much of that traffic, it could very well be related to your Web Core Vitals scores. These all-important metrics have a big impact on how many clicks Google sends your way.  Web Core Vitals are a set…

Revolutionising Code Refactoring with ChatGPT: A Developer’s Dream Come True

In the ever-evolving world of software development, writing efficient and maintainable code has always been a top priority. As codebases grow in size and complexity, developers often find themselves spending a significant amount of time refactoring code to optimize performance and maintainability. Technologies move on and code that was considered…

Why you should be using WebP Images on your website

Things don't stand still for very long (infact they basically never do) in the world of web development. Something that seemed so ingrained it would never be replaced, is the ubiquitous jpg image format. This might not be a terribly exciting subject for many people, but if you're trying to optimise…

The rise of AI

AI is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about topics in 2023 and if early indications are right, it stands to radically transform many people's lives - in a very big way in a very short space of time! AI, or artificial intelligence, is a branch of computer science that…

The Dos and Don’ts of Sharing Your Availability Calendar with Others

We've developed AvailabilityCal.com to help make sharing your availability calendar with others quick and simple. Sharing your calendar can be a great way to streamline scheduling and improve communication. However, it's important to follow some best practices to ensure that you're sharing your calendar appropriately and effectively. In this article,…

Why Availability Calendars Are Essential for Effective Time Management

Effective time management is a crucial skill for professionals, entrepreneurs, and individuals who want to achieve their goals and maximize their productivity. One powerful tool for managing your time is an availability calendar, which allows you to schedule and organise your activities, meetings, and tasks in a visual and intuitive…

Upgrading php7.4 to php8.0 on Amazon Linux 2 Webserver

We recently had to upgrade a webserver running php7.4 to php8.0. It's a relatively easy task, but as with everything, it's a lot easier if you know the right buttons to press. So below are the steps I took to complete the procedure. Firstly, I needed to make a note…

Installing Supervisor to process Laravel queues on an EC2 instance running AML2

I recently had to install Supervisor on an Amazon Linux 2, EC2 webserver and it didn't seem to be as straight forward as the Laravel docs made out, so I thought I'd leave some notes here for future reference and to perhaps save somebody else a few hours trial and error. Here…

How to configure php-fpm, Apache and HTTP/2 on AMI2 (Amazon Linux 2)

I had a real battle getting HTTP/2 to work on my new AMI2 Lamp webserver this week. The Apache http2 module was installed but it didn't work alongside mod_mpm_prefork, so I needed to switch to the mod_mpm_event module. However this wouldn't start unless the server was using php-fpm. So what…