Skip to main content
tom

tom

Articles by tom

How to view the source of an HTML email

Creating HTML emails is a bit of an art form, although as anyone who's had the joy of creating an HTML email knows, it's a rather semantically ugly form of art.Making an email work across the multitude of different devices and email clients requires an awful lot of tricks and…

How to Analyse a website for speed

How quickly a website works is vitally important to its success. There are a million reasons why a website could be running slowly, but the following suggestions might put you on the path to diagnosing the bottleneck. Firstly, you might find it useful to install a Chrome extension/plugin called yslow, which…

Tips for Installing a 123-reg (GlobalSign) Domain SSL certificate on an Amazon EC2 Instance Running Apache 2.*

This process caused me a couple of issues when I came to do it just now, so I hope the following notes might prove helpful to someone (or possibly me next time I come to do this and have forgotten everything I just did!). In no particular order: 1. Once…

Upgrading a Server on Amazon EC2

Changing an EC2 instance type is not as straight forward as you might think, so I'm writing this post in note form as a reference for next time I come to do it. If it can also be of help to anyone else out there trying to get to grips with…

A Comprehensive(ish) List of Things to Consider when Building a Website in 2013

I wanted to put this list together as a checklist of things to remember when creating a new site, and more specifically when creating and developing our new site at 18aproductions.co.uk (coming soon...). This is all written in very much a 'note' form as there's just so much to cover.…

How to Work Locally

To develop locally there are a number of steps you need to take to get setup. I'm working on a Windows 7 PC. 1. Download Wamp or Xampp Whichever takes your fancy. Personally I work with Wamp, but I've heard good things about Xampp too. 2. Download all the files…

Git based development -> staging -> live workflow

I've been trying to get my head around a simple git based workflow for deploying from development to staging to live server environments. I found this post extremely useful in achieving a basic development -> live workflow, but adding in a staging step is very useful if you want to…

How to get around Duplicate Content issues with Cloudfront CDN

Cloudfront is Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN) offering and provides web developers with an easy to use and cost effective way of letting people access content from a variety of regions around the world with the aim of speeding up website delivery. This isn't a guide to using Cloudfront -…

Duplicate domain invoices from 123-reg

During December we found we were charged for several domains twice by 123-reg.This happened with 2 different 123-reg accounts, so it's very possible it's happened to a lot of other people! And I'm sure 123-reg are having quite a headache dealing with the fall out of what was probably a…

How to get rid of vertical scrollbars in a Facebook fan page application

More and more companies are getting customised Facebook pages, like ours! But when you create a basic Facebook fan page application you might find that the lovely design you've created gets horrible vertical scroll bars added along the right hand side. Here's a quick 'howto' to explain the steps you…

WP e-Commerce Delivery Paypal Fix

We love Wordpress as a CMS platform. It's a very cost effective way for people to get their own basic content managed website online and one of the few 'out of the box' solutions we recommend to clients.One of the great things about Wordpress is the vast array of plugins…

Stop the Black Hatters

Everyone who does even the smallest amount of SEO, appreciates the importance of outbound links. Black hat seo monkeys are no exception. Except rather than sending one of those annoying 'will you be my friend' emails to request a link, they just hack away until they find a route into…