Blog Posts

Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress part 2 – How to pull content from a WordPress RESTful API into an Eleventy generated static site.

Brief description of the common “server key has changed” error, and details on how to fix it on a Mac local server environment.

Quick writeup of how I handled a pervasive Intervention Image error “Intervention\Image\Exception\NotReadableException” in a Laravel app.

One developers journey toward content authoring nirvana. Thought process, decisions, and source code for a WordPress composable architecture.

Some notes on how I prepared for the CPACC Certification exam and reflecting on the exam itself.

Details of how I implemented dark mode on Be Inclusive, including some issues I encountered along the way.

A background image compromise to support IE11 while also giving modern browsers the best experience using CSS object-fit. Presented with detailed problem, solution, examples, and alternatives.

It’s easier to set well-defined, achievable goals when you base them on long-term, general goals. A personal mission statement and thinking in terms of roles can help.

On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we explore how building empathy is fundamental to improving our approach to web accessibility.

Why you should care about vertical rhythm and modular scale, defines them, and a demonstration on how to integrate them into your next project.

The term “Soft Skills” covers a broad spectrum of topics in interpersonal, communication, leadership, and personal skills. These are arguably the most important skills for your career, but by definition, they are also difficult to measure.

Tips to help you embrace the budget and time constraints of your project while testing in mobile browsers.

Tracing the path we took to accomplish a unique, cohesive design system for multiple sites within a single Content Management System (CMS) platform installation.

While working on a responsive refresh of the Upshot website I came across some buggy behavior when mixing an off-canvas menu with a fixed position element on the page. I realize that fixed elements have had a history of bugginess in iOS and detailed articles have already been written. However, I hadn’t seen what was occurring for me […]

As a web developer the potential for career stagnation – feeling stuck, idle, and lacking progression – is higher than average. With technology constantly being improved and reinvented it’s amazingly easy to find yourself falling behind. I’ve felt this way several times over the years, to the point where I’ve started to also notice what […]

I had a friend ask me earlier this week if I knew of any resources that could point him in the right direction on how to create a page of tabular data that had the ability to be both filtered and sorted. We both weren’t able to find anything suitably simplified so the underlying concepts […]

Pad, Reduce, Chunk I lumped these three functions together because I doubt I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve used any of them. Though once you understand what they do there are several applications for them that would make development cleaner if not also just plain easier. Here they are in […]

I find that I go through productivity phases, generally the two I am most cognizant of are what I can loosely refer to as recharge and release. When recharging I feel I read a lot more than usual. I catch up on a backlog of articles I flagged, dig into books I had been meaning […]

Web developers are tasked with remembering several different programming languages in order to effectively get the job done. HTML, CSS, & Javascript are the big three of course, but there are others such as Coffeescript, SCSS, XML that help workflow and facilitate tasks. Backend devs also commonly need to know scripting languages (e.g. PHP, Ruby […]

I’ve been working with PHP for several years, dare I say a decade at this point, and I’m still surprised at functions I’ve never or rarely used. In an attempt to share in my delight of discovering these gems and hopefully enlighten others to some very helpful functions, I’m going to try to start a […]

Just came across a new issue I hadn’t dealt with before, apparently once a file (in my case a very large error_log file) reaches 2GB or 2,147,483,647 bytes it can’t work with the file anymore. In this case the system couldn’t write to the error log and threw an Internal Server Error. I didn’t realize what the […]

For the longest time, I’ve been unconsciously transposing URI and URL (with the occasional sprinkling of “web address”) in conversations and correspondences without ever really considering that they are abbreviations for two different things. That is until I decided to finally read up on these confounding abbreviations and got the proper info on the real difference between URL and URI. So you […]

After over 7 years of calling sleepingawake.net my internet home — in all its random incarnations over the years — I felt it was time for a change. A change spurred on by the fact that THE domain name I’ve been lusting over for years finally became available. After all, what self respecting web developer doesn’t have […]

With a mixture of a few techniques added to the .htaccess or httpd.conf files, you can reduce the pageload and the bandwith usage of your website fairly easily. In the examples below i’m referring to expressions for addition to .htaccess, the http.conf file may be structured differently to do the same things. I’m setting this […]

I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of information on this topic so I thought i’d share the top ten things that matter to me when creating and querying databases. Make the fields of your tables as […]

For many of us the difference between 1099 Independent Contractors and W-2 Employees is very clear for various reasons. But there are many out there that either never encountered it or never thought to discover their differences. In this article, I will try to provide you with the necessary information so that you can determine […]