Some of my ramblings on tech, websites, and self-development.
Working with Google Cloud can be confusing for beginners and sometimes all you need is to manipulate a Google Sheet. I have a couple of use cases for downloading a sheet and uploading a sheet. I haven’t quite figured out the upload part yet, but I have got downloading to work. I’ve decided to write…
I had a task to add a Google Analytics ID to the user profile in LiveChat. We wanted to be able to match up the person we were chatting to with the analytics data in Google. This looked really simple according to their docs. You can just use the following function: What their docs failed…
Have you ever experienced broken deploys while using Nuxt? It can be frustrating when your build encounters errors, but still proceeds to deploy all the files, resulting in broken pages on your website. Fortunately, I discovered a handy Nuxt trick that prevents such broken deploys and ensures a more reliable deployment process. In my case,…
In today’s fast-paced digital world, attention spans are getting shorter, and users often have limited time to consume content. As a result, providing readers with an estimated reading time can be a valuable feature for any blog or content-based website. Why having a read time for a blog post is important Automatically generate a read…
Background A little while ago I read the following blog post, Web Component for a Code Block by Chris Coyier, it got me thinking about how I could enhance the code blocks on my website. This is a tech blog after all, and from time to time I want to share tips and tricks which involve…
My site is pretty small, so I don’t really need search functionality, but the Netlify Algolia plugin looked easy enough to use and a bit of fun. Diving into the docs, I got a bit overwhelmed. Algolia’s breadth of capabilities is huge. They definitely seem like the go-to for fully customisable search on a Jamstack…
My portfolio has some cards to showcase projects and blog posts. On mobile, these cards display in a horizontal slider, which is easy enough to scroll on a touchscreen, or trackpad, but what if someone is viewing the website at a small size on a device with a mouse? Well they can of course use…
This guide will help you use UFW (uncomplicated firewall) to block all traffic to your server other than traffic coming via Cloudflare, or for essential operations such as FTP and SSH. Why would you want to do this? Cloudflare will protect your site from all manner of attacks. However, your server may still be vulnerable.…
The third challenge was to create a calculator. I wanted to practise my CSS art and so chose an image of an old Casio calculator and tried to recreate it as closely as possible. It was quite a challenge creating the code for the calculator to function. It wasn’t as simple as just adding numbers…
The second challenge was to create a fitness app. I chose to make an activity tracker. I took inspiration from Lifelog, an app by Sony that I used for many years. I used the Google Maps API and created a component in Vue for the activities.