James Nock's Blog

An improved GitHub deployment workflow

2024-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of days ago I blogged about how to deploy SvelteKit websites to a digital ocean droplet. Near the end of that post I offered a github workflow file but noted that it was basic and could be improved. Well here it is...

How to deploy SvelteKit Sites to a DigitalOcean droplet

2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

With all the recent fuss about a certain cloud provider billing someone a huge amount of money for a simple website that experienced a DDoS attack, it got me wondering "how hard would it be to just deploy this stuff myself". The TL;DR is that it's not really that hard if you're patient.

Batch Processing with ImageMagick

2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

I recently had to process a large number of images in a couple of ways so I thought I’d log them down here.

Fix Microsoft Teams Login on Mac OSX

2021-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

A few of us at work have had huge issues with Microsoft Teams on our Macs with not being able to login for seemingly no reason at all. After a lot of messing around with uninstalling, reinstalling, restarting my machine etc. I finally dug in and got my hands dirty.

Convert PNG to ICO on Mac

2021-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

New website

2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

For quite some time now I’ve shuddered at the state of my own website, it’s been looking very tired for a long time now and it’s not really been fit for purpose either. I launched it on 31st August 2015 back when I was looking for clients for some freelance work and it did well for the few years I needed it. However, I’ve not wanted to take on any new clients for quite some time now as I’m just too busy. It was time to get something put together that serves as less of an advertisement and more of an ‘about me’. So I did.

CraftCMS Flipbuilder Plugin

2018-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, I ran into a problem whereby I needed to incorporate a magazine into a CraftCMS website that had been generated using a neat bit of software by the name of ‘FlipBuilder’. This would be a regular thing, so I was hoping I’d simply be able to drag and drop the outputted files into the templates folder and that it would magically work.

It didn’t.

Homebrew mcrypt mismatch PHP Startup: mcrypt: Unable to initialize module

2018-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

This has happened to me a few times over the years and I always forget how to fix it. I’m scribbling it down here as much for myself as I am for you.

MySQL 5.7.12 / CraftCMS install fix

2016-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

I recently upgraded to MySQL 5.7.12 before embarking on a new website build using CraftCMS (which, by the way, is a great bit of kit). I’ve never had a problem installing CraftCMS before, but the install kept failing afer installing version 5.7.12 of MySQL.

Why Gulp is Awesome

2016-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

I realised the other day that I had a project that contained 100’s of unminified JS files and decided to look for the most efficient way of automagically minifying them so that a) they are harder to read/unpick and b) the site will run faster; well web-application in this case.

I consulted the forums and got a tip to use ‘Gulp’.

My Setup

2015-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

So I thought I’d kick-off my blog with info about my setup; hardware and software. I think it’s safe to say that every developer has their preferences in regards to just about everything when it comes to development; there is an infinite number of ways to get to an end product. My setup comes from my own preferences and is neither better or worse than the next developer’s; it really does come down to personal preference.