George Buckingham

My setup for PHP / Laravel development on Apple Silicon M1

At the end of 2020 my trusty mid-2014 MacBook Pro died and was replaced with the latest generation MacBook Pro, running an Apple Silicon M1 Pro processor. The change in architecture away from Intel to Apples own ARM based CPU meant that some software would no longer run on my

2020 Year In Review

This is my first ever year in review blog post and I've sure picked an interesting year to start. Life as we knew it changed thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, but despite that I feel that I had a pretty good year from both a work and personal point of view.

Laravel

Laravel Upserts: How to batch import data efficiently

Released on 13 October 2020, Laravel 8.10 came with the addition of the new upsert() method on the database query builder (and therefore Eloquent based queries too). This allows you to perform "insert or update" queries far more efficiently - which will help when importing large batches of data.

Web Development

Do the right thing: Choose privacy focused analytics

Most website owners want to view analytics to see how many poeple are visiting their website(s) and how the site is been used so they can make improvements and produce content that their visitors are interested in viewing. For years the go-to tool for most website owners was Google

Laravel

What's new in Laravel 8?

As I'm sure you heard if you follow along with the Laravel community, the latest Laracon event was held on Wednesday, which was hosted online instead of the usual summer conference in the US. There were 15 fantastic speakers, but there was one that everybody was waiting for. Taylor Otwell

Laravel

Real time charts with Laravel Livewire & ChartJS

I've recently been trying out Laravel Livewire (a new JS framework for adding front-end interactivity to your Laravel applications) by updating a personal project of mine, a home network monitoring tool. This post explains how I built auto-updating ("real time") charts using Laravel Livewire and ChartJS. IntroductionBefore trying Livewire, I

Laravel

Which is the best Laravel cache driver for performance?

The Laravel cache can bring speed improvements to your web application. I compare the speed of each Laravel cache driver to see which is the best for performance.

Networking

How to find your Sky Fibre Broadband VDSL username & password

If you replace your Sky Fibre Broadband router, you'll need to find your VDSL username and password for connecting via MER / DHCP Option 61.

Laravel

Laravel error logging with Sentry

A tutorial for configuring better error logging, tracking and notifications in Laravel with Sentry.

Web Development

Parse a YouTube RSS feed with my PHP package

Use my open source PHP package to parse a YouTube RSS feed and embed YouTube videos in your website.

WordPress

WordPress 404 Error with Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

WordPress and the ACF plugin appears to randomly generate a 404 page not found error when saving a post, but is actually caused by Apache mod_security.

Laravel

Laravel 5.2 Authentication Custom User Providers

Learn how to build custom user providers / authentication drivers for your Laravel web application.

WordPress

WordPress With Load Balancer SSL Termination

Lean how to fix the WordPress redirect loop that occurs when SSL is terminated at a load balancer.

Web Development

Forwarded SSL with the PHP Happyr LinkedIn API client

Solve "[Uncaught Exception] Could not get access token" PHP exception when working with the Happyr LinkedIn API client library.

WordPress

Working with WordPress & GIT

Avoid cowboy coding techniques and learn how to keep your WordPress website project in GIT version control.

Web Development

An introduction to website loading time optimisation

Follow along with my tutorial for improving the loading time of your website. Nobody likes a slow website - not your users and not Google.

Web Development

Deploy your PHP website with Capistrano

A beginners guide on using Capistrano to deploy a PHP website or web application to your server with zero downtime.

Web Development

Setup a Postfix (outgoing mail) server for PHP on Ubuntu

Learn how to install Postfix as an outgoing mail server on your Ubunutu web server for use with PHP.

Web Development

Heart & Sole Web Conference Review

A review of the Heart & Sole web design & development conference held at the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth in January 2011.

BBC Radio 1 Access All Areas Tour 2010

A review of the BBC Radio 1 Access All Areas tour I was given at Yalding House, London in November 2010.

Web Development

Testing in Internet Explorer

A summary of the options available for testing websites in Microsoft Internet Explorer.