Sending Emails

January 7, 2018

Rails email

When action mailer fails to deliver to Hotmail/Outlook email accounts… A short note on sending mail from a Rails application ( action_mailer ) to a Microsoft Hotmail account, but the email never arrives in Hotmail/Outlook. After investigation, it looks like Hotmail probably only likes one email address per origin / server IP address. If you send an email from the same server but change the email address, then hotmail will silently block it. ... Read more

Let’s Encrypt automatic SSL certificate renewal on a single AWS instance

August 14, 2017

Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS Elastic Beanstalk EC2

How we configured Elastic Beanstalk to play nicely with automatic certificate renewal by Let’s Encrypt. Everyone it seems is going with Let’s Encrypt to generate their free SSL/TLS ceritficate. Running it once is easy, but getting it configured to work with Elastic Beanstalk and EC2’s lifecycle can send you round in circles. This post is an update of the original January 2017 post with our improved configuration. The configuration needs to cater for ALL of these scenarios: ... Read more

Hugo website SEO

August 9, 2017

Hugo SEO

You want to be found on the web. Search Engines want to help… Hugo or your Hugo theme might provide some SEO components out of the box, but consider adding what it doesn’t, then tell google; bing and other search engines about your site. Part 1: Add SEO elements to your website See also about SEO elements -> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides 1. Configuration: By default Hugo or your Hugo theme will give you: ... Read more

Hugo website on GitLab Pages

August 6, 2017

Hugo GitLab Hosting SSL/TLS Let’s Encrypt

How we created a static website with Hugo and hosted it on GitLab Pages with our custom domain secured with a SSL/TLS certificate, for free. With Hugo + GitLab Pages + Let’s Encryptyou get: Static website generator. Auto-deploy on checkin. Free hosting. Custom domain AND secured with SSL/TLS encryption. Free Let’s Encrypt certificate. Previously we had [setup our website on GitHub] (/post/hugo-website-on-githubpages/) but with one major drawback: Github Pages doesn’t currently support SSL/TLS certificates with a custom domain. ... Read more

Wordpress to Hugo

August 2, 2017

Blog Hugo Github

How we migrated a Wordpress blog to a Hugo generated website (and hosted it on GitHub Pages for free), without too much fuss. Part 1: Export from Wordpress to Hugo format: Being on the free tier of Wordpress, it was not possible to run any of the excellent looking tools that [hugo recommends] (https://gohugo.io/tools/migrations/). So instead we opted to use the wp2hugo.go tool to process the downloaded export file from Wordpress into markdown files, as explained [here] (https://eklausmeier. ... Read more

Hugo website hosted on GitHub Pages

August 2, 2017

Hugo GitHub Hosting

How we created a static website using Hugo and hosted it on GitHub Pages, for free. With Hugo + GitHub Pagesyou get: Static website generator. Auto-deploy on checkin. Free hosting. Custom domain (not secured with SSL/TLS encryption). With GitHub Pages your URL optionsare: Encrypted sub domain of GitHub Pages, for example: https://mygitname.github.io/mywebsite. Unencrypted custom domain, for example: http://mycustomdomain. If you want to use a custom domain and SSL/TSL encryption, consider using GitLab instead: see blog post [Hugo website hosted on GitLab Pages] (/post/hugo-website-on-gitlabpages/). ... Read more

VMware Workstation

May 27, 2017

VMware

A short note on VMware Workstation. VMware Workstation is a great tool. But accepting an upgrade can run into problems. If after installing an upgrade, when you try to start a VM you may see this popup message: If you are running VMware from Windows: Confirm that “VMware Authorization Service” service is running ( i.e ‘Started’ ) Check if VMware Player shows up in the list of installed programs The 2nd problem means the update process didn’t properly register the program. ... Read more

Rails 5 Progressive Web App - part 2

December 17, 2016

PWA

Inspired by some evangelical Progressive Web App (PWA) posts, we wanted to see what PWA goodness we could bring to our Rails 5, Turbolinks 5, Websocket-using web project. So this post is about what steps we have taken thus far. In Part 1, we added service workers and achieved the “Installable”, “Discoverable” and “App-like” and “Connectivity-independent” improvements. Now in Part 2 we look at achieving “Re-engageable”: User re-engagement with displayed push notifications via service workers, even when a tab is not open. ... Read more

Rails 5 Progressive Web App

December 13, 2016

PWA

Inspired by some evangelical Progressive Web App (PWA) posts, we wanted to see what PWA goodness we could bring to our Rails 5, Turbolinks 5, Websocket-using web project. So this post is about what steps we have taken thus far. We are coming at this from a web-first approach, we are following the Basecamp route into mobile with turbolinks-android. Our mobile development effort has mostly gone thus far into product re-design: stripping back and simplifying views to optomise for the more intimate phone format. ... Read more

Upgrading d3 from v3 to v4

July 31, 2016

d3.js

We recently upgraded to d3js v4.1.0. Here is what we did to fix the breaking changes: After the upgrade our data visualizations stopped being generated, and on a closer look we were getting this js error in Chrome: It turns out d3js v4.1.0 is a major rewrite with several breaking changes, so be prepared to spend half a day looking at it. Fortunately the d3.js documentation is very comprehensive, including the documented changes which is a must read. ... Read more