So I recently purchased an Amazon Echo and I wanted to be able to add todos to my list via my voice. However the built in task manager is extremely simple and I did not have any interest in the two options that can directly integrate with Echo. So I needed to find a better solution.
Quick tip I figured I would share. If you ever need to download a larger amount of images and you do not have FTP access and you know the URLs. Down Them All extension for Firefox is great.
So I have been wanting to build a WordPress installer for a while now. It is a lot of effort setting up multiple WordPress installs in the same basic configuration to start a project. I admit it I am extremely lazy but thats okay. I also wanted an excuse to build something with the Symfony Console component which makes building a CLI tool fairly easy.
A while ago I wrote a post on Setting Up Your Shell. I wanted to follow up with more information about ZShell and OHMyZSH. Since both have really made using the terminal a lot easier and more enjoyable. So check out Setting Up Your Shell to get up to speed. This will be a very high overview of configuring ZSHell and OHMyZSH.
Mailhog is a tool that allows all of your outgoing mail to be intercepted. This is great for your development environment since you may need to test things incrementally. You really do not want your clients or users receiving your test emails.
I was mentoring this month for Launchcode. it has been a pretty good experience so far it would have been a nice option when I was learning. Many people in the industry do not have a formal education background which is ok. I do not have a CS degree if I was younger when I decided to do this I would’ve. I did do a degree that was more based on web which I feel was helpful.
I still have not built anything with Statamic but it seems really promising. Even at $200 a license I believe it would be worth it. Well at least if you are working on a site for a business. I would like to use it for my personal site with the static file caching mode so it would be much like the static site I have now with Jekyll. In that case $200 may be a little too much since as a developer I am fine compiling my blog and deploying it.
WordCamp St. Louis was held this year again at Washington University St. Louis on May 14-15 2016. Over all it was a good time I always enjoy going to WordCamps. I figured I would post my notes here like I did last year just cause. I have added the slides that where available as of this posting you can checkout the full listing here. Some of the later notes on Saturday kind of trailed off because I decided to fix my blog after a few issues with Github Pages and Jekyll 3. One of the downfalls to Jekyll being so easy to write with being Markdown at its core and all makes it sometimes difficult to upgrade.
I recently posted an overview of how to setup Web Sockets using Laravel and Socket.io. I wanted to follow it up with a quick post on how to get the Web Sockets functioning correctly on a Digital Ocean server using Laravel Forge. I a going to assume that you have already gone through the setup process to provision a new server. Also that you have read the first post since the largest amount of work will lie there. I believe these steps should be identically for all hosting providers not Just Digital Ocean but do not quote me on that.
Working with WebSockets and Larvel is extremely easy! If you are new to Laravel it has an event system that you can use to dispatch events for other parts of your PHP code to use. As well as Laravel supports Redis and Pusher for dispatching events via WebSockets. Pusher is a fully hosted service that will handle the Node.js side of things for you. I hover will cover using Laravel events with Redis to broadcast events to Socket.io and using Supervisor to keep all the processes needed running by default. The current version of Laravel as of this writing is 5.2 which you should already have installed and I will be assuming you are using Laravel Homstead.
