Learn Web Development using Udemy's Top online courses in Web Development. Learn Wordpress, PHP, Laravel, web development, web design and more. Read More

MagPi's 's Twitter account was asking if anyone has any good air conditioning Raspberry Pi projects, but so far no one has made one which is appalling in this UK heatwave (currently over 30C). After some time into the conversation, this article popped up, and as you can see he has made quite a mess of the copper piping, but it gives you a general idea for how to build your homemade air conditioner system. For much more improved designs, I recommend you check out this article that showcases a… Read More

If you have a Blog in a CMS which isn't Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla, then you will likely not have some automated way to post your new blog posts over to Twitter or Facebook. I have started using IFTTT to automate a lot of my workflow, but I couldn't find any applets which would automatically post my feed items to Facebook or Twitter. I then went and created my own RSS applets, but hard coded the URL as it was just for my personal use. I then thought to myself "I bet other people may find this… Read More

I am taking part in what seems like a crazy event, but I am super stoked and will be looking forward to taking part and supporting an awesome charity. It is a Crossfit event held at CrossFit Cheltenham and it's 24 workouts on the hour, every hour for a complete time of 24 hours. I am aiming to take part in the full 24 hours and will be live streaming it on Periscope/Twitter , you can follow me if you would like to watch. If you would like to help support me, then you can follow this link to… Read More

Laravel - Up and Running: A Framework for Building Modern PHP Apps Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk Matt Stauffer What sets Laravel apart from other PHP web frameworks? Speed and simplicity, for starters. This rapid application development framework and its vast ecosystem of tools let you quickly build new sites and applications with clean, readable code. With this practical guide, Matt Stauffer-a leading teacher and developer in the Laravel community-provides the definitive introduction to one of… Read More

Working Effectively with Legacy Code Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk Michael C. Feathers The average book on Agile software development describes a fairyland of greenfield projects, with wall-to-wall tests that run after every few edits, and clean & simple source code. The average software project, in our industry, was written under some aspect of code-and-fix, and without automated unit tests. And we can't just throw this code away; it represents a significant effort debugging and maintaining. It… Read More

Testing for Facebook's IFTTT applet. Read More

Today, Barclays fixed some major issues which it had with Windows 10 mobile devices running on the creators update. First issue it ran into when this update was released was a message saying "Sorry, Barclays Mobile Banking is not supported on jailbroken devices". I thought that as I was running on the insiders update, it may have been some new measures to ensure the app was being run securely. I tried coming off the Insiders updates, reset my phone and was still received with the same message… Read More

This is a test for the If This Then That service for my Blog feed. Read More

This little command is a lifesaver and will save you so much time when switching and merging previous branches in your GIT workflow. See the little minus symbol at the end? That basically tells GIT you want to checkout the previous branch, or merge the previous branch. This will also work with rebasing and any other command which uses branches. Say you were in master branch and wanted to switch to that new PR request your colleague has submitted, you would do something like this... You look at… Read More

I recently had this given to me as a Christmas present and I think it's time to give it a review. This controller is a beast and I doubt I have yet to use this controller to it's full potential. It has so many knobs and triggers that you feel a bit lost when using it for the first time. However, after a few rounds and a bit of customisation, you really begin to love it and find that it can work to your advantage really well. I have played a lot of Gears of War 4 using this controller and feel… Read More

Don't just rely on your blog's RSS feed This is probably the most important lesson I learnt when creating my blog and it could be yours as well. Firstly, I used a tool which generates an RSS feed for me, once I did this, I thought I was done and little did I know just how wrong I was. You see, when you have an RSS feed, you don't have any analytics on who is subscribing and no one can easily subscribe to you, no matter what tool they're using. Once you have your feed set up, you need to use an… Read More

We are now into the new year (Happy New Year everyone) and usually at this time, everyone is looking to either lose weight, or become more healthy or even a combination of the two. As a Web Developer who has been in the field for just shy of 4 years, I think I have found a good way to keep myself motivated to becoming fit and healthy and would like to share it with you in the hopes you too can become more healthy. Within this industry, it's very hard to want to do anything before or after… Read More

I have just released a dev branch of my first ReactJS application which utilises Firebase database. If you are looking to build a ReactJS application, then I encourage you to clone my repo and create any PRs which you think will be helpful towards the project. You can also preview my ReactJS blogging app here and please let me know what you think of it. ReactJS Github repo Preview Blogging Application You can contact me through comments on this blog post, or you can message me on GH with any… Read More

I never do the "New year, New me" bullshit, I have always believed that the end of the year is a time to reflect what we have done over the past few years and what we can improve upon for the new year to come. Let's start with looking back at what happened with myself. I have gone through two workplaces, my first workplace was struggling with money and had to let some people go, me being one of them ( Sound familiar? ). The other company had to let me go due to me not being able to pick things… Read More

EAT MORE. BUILD MUSCLE. BURN FAT. Lean in 15: The Shape Plan introduces a new way of eating and training to build lean muscle and burn more fat. Joe Wicks, aka The Body Coach, has helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their bodies and feel amazing. In the Shape Plan, he shares 100 delicious recipes and four new workouts to take your fitness to the next level. Are you ready to start your transformation and get Lean in 15? Joe Wicks has become a loveable character with his charm and… Read More

EAT MORE, EXERCISE LESS AND LOSE FAT 'This isn't a strict diet - it's a lifestyle that will transform your body and the way you eat forever. Once I teach you how to fuel your body properly, you will never need to follow a low-calorie diet again.' In his first book, Joe Wicks, aka The Body Coach, reveals how to SHIFT your body fat by eating more and exercising less. Lean in 15 features 100 recipes for nutritious, quick-to-prepare meals and guides you through Joe's signature HIIT (High Intensity… Read More

6 months ago, I had been given a Microsoft band 2 as a loving birthday present. I thought it was a great device which had so many great features, but unfortunately the wear and tear of the device eventually let it down. The microsoft band 2 is definitely a sought after device with lots of great features such as GPS, UV sensor, a multitude of reminders and a fantastic alarm clock. After setting the device up, I would go for a so many walks and speak to others around me about how fantastic this… Read More

I have started seeing the sudden increase in AI and bots and I am so excited to see where this is heading. First we had Microsoft introduce Tay the Twitter AI which unfortunately saw it's demise when it got turned into a racist drug dealer. Tay displayed just how powerful their AI could be even if it turned against the rules set to keep it at bay. Next, we saw Microsoft give a centralised API for Microsoft apps which is a pretty neat. Then Facebook decided we need to chat to robots in order to… Read More

Last time I updated you guys on this, I only had a list of ideas and how it would initially pan out. I have now started the project and published the repo onto GitHub (which can be found here ). If you would like to contribute then I would whole heartedly appreciate any contributions, pull requests or feedback on the project. I must warn you guys that it is literally just started, but so far I have implemented Dingo and JWT tokens as part of the API. You can also find my todo list publicly… Read More

I found this MagPi Tutorial to be a really nice starting project for my newly purchased Pi 3. However, I did run into a few problems which I will address in this Blog post. You can pretty much follow either this post, or the MagPi one, but my post will address any issues I had when following their tutorial. So to start, they requested I find the Mac address for both my phone and PC. I followed their advice for looking on my phone, but the Mac address was long and full of dashes which looking… Read More

If you're looking forward to what Laravel 5.3 has to offer then I would definitely recommend that you watch this video of Taylor Otwell which goes into detail on what the latest version has to offer. It is pretty long at 1 hour and 36 minutes, but my gosh is it worth it. https://streamacon.com/video/laracon-us/taylor-otwell-laravel-53-overview Read More

The last two days I have been keeping an eye on the Laracon US live stream shown on StreamACon and while the first day of the stream didn't go too well, the second days stream has been phenomenal (Review will be coming soon). The reason for this post however, is to talk about the new features in Laravel 5.3 and oh boy has he put a lot in. First off, he has removed a lot of unneeded folders, but these can be placed back in by running the simple artisan commands for when they are actually needed… Read More

In my last post, I said how I would create a new open sourced social networking website and I would start out on the API. To get us started, I am using the latest Lumen build and will extend it with Dingo and JWT Tokens for authentication. First and foremost, I feel that the database and API endpoints are the most important parts of our application and is what I will begin to build out. I will start with the basics, user profile, comments, friendship etc and then build out a nice messaging… Read More

A long while back, I said I would love to create and document making a social networking website using the Laravel framework, well that hasn't happened, like at all. Instead, I have started to build an API based in Lumen which I hope to open source once the main functionality has been built into it. Once the API starts to take shape, I would then like to build an open source website which interacts with the API and then also open source the website. Developers will then have a choice, they can… Read More

As some of you readers may know me by now and possibly read my previous post . Which explained how I went through a hard time with work and built up a lot of anxiety with myself and I felt as though I wasn't a good enough developer. Well, I wanted to update on my progress as this year I was made redundant once again, and it was for the same reason. The company was in a struggle to find funding and therefore had to make some cuts. My family were worried that I would slip again and get the same… Read More

I started listening to a great Podcast series which talks a lot about different PHP and server technologies and on one of the later episodes, they talk about ReactPHP . ReactPHP is a great asynchronous solution for PHP and it offers non-blocking async which is fantastic and can be easily compared to NodeJS (although we won't be doing that here). I have now started exploring the technology and what it is capable of, one of my great project ideas is to have it listen on Twitter's Streaming… Read More

As a few of you may know, I have been using Docker for some time to deploy my site with. It's been a great learning experience for me and is something I wish to carry on with. However, because of the nature of the beast, and the lack of knowledge I have with the technology, I have decided that I shouldn't be using it to host my live Blog when I am still learning how it works. Therefore, I have decided to create a new DO Droplet and deploy my site with Laravel Forge . This is a cheap, but… Read More

I want to introduce you guys to an awesome e-commerce API called Moltin . It takes out so much hard work when it comes to creating an e-commerce platform and I have been working with the API to try and create an open source Laravel e-commerce platform which utilises the Moltin API as the core part of the app. I won't go into details of my app just yet as it isn't released yet, but I just wanted my readers to get excited about the potential of using Moltin as their e-commerce backbone… Read More

This evening, I had myself a little challenge. I would turn my two containers (MariaDB and my own built container) into more containers, but using the power of Docker's official container repos. E.g. I would have 3 containers in total PHP7-FPM, NGINX and my already created MariaDB. If you don't know my steps I previously created, you can check it out here and skip to MariaDB for your database container and settings. First off, I used the PHP container and followed instructions to have a PHP… Read More

At the beginning of this week, I had decided to give myself a little project of creating an app for the Windows 10 ecosystem. I wanted to my website to be a Windows 10 app and I wanted to create this with as little effort as possible. After a little searching around, I managed to find Project Westminster . You can use Visual Studio to create a web app which is a wrapper for your site, but I remember reading that you can use a web based version and have something created for you with 0 code… Read More

I want to share with you how I am hosting my website with Digital Ocean (hosting company) and Docker (places your app in containers). First off, I created my droplet on DO and used the docker image from the list of "One-click Apps". The droplet was the $10 a month size as I don't currently need anything more. (If you want to try Docker for a month or two then click here ). After going through the setup process, I accessed my server through SSH and downloaded the Ubuntu image. Once I have… Read More

I am really stoked to show you guys my brand new Blog built with October CMS . For my hosting, I have used Digital Ocean (click the link for $10 free). Digital Ocean is a fantastic hosting company which I just love to use as they give you complete control over your VPS, and they even give you One-click apps to help you get started. The technology I am using to drive my Blog is Docker , NGINX , PHP 7 and Maria DB . I don't believe I have containerized each of my instances as much as I… Read More

I have started using Laravel's View Composers which come in handy when you have a navigation bar that constantly needs certain data. For example, you have an ecommerce store and you need to poll how many items a user has in their basket on pretty much every page they move onto, or you need a login/register button when a user isn't logged in and then a profile options button when they are. You could be really lazy and add the same code/query into every single controller, which yes, that will work… Read More

It has been a year since I had been let go from from previous employment and whilst the circumstances were understandable, it really did hit me. It was something which was unexpected and I really thought I was going somewhere with the comapany and expected to be there for at least 3 years. When they told me the circumstances, I tried to fight my corner in order to carry on working for them, but because they were struggling themselves, there was nothing that they nor I could do. My mind was all… Read More

I want to show you guys just how quick and easy it easy to get a Laravel project up and running alongside Vagrant/Homestead. 1 . Head over to your chosen directory and run something like... or if you have the Laravel installer... This will create a Laravel project directory with everything installed inside the given PROJECTNAME folder. 2 . When you cd into your PROJECTNAME directory, you can run the following... This will add Homestead into your Composers require attribute under the dev tag… Read More

This is a quick post to details some issues I have found when trying to use Docker within a Mac or Windows environment. I had been following this tutorial on how to get Laravel up and running on Docker and my first pain I came across has been shared with both Mac and Windows environments. Basically, when you go to mount a volume, by default you can only mount local directories in your User folder. To fix this, you first need to open up your VirtualBox GUI. Click on your current VM and click on… Read More

I just want to write to my Blog followers and notify you all that I have been relatively busy lately and that is the reason for lack of any posts. I have just been employed by a company called CreateANet . They specialise in app development, so it's an exciting time for me and my future. I have been settling in for the past couple of weeks and all seems to be going well thus far. I am also taking a week off work this week to look after my mum, it may give me some free time to create a few… Read More

Last week I promised that I will be creating some tutorials regarding Oauth and Laravel's Socialite plugin. Today, we will start with setting up each website and creating on app on these sites to accept our Oauth requests. Firstly, we will start with Facebook, then head on over to Twitter and Google+. I am using these as my website won't be for developers, it will be for everday people so I don't expect them to have a Github or Linkedin account. If however, I want to implement these at a later… Read More

I've seen a couple of questions regarding the error "Curl: (60) SSL certificate : Unable to get local issuer certificate" and thought I would post some steps on the best way of setting it up locally. I use XAMPP as my local development environment, but this will work with WAMP or LAMP enviroments too. (I know I should use Vagrant as my local environment, but I haven't got round to getting it up and running just yet). Firstly, we need to download an SSL certificate to use for our local set up, to… Read More

Lots have been going on recently, so I do apologise for not writing a post as of late. I had to be made redundant by my previous employee due to lack of funds and not being able to push enough work my way. Luckily, the guys there are pretty cool and was happy to be my reference for any future employment. I was really lucky to find a new workplace and as soon as I left, I started my new position with Pulse8 Broadband . Now I am working on a single website and trying to push it up to be an… Read More

Just recently at work, I had to change the way my news articles worked. We have a client who has Holiday Homes, and they have news articles per park. When I redeveloped the website in Laravel, I created a one to many relationship based on one park has many news articles. I really should have created a many to many relationship, as there could be the same articles per park, but I was young and naive. Because I worked in this way, I needed to figure out a way where I could have the same or similar… Read More

As you can see, it has been a while since my last post, but I have been busy trying to push updates over to my website to help strengthen the relationships between you and I. You can now share any articles you like by scrolling to the bottom of each article and click on the "Share This" button. Each social website which you can share with will pop up. I do however need to improve on this so it will automate text titles, images (when I start adding them) and using selected paragraphs. I would… Read More

I've been developing a couple of projects which use UTF-8 encoding on my databases, but have found that this has been problematic recently. Mobile phones and tablets now use emoticons which can cause problems for us UTF-8 users. So how do we fix this issue? Well let me explain below... Recently, I was testing out one of my creations and sent a message using an emoticon. Laravel started spitting out errors and it confused me as to why this was happening. After a quick search, I found that in… Read More

It's been a while since I've post and for that, I do appologise. My head has been loaded with ideas and new projects that I absolutely would love to get started on, but I tend to try and start 100 all at once and then get too agitated because none of them are working for me or just get pushed away. My first idea was to create a better, not so bland website. This idea has been around ever since I created my Blog, but I never got round to it because I wanted to make larger projects. It's now… Read More

I needed a way to change the sort order of my data inside of an admin interface which I have created. After a little looking around, I found many tutorials which would show how to get this done with JQuery, but wouldn't show the best way to handle this data (and in my case using Laravel to handle this data). I dug around for quite a bit, but I ended up finding this lovely little tutorial by dragonfire1119 which was called How To Use Jquery UI Sortable In Laravel 4 . (Okay, so I might have… Read More

For this tutorial, I will show you guys how I managed to create an image uploader for your profile image. This is very similar to how Facebook's/Twitter's functionality. First of all, lets create the routes, for this we will need to create a get and post route... Remember that you can name the controllers and methods anything you like, as long as you keep everything consistant. Now we need to create the controllers and methods which are as follows... We are trying to get the user's information… Read More

This will be a fairly simple tutorial as I'm not re-creating the wheel here. I started by developing a login/registration system by myself until I start talking to people in Laravel's IRC. There is a package which did everything I needed it to do which was as follows... Register a user with the following credentials; Username, Email, Password and of course Confirm Password. The user then gets sent an email to confirm registration. User confirms registration and can now use the website by logging… Read More

I've had a lot to think about when it comes to the where I want to take my website. Firstly, do I really want to take on such a big task of trying to beat Facebook on my own, when they have a huge team? The answer to that is no, no I don't. I have always had some great ideas with what I wanted to do, but the fact is, I couldn't carry this out on my own. What could I do instead? I figured I should go for something which possibly hasn't been done before, but it could be similar to something which… Read More

Last week some time, I received a phone call from Virgin Media. The caller said he would like to talk to me regarding my account, which at first seemed fairly legit. I asked him what the problem was and to his response, I was shocked. The reply was "Firstly Michael, I need to know your password". I told him that I'm not giving him my password as he rang me, he knows that he is talking to the correct person. I personally felt like this could have easily been some fraudulent call, so after him not… Read More

Just today, I was looking at using a ternary operator in Laravel's Blade templating system and thought to myself... "There must be a better way of doing this". After a quick Google aanndd... BEHOLD THE OR STATEMENT! Since version 4.1 they managed to sneak in this "or" statement and it's managed to bypass so many people (I figured this out by the lack of voices shouting about this on Google). So, instead of doing something like this... You can try using "or" like so... And there you have it… Read More

In my office, I'm the only one who fully supports Windows Phone as an operating system. My fellow colleagues disagree with me and would rather have either an android phone or iPhone. I would like to make a quick post on why I chose Windows over Android and Apple and why I think Windows phones are the winners. Like android, Windows has been able to get it's OS into many phones, which I think is fantastic because it gives the user more choice and is why I would choose it over Apple any time. Apple… Read More

I have been in the Laravel chats for quite a while now and one question which I see requarly is how to remove the public/index.php directory in Localhost. The easiest way to do this (and the way I always use) is to open up your Command prompt or Terminal and cd into the main directory of your project then run "php artisan serve". That's it. You're done. Don't believe me? Check out http://localhost:8000 and admire your Laravel work. Another way, but a bit more complicated would be to set up a… Read More

I have managed to create a dynamic navigation package which can be seen in my previous post. If you go to Packagist you will be able to find my package under checkeredmichael/navigation. I have created a readme with this package which should get you started on implementing it within your own projects. I would like to get as many people as possible to use this package and come back with feedback/bug fixes. This is my very first public package and I will be using it to expand on other packages… Read More

Learn more Laravel here Thanks to this very Laravel topic over at Laravel.io and Josh Benham I managed to find out how to make my very own dynamic menu (which is great if you would like to make a reusable admin package). In this tutorial, I will show you exactly how it's done and hopefully you will now be able to make amazing admin packages for Laravel. For those that just want the package then you can download it the Laravel dynamic navigation package . Otherwise, continue below. First off… Read More

Recently I have been finding out the slight differences between Windows and Linux for use with Laravel and Composer. One difference is Windows isn't picky with the way you set out Composer's packages which can be a major problem. Here's the issue I had and what I had to do to get it going... As you can see, I placed all of my private vps URL's into one JSON object. On Windows, everything was fine and dandy, nothing was overwritten and everything could be found easily. However, when I placed it… Read More

I've been wanting to make a social networking website for a long time, one which will rival the big guys. I also thought about maybe doing it following the footsteps of Mark Zuckerberg by recording my steps live on my Blog and get feedback to what others think. That way, I can create something which everyone wants and unleash something which almost everyone will love. I will also release any tutorial worthy stuff as I go through my development to help anyone else who are thinking of making their… Read More

Previously on a project, I had to have a slug within my routes which would point to two different tables within my database. I needed a controller which would do the thinking for me. And by this I mean, in my routes I would have... And in my Controller I would have the following to do the thinking for me... So here we have our logic saying if there is anything in the page table where the slug matches, show the page with that slug else show a blog post with the matching slug. This might not be… Read More

Here I go again, on my quest of becoming a Web Master. It's been a while since I properly posted onto my Blog and so I wondered the best way to go about this as I went back to my old site and old Blog. Looking at it, I couldn't help but think that the way of making temaplates on Blogger was a bit too tedius and slap-dashed. And as I am now using Laravel at work and starting to feel like it is such a great tool to use, I felt like I should start my new site using a platform which embraces the… Read More