Ye olde geeky blog

I use XAMPP for my PHP web development. My wife designs the sites that I work with, and sometimes she needs to access my local web server from her PC. Usually that's as easy as typing in my PC's network name in her browser and she can access everything on my localhost. Since a few days ago, it stopped working. She even tried using my IP address directly in her browser, but that too, didn't work. Then I remembered, Windows 10 updated something a while back, and I guess it was then when this issue started. Turned out, I had to allow port 80 over my Windows Firewall again. So, if you're running Windows 10, here's how to do that: Press the Start button, and type in Firewall, then click on Windows Firewall with Advanced Security at the top: This will open up the Firewall window, which looks like this: (click on the image to see it bigger if you need to) What we want to do is set up a new Inbound Rule, so at the top left, click on Inbound Rules: The...

South Africa is slowly but surely getting on the online shopping bandwagon, and we have a few big online retailers, but the one I'm going to be talking about in this blog post is Takealot. They used to be called take2, but there was some issue with the name so they changed it. They've also absorbed Kalahari a few months ago, so I think it's safe to say they're the biggest online shop in SA. We buy from them often. Especially because they deliver for free if you order over a certain amount, and they have those damn daily deals which are hard to resist. But, and it saddens me a great deal to say this - their searching SUCKS. Finding an item on Takealot is akin to finding that proverbial needle in the haystack. It's much more difficult than it's supposed to be. So many times I've searched for something on Takealot, then I'm bombarded with irrelevant results. And complaining about this on their social media doesn't do anything. Now, I'm a web...

Hi there, thank you for visiting this blog. Please will you be so kind and follow me on Twitter as well? See my Twitter details on the right hand side of this blog. By the way, do you also have a blog? Want to know how I got my Twitter feed to the right here? It's actually quite simple once you know how, but allow me to take the guesswork out of it ok... Obviously, you need to be logged in on your Blogger account, and be editing the blog where you want your Twitter feed to go. On the left, you'll see a bunch of options like so: Third from the bottom you'll see the Layout link - click on that, which brings you here (obviously yours will look different to mine): A Gadget is what you want to add to your blog. Before you do that, head on over to your Twitter profile - we want to get a widget code from there which we'll add to your blog. Once on your Twitter page, click on your Icon at the top, and hit Settings: This will open up a page with this on the ...

For the last 6 months or so I've been working in Drupal, which is one of the top open source content management systems out there. I was kinda thrown in the deep end with it - I had a customer who really wanted me to do their website, and was actually willing to pay me to learn Drupal. So I did. And I'm super impressed with it as a CMS. It is quite a complicated system to learn from scratch, but not impossible. I silly mistake to make is to assume that you know Drupal if you already know PHP, HTML, JS, CSS and MySQL. Knowledge in those things help, yes, but it's a brand new system to get to know. Anyway, one thing I really like is that chances are, there's a module for that - this is a very popular saying among Drupal developers - because it's such a popular CMS, there are thousands of developers doing the grunt work and help expand and develop the platform, and as I found with my first big Drupal site, 9 out of 10 times there actually is a module for that! He...

I always kicked against open source CMS's quite heavily, mostly because I personally found that regular people, and by that I mean people who aren't in IT or web development, struggle to use them. That was why I created my own CMS. The whole idea behind it was to be a very straightforward way of managing stuff in a database. It didn't have advanced things like modules or templates and stuff like that, the backend and frontend were two separate entities. At the end of last year I had a client who really wanted me to do their site in Drupal, and even offered to pay me to learn how to work with it. Their reason is a good one - if I die (sounds a bit harsh, but it's a legitimate concern for a big client), who will be able to carry on with the site. Drupal is one of the top three CMS's on the internet. Anyway, I was very reluctant, but I thought, hey might as well do it and learn something new. I started studying Drupal. I watched numerous tutorial series about t...