C.S. Rhymes author of How NOT to make a website and How NOT to use a smartphone
Recently I had the opportunity to work on a new side project. I had already decided I wanted to use Laravel and Livewire, but I wasn’t sure about the frontend user interface. I had seen some demos of Flux UI and liked what I had seen, so decided to give it a try. Installation First things first, the installation was very easy in a new Laravel app as Flux UI was installed by default when I selected…
I thought I’d share some learnings about how to host a Next.js site with AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This is a minimum configuration to get a basic site up and running. Getting started In this example, we are going to create a new Next.js project, but the process should apply to existing projects too. The following command creates a folder called ‘my-app’ and creates a new Next.js app npx…
I’ve seen a few posts recently asking what other authors use for their website. There are many options available, but sometimes you just want a single page with links to your social media profiles and links to your books. This is where Bulma Clean Theme and GitHub pages can come to the rescue. The below may seem a bit of a different workflow to begin with from other website builders, as it is…
Building a modern website can sometimes lead you to be so far separated from the end result that is sent to the user. Developers can end up focusing on building sites with component based frontend frameworks, fetching data from APIs and installing hundreds of npm dependencies. We can become more interested in writing great code in their chosen programming language than what we serve to the website…
When I launched my cozy mystery series, The Little-Astwick Mysteries, I decided to create a new website to promote it. But I made a few mistakes with SEO that have led to a few issues with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Here is how I fixed them. www or non-www subdomain The site is built using Jekyll, which has a _config.yml file where you can specify your site_url that is used to build all the…
I created a free account for Codepen to provide a demo with my blog post about ‘Creating a custom toggle in TailwindCSS’ but it took me a little while to figure out how to use Tailwindcss with codepen. So, this is what I did to get it working. Add the Play CDN Looking at the get started guide in Tailwindcss documentation, it states: Use the Play CDN to try Tailwind right in the browser without any…
I’ve only just started using TailwindCSS, (I know late to the party huh), and I wanted to create a custom toggle switch that looked a bit nicer than a standard checkbox. This blog post goes through some of the thought processes and the tools that Tailwindcss v4 has out of the box that you can make use of. Starting with the Checkbox As I said, I wanted a checkbox to look nice, but what was really…
Amazon KDP gives you a basic text editor for your book’s blurb, but here are five observations that I have made from researching other books. All of the examples are taken from Mystery books in the Amazon UK store. 1. Use bold text Use bold text in your description to highlight important hooks or tropes to catch the readers attention. Highlighting words or lines helps them stand out from…
I have seen a few posts on Threads recently asking what software people use to format their books. This is one option out of many, but I thought I would share my current workflow to give authors an insight into the pros and cons. I use Google Docs to write. This is because I find it easy to use, it’s free, has a grammar and spell checker, and it syncs to the cloud and between my various devices. I…
There are lots of possible hosting solutions available for Laravel, from Forge, to Vapor to the new Laravel Cloud. I’ll start out by saying that these other solutions are much easier to get up and running than beanstalk, but I thought I’d share some of the “fun” I had getting it up and running. If you have to use AWS for hosting, and for whatever reason, you can’t make use of Forge or Vapor, then…