Personal website of Seb Duggan, a web developer in the UK. Writes about code, dogs, records, family history, and more.
My great-uncle Edwin pictured as a young man with the family dogs Exactly 85 years ago, on 27th May 1940, while the eyes of the nation were turned to the events unfolding on the beaches at Dunkirk, six RAF aircraft set out from Shetland to patrol the Norwegian coast, but only five returned. The three-man crew of the missing aircraft included my great-uncle Edwin; he was just 19 years old. Edwin…
Well, this is embarassing. It is exactly two years, to the day, since I posted about the reworking of my site in Eleventy . Specifically, I noted my lack of posting, and vowed to do better. Jump forward to the present day, and that is still the last thing I posted on my site. And before that it was a gap of 6 years. Not exactly setting the internet alight… Let's face it, the old site was not…
When I last rebuilt my personal site, back in 2017, I was full of good intentions. It was built on Hugo, which was the SSG I chose at the time (a coin flip between Hugo and Jekyll). It had a basic theme, and could be published by simply committing to a Git repo. What could possibly go wrong? Jump forward 6 years, and the only content I posted was three related articles within the first month. And…
In the first two parts of this series, I’ve looked at selecting and filtering data from Preside objects using selectData() . In this third and final instalment, we’ll be accessing the power of related objects. Simple, standalone data objects are all very well, but even a very basic application will define connections between objects. These will be in the form of many-to-many and many-to-one…
If you’ve read part one of this series , you know how to retrieve data from Preside objects using selectData() . But any web application will need you to refine the data down to a subset of the whole dataset, or just a simple record (think of a SQL where clause). Simple filtering Every Preside data object has a unique id, and we can use this to retrieve a single record from the database: film =…
A little background to start with: Preside is an open-source web development platform, created at Pixl8 Interactive , which runs on the Lucee application server. While at first glance it may look like any other CMS (it was originally called Preside CMS), it does so much more, and can form the hub of some very complex integrations between other applications. The key to this is an incredibly…
After years of avoiding SSL like the plague, unless the website absolutely, positively demanded it – due to certificates being both expensive and a nightmare to install/renew – I’ve just discovered Let’s Encrypt , thanks to the one-click simplicity of adding SSL to this site via the Netlify dashboard… Within 20 minutes of first having the idea, I had all the (more than 20) sites on my CentOS…
On a couple of the sites I manage, I have employed FoxyCart to handle the shopping cart and e-commerce. It provides a simple integration into an existing site with very little fuss, and makes it easy to offload the business of running a webshop. One of the features offered is to post back an XML data feed of each completed transaction, in real time, to your server. You may want this to maintain…
The FW/1 plugin architecture for Mura CMS is a very powerful way of embedding complex applications and business logic within your Mura-based website. However, this comes at the cost of your SES URLs. While Mura itself generates human- and search engine-friendly URLs, your embedded FW/1 app will only have this for the top level of any display object. As you drill down into the app, you will start…
Here’s a quick tip for anyone who may be seeing some odd behaviour after applying a ColdFusion hotfix (as well as a reminder to myself to be more careful next time…). I’ve just applied the latest security hotfix to my web server, and everything seemed to have worked fine - except that I suddenly started receiving a bunch of ColdFusion error notifications from a couple of my websites. The error was…
