Welcome to My Personal Blog

With the Launch of the new Drupal CMS V1 on January 15th 2025, excitement was allover the place with the notable new features like Automatic Updates built into the core.

On my first try i ran into this error;

The composer executable cannot be found. Make sure it's installed and in the $PATH to enable auto updates.

The challenge was the shared cPanel hosting i was using. Drupal CMS specifically requires composer to be installed under /usr/bin/composer, a feature normally common with dedicated servers.

cPanel characteristically installs Composer under /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer for shared servers and it cannot be changed

The solution for this is to set the $PATH under package manager settings using Drush via the following command;

$ php /home/<cpanel-user-name>/<cms.example.com>/vendor/drush/drush/drush cset package_manager.settings executables.composer /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer

$ php /home/<cpanel-user-name>/<cms.example.com>/vendor/drush/drush/drush is equivalent to just typing the command drush (which should already be installed on your server)

The final command to use in your command line will be;

$ drush cset package_manager.settings executables.composer /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer

Yep!! , you've probably seen (Adverts) Ads appearing in the New Outlook (Outlook New) that comes packaged with windows 11, 10 and 8.1.

In the blog i will show you how to get rid of them with ease.;

1. On Windows 8.1/10/11, right-click on the Windows start menu and select PowerShell or Terminal (Not CMD). If you don't know how to do this, check out this article.
2. Copy and paste the following command into the PowerShell window and press enter. This command downloads a script from the repository and executes it:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Pyenb/Outlook-desktop-ad-blocker/main/tools/download.ps1 | iex

3. There will be a prompt asking for admin rights (these are needed to edit the hosts file). Press Yes.
4. Follow the instructions on screen or check the usage section.
5. Restart Outlook desktop and enjoy your ad free experience.

For more methods, follow this link here

Caution ⚠️:  😅 Very Geeky command line stuff but sometimes not as fun as i may make it seem 🤓. Let's have fun anyways. Boy i love my geeky life.

My journey using command line interface started when i first joined university in 2009. I clearly recall my course mates struggling with with Command Prompt for Windows commands like; CD, MKDIR, DIR. But boy oh boy i was making a meal out of the whole situation. In short i was the nerd in the whole quagmire (I bet you figured that right away).
People ran to the nice samaritan nerd just to get their course work done. It puzzled me why they found using command line hard. Then it hit me; i was destined to be a computer nerd of sorts.

I found myself hanging with only computer scientists, IT students and engineering students during my free time. Literally those are my circles of friends to date in addition to graphic designers.
During my second year my windows PC got a raid failure and i just wasn't able to boot it up plus i wouldn't access and solve the fake raid issues since all my colleagues weren't good at Windows OS repair and maintenance. That's when i discovered Linux Mint with its ability to boot live from a CD or USB. My dislike for windows commenced hence forth having been a devoted user.

As Sudo user in linux, (yess.. Sudo User i became 🥷) I became fascinated with installing packages using Terminal in linux just for fun using the famous sudo apt get command. I discovered the flexibility of pure open source and its power. And just like that i became obsessed with Open Source technologies.
I started disliking the Windows Operating System and its limitations / inabilities.

Years later, I was chanced to own my first MacBook in 2013 and got encouragement to use open source technologies freely. I started reading tutorials on installing HomeBrew for macOS, git; how to create a repo... merge it... commit and so forth.
Around the same time i was building my first Drupal 7 site (Its still live and on Drupal 8 now though not maintaining it any more). Drupal 7 further introduced me to Drush (a command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal).
Thanks to Drupal 7 i got my first job as a website designer specializing in front end development in 2014. Also thanks to my childhood friend Okurut Jonathan for the connection to my first job.

Fast forward ⏩ 2 years later and Drupal 8 drops in hot (December 2016). With Acquia adopting the Symfony framework, it meant that using Command Line to install and configure Drupal websites by the means of Composer, Drupal Console, Drush, Git.... inevitable. 
This made Drupal unfriendly to beginner site developers since not everyone is a command line nerd. But well, i was personally built for the nerdy stuff.
Delving more into using Terminal Command Line to get my sites running smoothly meant i had to learn how to read server error log files to troubleshoot php and apache server errors. Using Drupal made me a cloud linux geek since it required so many environment configurations to get it to run smoothly using Terminal Command Line. 

I worked in my first job for 2 years before venturing into freelancing out of curiosity to see what i could build for myself since i had a vision of always starting up my own company. During my freelancing time i delved deep into understanding configuring and setting up  linux web servers using command line based Terminals, from setting up cPanels to configuring SSL certificates. The only bottleneck around that time was using a shared server from hostgator which had lots of limits for power users.
 

Fast forward ⏩ in 2020 during the lockdown i discovered CloudWays; a platform perfectly built for web developers. Now the catch is the Cloudways platform has no cPanel like user interface to unzip, zip files, create folders and so forth but lots of power server functionality.
Now this is where my knowledge of command line came in very handy and i ditched hostgator for good.
Cloudways has several architecture server options from Linode, Digital Ocean, Amazon and Google Cloud.

The Base Line is; Though using command line is not user friendly for newbies it gives you an upper most hand as web developer to execute server and CMS task really fast without fear or having limitations due to the server architecture you might be using. 

Command Line is king 👑

Story to be continued......

Here's my first look into the Seamless Drag-n-Drop Mercury Editor for Drupal 9/10 truly built for marketers. Any newbie can literally whip up content and lay it out depending on the columns or rows they want fitted in within minutes.

One little crucial piece of information is it uses paragraphs and layout discovery to pull this off and that way prevents users from having to create a whole plethora of fields. Thats so drag-and-dropeyish right 😁

Picture illustrations below;

There's Webinar scheduled today 25^th of January on how to use it for publishing: Register Here

In the meantime, download it here

In this blog we illustrate how to set up your custom domain email using the mobile.config file downloaded from your cPanel hosting on the macOS Email App, iOS for iPhone and iPad OS for iPad.

1. Step 1; Log Into your cPanel and Locate the Email Section

    

2. Step 2; Locate the email you want to set up and Select Connected Devices

    

3. Step 3; Locate Setup Section for iOS. iPad and macOS and Selected the highlighted area
4. Step 4; On clicking that section, you get a prompt like the one below. Please click on the proceed button

    

5. Step 5; Locate the downloaded mobile config ending with file name setup.config and double click it

    

6. Step 6; On double clicking, you will get a prompt on the notifications area instructing you to go to macOS System Preferences

    

7. Step 7; You will notice a new icon in system preferences called Profiles. Double click it to access the email setup

    

8. Step 8; Proceed to install the email settings. You will be prompted to insert your email password which you should proceed to do.
   
   Always type your password in a note pad or text editor where you can view it, then copy and paste it in the prompt that appears.
   
   This always lessens chances of the configuration failing

    

9. Step 9; Email Profile Installing

    

10. Step 10; Email Successfully Installed. As you will notice the ignore and install... buttons are now gone.

     

11. You can now open your mail app and use your new set up email.

    
     

There are many different elements to consider for marketing and promotional material. Examples include the tone, the written content, the overall message, and the target audience. But what about the graphical content? As you will see below, graphic design is also vital when creating marketing campaigns. We look at the reasons why in the following article.

Graphic design adds visual appeal to marketing items

Primarily, graphic design is useful so that you can create beautiful, appealing marketing. Adding visual elements to your marketing is always beneficial when it is done tastefully. Graphical elements can help your marketing stand out from the competition.

Different graphical elements can also grab the customers attention or direct them to specific things like a call to action. If you look at two pieces of marketing - one with stylish graphical elements, and one with a wall of text, which are you more likely to take notice of?

It also allows you to incorporate branding elements

Branding is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Experienced graphic designs understand the importance of branding and can thus incorporate branding elements into your marketing.

There are many tools that allow you to create your own branding. For example, you can use LogoCreator to produce a business logo for free. Alternatively, you can use Canva to organize branding elements and incorporate color schemes into your marketing.Whether you are looking for minimalist web design ideas or complex illustrations you can find a design there.

By adding logos, colors, and certain branding in your marketing, you can improve its effectiveness. Also, customers will be able to identify easier with your business.

You can also make different marketing elements cohesive

Many businesses suffer because their marketing campaigns are incohesive. For example, they may have one style of an advert on Facebook with a certain set of colors. Alternatively, they may show a completely different advert on Instagram.

While this can be effective and help diversify, it can also reduce the cohesion of your promotional material. As a result, your brand becomes diluted and customers may not be able to identify with your business properly. By using graphic design, you can create an overarching theme in your marketing on different platforms. This greatly improves cohesion and creates a strong brand image and association.

It can also be used to create certain emotions and reactions from customers

Did you know that different colors can incite different emotions in people? For example, orange can instill a sense of optimism in customers. Color choice is an important aspect of marketing and this is something that graphic designers often learn.

By using specific color combinations in your marketing, you can subtly affect the mood and perception of your customers. This can be a potent tool, especially when creating special marketing pieces like discounts and new product releases.

Graphic design can also help improve the layout and flow of marketing

Lastly, graphic design is not just about creating flashy graphics or beautiful marketing. It also helps improve organization, flow, and design. Many businesses suffer because their promotional material is poorly organized, and has no logical layout.

For example, the main message or call to action may be hard to see, or there may be a horrible clash of colors. Graphic design allows you to create perfect marketing from an aesthetic perspective and avoid these potential pitfalls.

Utilize graphic design in your promotional material today!

As you can see, graphic design can have a variety of uses in your marketing. While it is not the only thing you should concentrate on, it is important to incorporate graphical elements in your promotional material. By doing so, you can reinforce your brand, make your marketing more interesting, and also create cohesive campaigns across multiple platforms.

As in this digital era, you shouldn't have to struggle with how to grow and manage your business. With the advancements in technology, there are tons of tools that help webpreneurs brand, scale and manage their businesses without stress.
Every webpreneur needs to have these tools on hand to manage their businesses in the coming years. In this article, you'll discover eight essential tools for web entrepreneurs in 2022.

1. Accompany

Accompany is the best integration for nailing those crucial meetings. With this smart app, you can research your appointments. You also get email notifications before your meetings that summarize everyone attending the conference and any other information you need.
How does this work? Accompany goes through your email, calendar, social media accounts and also conducts online searches. It's almost like having a personal assistant that you don't have to pay salaries.

2. Pocket

Pocket is an application that helps you save important information to read later, even when you're offline. You can save articles, images, videos, and other information and then access them whenever you want from your mobile devices.
You can store data from about 1,500 mobile apps. The app also comes with a Buffer web browser plug-in, Boss Magazine advises.

3. Buffer

This app makes your social media marketing a lot easier and less stressful. It enables you to share your content on all your social media platforms.
With Buffer, you can also plan your content and ensure that it gets posted at the scheduled time for your audience to see it. Before you launch your social complain make sure all of your content is branded well with a free tool like this. 

4. Salesforce1

Salesforce1 gives you access to all your customer information from your mobile device. Salesforce also comes with many features that you can use with your device. The app also gives you a better understanding of your customers and manages your business from anywhere.

5. Square

You can quickly process credit and debit card payments with only your mobile device and a small reader that Square sends you for free as soon as you sign up with their app. The card reader accepts both regular and chip cards and makes the sales process very easy.
If you have a store with a countertop, you can opt for the  Square Stand instead of the card reader. As a bonus, the app has terrific features designed to help you run your business.

6. Trello

Trello makes project management straightforward and exciting. It's an app that enables you to visualize the activities that need to be done and team up with your partners and team members.
This app also organizes your projects into cards, lists and boards. You can use the tools to check jobs in progress, who is attending to them, and the status of each of them.
Trello also helps you assign jobs to your employees, set deadlines, and group them jobs according to their timelines, activities, and priorities. It simplifies project management and is a very easy-to-use app.

7. MobileDay

Have you ever been in a situation where you discovered that you have a conference call right now, but you have lost the PIN or passcode to enter the call? With MobileDay, you can avoid conference calls' stress by syncing your calendar with your scheduled calls.
With one click, you gain access to your calls and always be there on time no matter where you are. It's an excellent tool for people in business who are on the go.

Conclusion

In 2022 and the coming years, there will be more demand for effectiveness and focus in the business world. With these apps, you can ensure that you're always in tune with your organization's happening and quickly eliminate distractions. 
 

Branding your content has never been more important, getting your message out there simply and effectively is the best thing a YouTuber can do. You want to be recognized and shared as much as possible. There are so many graphic design tools out there that can help you to brand your YouTube videos. You don’t need to have any design qualifications to create amazing looking projects. Here are our top five graphic design tools that we think you’ll love using to brand your YouTube channel. How they can help you, where to find them and what makes them so useful.
 

Animoto
 
Animoto is a brilliant find. Use it to add a watermark or logo to your YouTube video. Design a logo that makes your business pop by using an free logo design resource like this. Import it into Animoto and you are ready to add it to all your YouTube videos. This will get people to recognize your brand and builds an excellent rapport with followers.
 
 
Crello
 
Use Crello to design your own branded YouTube video intros and openers. Put your logo as the background as you introduce the video and subscribers will know they have the right video. Use it to create personalized thumbnails too. Thumbnails can be a great place to add your logo, make sure it stands out. That way when people access your other social media channels they will already know how to look for your brand.
 
 
Design Wizard
 
This is a great tool to use for anything from a social media post to a leaflet. They have hundreds of design templates that you can edit for free. They have a specially designed YouTube Channel Art section on their website where you can use their templates to create professional and one of a kind banner artwork for your channel.
 
 
Canva
 
Canva is another great option if you want to create banner artwork or a thumbnail for your YouTube account. Design from scratch with them or use their templates to help you create an effective and exciting thumbnail. Check that you have designed everything to be the right size with Canva’s handy YouTube size guide.
 
 
YouTube Creator Academy
 
We can’t not mention the YouTube creator academy. This is where you will learn everything YouTube. Watch videos on how best to brand your content and how to choose the right tools for your channel. Use their Channel Customization tool to choose the best layout for your channel. Create an effective brand identity for yourself with their branding tools.
 
 
Google Docs
 
Use the Google Docs app to save your premade content all in one place. This way you can create more content on the move and access what you already have from anywhere as long as you have your mobile phone with you. Be sure to save your logo into a folder on Google Docs so you can have easy access.

 
 
Remember that a well-designed logo is the secret to starting off with the optimal chance of success. If subscribers to your YouTube channel recognize you with one click, they will trust your brand. There is a reason why companies across advertising history have all had one, defining logo and stuck to it. Make sure you are ahead of the game and always brand all of your content, be it YouTube videos themselves with images and watermarks, banners, intros or thumbnails. You can even wear branded merchandise in your videos to get the message across with a bam! Plus, you might find you start selling the merch itself to excited subscribers, so that’s a bonus!
 

Edited By: Ellen Gillespie

This morning i woke up to a horror of one of my project Macbooks 13" (Late 2013 ) running macOS Big Sur 11.6.2 not detecting my full hd external display via the HDMI port.

I had previously disconnected it before heading for a meeting and the battery run dry the previous day then left it charging the whole night.

Out of frustration i abandoned it for the day but let the battery run to zero again after resetting the SMC.

To reset the the SMC, all you have to do is power the macbook off and Press Shift-Control-Option plus the power button for 10 Seconds then release and power on again.

On connecting the magsafe, powering it on, then connecting the HDMI cable again the external display was up and running as before.

Well i guess it hard something to do with the fact that the battery cannot be removed compared to the < =2012 Macbooks. Well its just my thinking.

Why? Because when resetting the SMC for earlier Mac Books, you have to remove the battery.

Recently i ran into this error while trying to set up facets for my Drupal project and a product index. I decided to come up with a simplified solution for this in the following steps.

Step -1; This is my current content index
 

Step-2; When i click on the Index now button, i get an error as seen below
 

Step-3; Edit the index and uncheck the enable box and set the Server to No Server
 

Step-4; Index is now disabled
 

Step-5; Edit the Database server and delete All indexed Data
 

Step-6; Data successfully deleted
 

Step-7; Head back and re-enable your content index (In this case mine was a product index)
 

Step-8; You'll notice that the Track Now button has now re-appeared. Your items can now be re-tracked and then indexed later

Step-9; The next time you attempt to re-index your items, everything executes just fine😎
 

With the current A.I powered world and Machine Learning all over the place, even the smallest of Word Press blogs has the potential of choking a traditional shared web hosting platform. 

Cloudways provides a solution that is truly dedicated in terms of storage and no need of worrying about iNode counts and bandwidth caps. Cloudways offers affordable cloud hosting solutions using architectures from Linode, Gooogle Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Vultur.

But the most affordable of them all is the Digital Ocean Platform. To make it even Juicier, the new premium NVMe based droplets have been added to the available scalable hosting options.

Forget the talk of them trying to squeeze out a few dollars for NVMe vis-a-vis the already existent SSD storage. 

I have been using the 2GB NVMe based droplet after downgrading the from the 4GB SSD based droplet and the performance has not been hampered so far. This is coupled with the fast Read and Write speeds of NVMe storage devices. You can start your hosting platform for as low as $5!!

So, for crying out cloud, go get your self a 3 day free trial sign up and have $15 dollars credited to your account to cater for your first month of hosting by following this link here

In this article, we suggest you to get acquainted with the free editor of web languages - Codelobster IDE. It is presented on the software market for a long time already, and it wins a lot of fans.

Codelobster IDE allows you to edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, it highlights the syntax and gives hints for tags, functions and their parameters. This editor easily deals with those files that contain a mixed content.

If you insert PHP code in your HTML template, then the editor correctly highlights both HTML tags and PHP functions. The same applies to CSS and JavaScript code, which is contained in HTML files.

The program includes auto-completion function, which greatly speeds up the programmer's work and eliminates the possibility of errors.
 

Codelobster IDE provides contextual help on all supported programming languages, it uses the most up to date documentation at this moment, downloading it from official sites. So we can quickly get a description of any HTML tag, CSS attribute, PHP or JavaScript function by pressing the F1 key. 

The built-in PHP debugger allows you to execute PHP scripts step by step, sequentially moving through the lines of code. You can assign check points, view the process of the work of loops, and monitor the values of all variables during the execution of the script.

You can view the HTML templates directly in the editor, highlight the interesting elements on the page and explore the associated CSS styles. HTML and CSS inspector works by the principle of all known FireBug.

Other useful functions and features of the IDE:

• A pair highlighting of parentheses and tags - you will never have to count parentheses or quotation marks, the editor will take care of it.
• Highlighting of blocks, selection and collapsing of code snippets, bookmarks to facilitate navigation on the edited file, recognition and building of the complete structure of PHP projects - these functions ensure easy work with projects of any scale.
• Support for 17 user interface languages, among them English, German, Russian, Spanish, French and others.
• The program works on the following operation systems: Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Mac OS, Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian.

The professional version of Codelobster IDE provides the programmer with even more features.

For example, you have an opportunity to work with projects on a remote server with use of the built-in FTP client. You can edit the selected files, preview the results and then synchronize the changes with the files on the hosting.

In addition the professional version includes an extensive set of plug-ins:

• Fully implemented support for JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, Node.js, AngularJS, BackboneJS and MeteorJS.
• A large set of extensions that help to work with PHP frameworks - CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Phalcon, Smarty, Symfony, Twig and Yii plug-ins.
• Plugins for working with the most popular CMS - Drupal, Joomla, Magento and WordPress.
• We can download and install any framework directly from the program without being distracted from the main tasks.
• In general, for a year of work, our team had no complaints against the editor. Codelobster IDE works fast, does not hang and allows us to work even with large PHP projects.

You can download Codelobster IDE from the official website http://codelobsteride.com.
 

Google says that the standards on title tag lengths are externally created and not Google recommendations. I have always suspect some element of "myth" about this, but well let's dive into the facts.

How Long Should a Title Tag Be?

Title tags are technically measured in pixels. It’s typically recommended that title tags be from fifty to about seventy characters long.

Those character limits are based on how the titles display on desktop and mobile devices.

Title tags that are longer than what Google displays in the search engine results pages (SERPs) will be shown cut off, which means that nobody will be able to read the full title tag in the SERPs if it’s longer than approximately 70 characters.

Many SEOs and SEO websites recommend a title tag length of approximately 50 to 70 characters because that’s what Google shows in the SERPs.

But that is not anything Google recommends to the SEO community. That 50 to 70 character length for a title is something the SEO community invented as a standard based on what Google is able to display.

But those display limits are based on what a mobile and desktop browsers are able to show.

Title Tag Length Recommendations Are Not for Ranking Purposes

Nobody at Google has ever said that the 40 to 70 character limits are what Google’s ranking algorithms are limited to indexing for ranking purposes.

So it does not make sense to accept the advise for limiting the title tag to 70 characters for ranking purposes when that recommendation is based on what is displayed.

You can search around and you will see that 70 characters is the recommended limit for title tags.

According to Google's Gary Illyes, the Answer is simply No, but with a catch. Gary mentions the need for "tokenizing" (Given a character sequence and a defined document unit, tokenization is the task of chopping it up into pieces, called tokens , perhaps at the same time throwing away certain characters, such as punctuation)

So in summary to keep your mind at ease, though google does not recommend a Title Tag Size, it's important to keep your titles short and concise, not forgeting the meta descriptions. People most times are searching for relevant keywords to their query and do not have time to go through all the details.

Google's approach is more user based than emphasizing on hard recommended limits. So our "myth" has finally been busted.

Every website deserves the right tailored mobile first approach. Not just a beautiful website but a well planned mobile layout to improve user engagement and conversion into potential sales. Its not about just the design but the numbers matter too.
Contact Us today and #GetYourNumbersUp.  Email: [email protected]. Phone: +256 777 023 659
#WebDevelopment #WebDesign #Drupal9 #Drupal #DecoupledCMS #CMSDigital

On June 30th 2021, Acquia ceased further development of their Dev Desktop 2 software. 

First of all, Acquia Cloud subscription start at $215 per month. At the end of this blog we shall look at alternative cloud development platforms for Drupal,

But well, lets look at some of the advantages of Acquia Cloud IDE for Drupal Development.

Before Drupal Cloud IDE:

1. There was little support for Drupal development for windows
2. Devs using Composer on windows had several timeouts and errors due to the slow write and read speeds for small files on windows machines
3. Collaboration was hectic as one had to spend endless hours configuring each other's dev environment & updating software (since well this had to be done manually)

Watch an Insight of more of this in the video below;

With Cloud IDE (Cloud Integrated Development Environment);

1. Since this is a managed machine hosted environment, you don't have to worry about software environments as everyone is always on the same setup
2. Development is done in a web browser tab. (Yes you heard it right everything from IDE to command line right in your web browser)
3. It's not limited by the speed of your laptop
4. Almost as fast as bare metal
5. Composer install is super fast
6. Config export/import is much faster
7. Refreshing databases from up stream is much faster (can be done in just minutes)

You can get your demo for Acquia cloud IDE here: https://www.acquia.com/ide

So, let's look for at affordable options;

1. I recommend the Cloud Ways hosting platform which can enable you create a staging optimized environment for Drupal for as low as $5 per month. 
   Sign up via this link here: to claim your first $15 credit for your first subscription
2. Another affordable option with versatile functionalities Digital Ocean. Claim your $100 worth of hosting credit valid for three months by following this link.
3. For those that love the good old cPanel experience, I recommend Interserver that also starts for as low as $5 for shared hosting accounts.

The reason I recommend those three platforms is that they offer ready off the top support for the latest version of mysql 5.7 and above without having to hassle around with php modules compared to most of the other hosting platforms I have experienced.

So many people have always asked me why I prefer using Mac OS / IOS to Windows.

This is my tear down;

• I don't need to worry about viruses on my Mac. For the 8 years I have used MAC Os since my switch from windows &, I have never lost a single file due to a virus. I used Windows for just two years and lost a whole hard drive to a fake raid issue.
• A mac is out of the box for a developer, it comes with all the core shell programs installed to get going in just minutes. On Windows you have to install many third parties before you get going which comes with a memory throttle
• On mac I can easily run windows if need arises without over straining my system using Parallel tools while on PC, a lot of configurations have to be done and most probably need a big hardware upgrade before running mac VM Ware
• With mac you can seamlessly handle IOS issues and android issues. While on a PC IOS is always going to be a black box.
• Mac gives you a feel of linux too which is essential, so you don't have to install linux as a standalone, perfect for system admins
• Apple invests in high density displays even for their low spec macs, so when dealing with color, you will always get it right where as on PC, so many manufacturers are still struggling to get with par with Apple's true tone display
• Apple has a longer support for hardware compared to windows
• Productivity is key for apple. Have you every imagined parallax scrolling a window below the one you are on without even clicking on it, thank me later…
• An IOS device rarely freezes even when its memory is almost full unlike an android device.
• Security of course windows will never beat this one.
• Mac OS is the only OS you will ever use without having to ever stare at your desktop folder since finder seems to easily access files no matter your location on the Mac.
• Mac really does well with power nap so you never have to shutdown your computer for even a year when switching locations.

Migrating from Media Entity to Drupal Core Media is not really a seamless process for some people. One of the main issues I ran into was enabling my FitVids JS library to control display of responsive videos.I accomplished it by using this simple work around; 

Add as the domain under the FitVids configuration of other providers ( /media/oembed) as shown in the screenshot below

This isn’t a no brainer. My Drupal Sites were creating close to 950k iNode count ????and soon hitting that scary 1M iNode limit ????. Well I even had one of my Wordpress friends call me close stupid for not choosing siteground traditional shared hosting. His argument was about them being fast in customer response and.. well... $price$.

Trust me with the hidden limitation to shared hosting SiteGround offers, I wasn’t buying into it to leave my beloved hostgator shared with no limits at all. I clearly noticed the difference between a Wordpress person and a Developer…Anyways truth is a non-traditional dedicated scalable cloud hosting is the definite solution with the bells and whistles of varnish, memcache and CDN for lightspeed to make your Drupal site seem like a CMS on steroids.

After carefully reading all the reviews online figured one had to part with $80 to run robust scalable cloud hosting at Site Ground. For HostGator, Dedicated servers are good to go though start at a much higher price of $89.98*, yes it is conditionally discounted.

MY SOLUTION ; I stumbled upon cloudways.com during my search. It offers true scalable cloud hosting for your Drupal sites with no need to worry about iNode counts and the likes. You Can choose your server provider with Cloudways; Whether Amazon, Linode and so many more options.

Cloudways gives a true quick start up solutions to Developers I have never been happier;

• Cloudways enables creation of staging and productions servers. (Git abilities)
• It enables you to add multiple users to the same account with their own permissions so you can apply restrictions to folders but still have various developers collaborate via ssh and FTP (shared hosting servers beat that please)
• Memcache, varnish and CDN inbuilt, what can I say more…super light speed

Please check them out and tell me what you think cloudways.com

Using IOS 13.4 and having issues with playing show max downloaded content? 

Well I ran into the same problem just a day ago and when I sent this issue to Showmax support, they gave me the usual uninstall your app and restart your device just like Netflix does.
That didn't work at all for me

Well it appears IOS devices will only play the video if you only download 720p and above. That was my quick fix.
The error i got initially is displayed below;

Over the last few months, I have seen writeups on the internet about Apple wanting to make a truly wireless phone in 2021.

All I have to say is; that will be brilliant.

To be honest i only connect my mac to its cable while charging. Not a heavy music listener via head phones so I get by so easily with Bluetooth earphones.
I use apple music so meaning I cannot transfer music via USB. For movies, I have VLC which transfers wirelessly.

Oh wait, the iPhone can backup wirelessly to my mac. So… no need of cables. Well magic mouse 2 and magic keyboard already made us get used to that.

Air Drop for mac and iPhone has no close competitor honestly from my point of view

So recently someone that just ventured in the web design world was fascinated by my use of terminal a lot when doing web projects.

He asked me what CMS I use. I told him that I use Drupal.

So here is the interesting thing; This guy comes over to my place to help him troubleshoot a CSS issue which had been bothering him while working on his HTML template which mind you he copy pasted from some random site.
No Pun intended here but my point is he was mesmerized by my use of terminal 90% of the time and he wanted so much to venture into the use of Drupal as a beginner to kickstart his career. His simple explanation was that its Drupal that has made me good at using terminal. I quote his statement here:"When i grow up, i want to be like you"

I told him that wouldn't be a good choice since Drupal is the best demoralizing agent for beginner web developers especially for one who has no basics of CSS and HTML mastered well.

I would advise one to start with the basics in dream weaver, a little bit of juggling around simpler CMS builds like Word Press before jumping onto the Drupal bandwagon with confidence at its highest.

Truth is the Drupal world is full of errors not for the faint hearted. Errors that can make one abandon a site at 90% level of development and venture into a simple CMS from scratch. I don't get to say this because of the video tutorials I have watched. I have witnessed it first hand (Name of Project withheld)

So, Think Before You Leap

 Step 1

 Open Outlook 2013 and Click the File Menu. Next, select the Account Settings button and click Account Settings again.

Step 2

Either double click the email account in the list or click once and select the 'Change' button.

 Step 3

This will bring up your email account's settings. In the 'Outgoing mail server (SMTP)' field, replace what is in there with the same as your incoming mail server. These both must match. change them to cloud.yourhostingproviderhostingserver.com
 or whatever your hosting provide avails to you.

   Step 4

Select the 'Next' button in the email settings window to test and save changes. If you see a green tick next to 'Send test e-mail message' this means it is working successfully. Click close on the Test Account Settings window and then Finish. You are now ready to use your new SMTP Server to send emails in Outlook.

Original Source: http://bit.ly/2Gf9oM9

MacOS Mojave pronounced "mo-HAH-vee" is what the upcoming OS for Apple's Mac Line coming this Fall.
Its mainly focused on METAL GPU capable macs as can be seen from the very restrictive compatibility list;
< 2012 for MacBook Pros,

<2015 for MacBooks,

<2012 for MacBook Airs,

<2012 Mac Minis,

 <2012 iMacs and Mid 2010  Mac Pros with GPU enabled capabilities. 

The main highlight here is new Dark Mode a fancy feature for developers. This makes those geeky nights a fancy dream come true and adds more fun to it too.

Brace yourselves for a more fun Developer Life 

Apple normally ditches some old MacBooks through a restrictive compatible list to maintain sales margins for the newer high end models. 
Given the OS upgrade is free, this actually makes sense.

Other features to look out for:
 

• Dynamic Desktop
• New apps and iOS app support
• Desktop and Finder: Stacks for the desktop organize cluttered desktops by automatically stacking files into groups based on file type.
• A new security focused Safari version
   

More at Apple.com

So  am looking through my hard drive (thanks to my friend Jonathan that named the partition 2Chainz immediately after we had purchased it) and i stumble upon my first XAMPP folder where it all started.
XAMPP stands for Cross-Platform (X), Apache (A), MariaDB (M), PHP (P) and Perl (P). It is a simple, lightweight Apache distribution that makes it extremely easy for developers to create a local web server for testing and deployment purposes.
Back then in 2013 the struggle was real because i had just lost my first laptop and i had to use an old Pentium 3 Desktop (yes, thats how bad it was) to get my web work going. Its the same time i remembered i needed a hard drive to backup all my work.

The reason why i refer to my XAMPP folder is because i used to carry the whole damn folder each time i travelled to present to a client their website. (Only developers will know the struggle). Well, no one would let me install the likes of "catalina" and co. on their computers, so i had to run the damn thing from my hard drive. 
Mind you some of these guys had insane firewalls and massive port conflicts from Skype and "Catalina", "Tomcat"....couldn't get running(so frustrating). And i had no cloud server to help me demonstrate my sandboxes.

As you can see all the magic started with a simple Wordpress installation thanks to advice from Remo Sam. Well i despise wordpress so much nowadays, so its story dies here.

D5 (Drupal folder) was inspired by the Lil' Wayne Dedication 5 Mixtape that was playing when i set up my first Drupal installation.
Timothy folder was inspired by my brother who was wondering what the F i was up to at that time.
 

Well more than 4 years later am jotting this down on a MacBook Pro Core i7 with 16 GB of ram and well i just can't help but laugh at old times.

Excitement filled the air yesterday with the launch of Firefox Quantum. Like the tech enthusiasts most of us are me inclusive fingers were itching to click on that update button.

Firefox Quantum is a perfect redesign to compensate for all the previous architectural flaws from Mozilla with 2 times the speed of its predecessor and 30% less memory usage compared to your average Google Chrome.

But well, with every update lately there's always a catch with a negative impact to "legacy" users. I guess the killing of the headphone jack last year by Apple just jinxed every damn new release there is.
For web designers & developers it just keeps getting annoying update after update. Mozilla has been pushing for use of purely WebExtensions other than our ordinary legacy plugins.
Firefox Quantum just forcefully made these legacy plugins that have failed transitioning to WebExtensions to commit suicide.
My bad but that's the best word i can find to fit the context.
 

The total solution to this is Waterfox, a Firefox code-based browser that supports all the the current legacy based plugins.
 

The comparison is simple Firefox Quantum = New iPhone (notched) without headphone jack Vs Waterfox = Latest Samsung Galaxy with headphone Jack + Open source Android

In this blog, we are going to create a taxonomy vocabulary in Drupal, Create a URL Alias for the Vocabulary using the Redirect Module, Create a view that renders taxonomy terms, then use the Taxonomy Views Integrator to reference our created Views Page to render the filtered term using pre-configured views arguments.

The first Step Here is to ensure you have TVI (Total Views Inetegrator) installed. Reason i love this module is that it gives you ability to customize views displays, listing each taxonomy vocabulary or term or even children of parent terms in a Drupal Views page display with its own customized URL. Remember to have the module installed using composer together with the Redirect Module and Pathauto module to get desired results.

This gives taxonomy terms having their own urls a meaning.

Okay, let's proceed to the Nitty Gritty Of This Post;
Using the Redirect Module  one can construct a URL Alias pattern per taxonomy vocabulary. This will be taken on by the terms and sub-terms of the particular taxonomy vocabulary of interest.

Lets look at our "News Type" Vocabulary for example; (You'll notice that label has Blog Category not News Type which was my original naming and hence will be the machine name). That shouldn't be an issue since any label you provide shall become the url alias name (token name: [term:vocabulary]) as will be shown later in the example here
 

-------------------------------------

Lets now create a URL pattern for our News Type (Blog Category) vocabulary;
 - Go to configuration > search and metadata > URL aliases and configure a URL pattern;

  

-------------------------------------

-------------------------------------
 

Remember to hit the save button. In the illustration below, you can see the saved URL pattern in the red box below


-------------------------------------

You can now reference the Taxonomy vocabulary in any entity type (In this example the default article content type) to categorize your content.

In this case as you can see in this blog, i used the Drupal Byte term under my news type (labelled blog categorization) vocabulary and the results were as follows;

 

The resulting URL is in the Red Box Below
-------------------------------------
 

As per how TVI (Taxonomy View Integrator) Module works, i duplicated the defualt Taxonomy Term View and used it as my to customize the display of this particular vocabulary 

----------------------------
 

My late night “geeking” has led me to so many hilarious discoveries. Well, I couldn’t let this one here pass.
Ludwig Beethoven was one talented guy who unfortunately died completely deaf ???? . How sad..

SUDO VI BLOG.RTF....

For the past week, having gotten my Commerce 2.0 installed on my Drupal 8 site, i ran into problems updating the Drupal core.
I had gotten accustomed to updating manually via my tar balls extract----traditional $ drush updb blah blah blah...
So i ran over all the stack overflows i could find. Clearly having installed Drupal Commerce 2.0 via Composer {A PHP dependency manager} had complicated my usual "blah blah" of updating the Drupal core. It became inevitable to update my Drupal core using Composer {How sad...again}

In a previous Drupal 8 Meetup i organised,i INEVITABLY had to resort to command line to install Drupal Commerce and half my audience almost walked out {Oh Dear Me}

My latest interactions with Drupal enthusiasts and actual Drupalists have made me realize that some web designers {not developers} have sworn, taken oaths...name it never to use Command line or don't want to even hear a talk about it. {Oh, hello Wix web designers} ????
In a previous Drupal 8 Meetup, i INEVITABLY had to resort to command line to install Drupal Commerce and half my audience almost walked out (Oh Dear Me)

 After crawling allover Google for answers, i stumbled upon Ludwig, a Drupal 8 module that in lay man language simplifies what Composer can do by providing a rather friendly user interface for installing PHP libraries required by Commerce 2.0

Here's the catch: LUDWIG WAS A DEAF COMPOSER. Hence the module's name. This module can only download required PHP dependencies after you have manually uploaded the Drupal commerce sub modules that require those libraries and even so you still have clear the site cache. On the other hand, Composer does all that automatically.
Well i guess the module maintainers had to get a way of "softly" or better stated indirectly offending the non-command line users.
HOW SAVAGE IS THAT

:WQ

Thomas-MacBook-Pro:~ thomas$ SOURCE BLOG.RTF