When I started this site a few months ago, I wrote about trying out DigitalOcean’s “One Click” WordPress install to get a droplet quickly set up with the required LEMP stack. I also noted some performance and security concerns long term, so I’ve been thinking about a different hosting provider. I wanted somewhere that offers […]
Using Sass or Less to create site skins
Using a CSS preprocessor can provide powerful flexibility if you are working with a design that uses colour to help orientation, for example changing the colour scheme depending on the section of the site the current page belongs to. These concepts can also be applied if you would like to add the option for users […]
Creating a content scheduler in WordPress
When creating CMS tools, it is sometimes helpful to allow the automation of content updates. For example, during a sale an ecommerce client may wish to highlight daily deals. I use ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) to create a lot of WordPress customisations, and using the date picker field makes implementing a simple scheduler quite straight […]
Creating a multi-step WooCommerce checkout
By default WooCommerce provides a single page checkout, which in a lot circumstances is the recommended approach as it encourages conversions by reducing the number of clicks required to purchase a product. However, depending on your page layout, or if there are a lot of custom fields included, a single page might start to become […]
One in a Million
I created this after seeing Chance and Control, an exhibition from the V&A that visited Chester in 2019. At the time I was experimenting with PICO-8 and making some simple games, but thought I would use it for a quick idea inspired from the exhibition. The program simply draws pixels to the screen to create […]
Turning off automatic scaling of large images in WordPress
While I was uploading posts of my work recently, I noticed that the larger images had been scaled down. Some of the screenshots of my sites are very tall, and the scaling being applied due to exceeding the maximum height had quite a dramatic affect on the width. It turned out that this behaviour was […]
Deploying WordPress on DigitalOcean
At Stride we use DigitalOcean Droplets connected to a server management service for the majority of our hosting needs. This gives us a great balance between the flexibility and access of a self-hosted VPS whilst still benefiting from some of the features of a fully managed plan, such as automated security updates. However, when deciding […]