Category: Blog

  • Blueing

    A Norwegian fairy tale trope in every day life, the effect of atmospheric perspective on a landscape makes you long for the horizon. Known as “Sju blĂ„ner”, or “seven blues” in English, it is an old expression and a measure of infinite distance. Like other literary tropes – “once upon a time”, “a long, long…

  • Shelf Wiki concept

    Without proper file management, having staff change over time and different technologies coming and going, it can be quite difficult to keep everything in order. What about if someone leaves – their institutional knowledge is lost. This could be catastrophic if they were the only one! Our issues weren’t quite this bad, but over time…

  • Upgrading PHPMail to Gmail SMTP using PHPMailer and Google reCAPTCHA

    Contact forms are a must on websites, preventing the need for email addresses to be on display and at risk to search-engine spiders as well as providing anti-spam protection from bots. In the past, I’ve used a simple PHP mail() setup which relies on the hosting plan’s local mail server, configured in the php.ini file.…

  • Searching a database table using MySQL LIKE and PHP prepared statements

    To finish off a PHP Wiki I’ve been developing, this week I wrote a very simple database content search, which leverages prepared statements and SQL LIKE. As is tradition at this point, a nice Paint diagram to get down my thoughts and work through what it is I was trying to achieve: a search bar…

  • Photography Twitter bot

    I’ve taken photos for years. First with film cameras and then the early 2000s digital cameras when they first started emerging. I was gifted my first “proper” camera on my 16th birthday – the 8MP Fujifilm S8000FD bridge camera – and over the next 5 years I snapped 120,000 images before upgrading to a Sony…

  • Rivers in trees

    I’ve always loved taking pictures of oblique angles, and with trees this often means just looking straight up. Fascinated by nature’s pattern of creating rivers of sky between tree canopies, for some reason I had never thought to look up why. “Crown Shyness” or the less poetic “canopy disengagement” has been studied in scientific literature…

  • Harwich RDF Tower

    I’ve recently been juggling quite a few projects, for both work and freelancing. I feel my own portfolio website has slipped a little by the wayside in delivering these other projects, but then surely that’s the point of a portfolio anyway, no? Harwich RDF Tower The Harwich RDF Tower project has been very enjoyable and…

  • Beginnings

    I mean, technically I’ve been making websites of increasing quality and difficulty since I was 10 or 11. I remember opening up W3Schools HTML quicklist, filling a notepad document with tags and using the now defunct Yahoo! Geocities as my gateway to the internet. Then it was drag-and-drop free editors from Wix or Weebly and…