Jason Darwin

Using Splunk with Traefik

In this post we'll look at what it takes to set up Splunk with the Traefik reverse-proxy, such that we can send log events using Splunks HTTP Event Collector, and see and query the results in Splunk's admin dashboard. Splunk is a great tool for

Edge Side Includes (ESIs) in React using higher-order components

Although React is a great way of doing component-based UI development, when creating web applications that are somewhat complicated or need to perform at scale, we may find ourselves running into situations where React seems to be less than helpful. One such situation that I've been working

Running Wordpress using Kubernetes locally

Our aim with this post is to describe the process to run Kubernetes locally, by demonstrating running MySQL and Wordpress on the Kubernetes cluster. We won't explain what Kubernetes is, suffice to say it is the container orchestration solution that everyone seems to be leaning towards; normally you&

Building Docker images on EC2 instances

Building Docker images on EC2 instances rather than on a local machine makes a lot of sense. You get the benefits of a consistent build environment, as well as a typically much-faster network connection than you often enjoy locally. However, there are some gotchas, and we look at these

Accelerated Mobile Pages: Under the Hood

AMP: Making the web great again Since launching in October 2015, Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has quickly been building up momentum, with many of the major news publishers now on board. AMP is an approach for making content-based websites fast to load, typically less than a

Automating Elastic Beanstalk

Good practice and scalability In this post we're going to demonstrate running Docker containers using Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk. When I was figuring out to use Docker containers on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk, I seemed to find plenty of articles detailing how to manually setup Elastic

Fast HTTPS using Pound, Varnish, LetsEncrypt and Pagespeed

Image courtesy of Jay Mantri. Making https fast Let’s Encrypt is a great initiative allowing anyone to easily generate and install SSL certificates so that traffic can be securely served over https. As well as gaining the benefits of secure traffic, by using https we're also setting

Setting Up Your Own PAAS Using Dokku

These are notes about how we setup Dokku on EC2 with Vagrant, Docker and Dokku. Note: an earlier version of this post mentioned that the maintainers of Dokku worked at Deis, however that's incorrect — previously Deis sponsored the project, but this has now finished, and none of the

Automating Linux Package Upgrades Using Cron Apt and Postfix

As the number of servers under our control grows, we want to be able to improve our control over package upgrades. The problems here are two-fold: * we want to know which packages are ready to be installed * we want to have these packages already downloaded so we can install

NPM Shrinkwrap: a Great Way to Hack Dependencies

One of the greatest things about using Node.js is the huge number of modules that you can pull down and use in your project — more than 120,000 according to modulecounts.com. This often makes it trivial to create a Node application — for example, you can create a web

ES6 Modules with System JS

Using ES6 modules today With the arrival of the latest version of JavaScript, ECMAScript version 6, we have access to some very useful features, such as the ability to properly modularise our JavaScript. Being able to use JavaScript modules is important, as it means that we can build applications (both

Testing on Devices Using a Local Webserver

Although it's improved in recent times, one of the painful aspects of web development can be testing that your site works well on mobile devices. This particularly applies when you're developing on your local laptop with wireless network connection, and want to view the site on

Using Local Storage to Improve Page Load

Many devices these days support local storage, meaning that we can store assets in local storage on the first visit by the user to a given URL, and then on subsequent visits choose to retrieve assets from local storage rather than downloading them again. Steve Souders has done a quick

Supporting Internet Explorer 8 in Foundation 5

Foundation 5 is a great CSS framework, providing lots of useful functionality that makes building modern websites easier. However, Foundation 5 doesn't provide support for IE8, although we can make up for this with a few polyfills and some well-placed conditional comments. Internet Explorer 8 lives on

Capturing Errors with Sentry

When deploying applications into production, the challenge then becomes keeping on top of any errors that may be thrown during day-to-day operation. In the bad old days, you might put in some error trapping to log to a disk file (and then remember to check this file regularly)

Improving WAMP Performance

One of the painful points of doing PHP development is the time that one has to wait for the PHP scripts to render the page, especially when using CMSes and frameworks which involve a lot of server-side PHP processing. Of course, PHP can be cached as bytecode, though in

meBooks Improvements for Publishers

We've been busy recently, and have made some changes which will allow you as a publisher with meBooks to more easily monitor your sales via meBooks and affiliates. Access your sales history Previously, after the end of each month, we've sent you a statement showing your

Ebook Pricing Trends

A question from one of the publishers that we work with got me thinking about eBook pricing, and I realised that the conversation about pricing seems to have become a bit quieter that it was a year or so ago. I'm sure pricing is constantly at the forefront

Gisborne Photo News

After a long gestation, we're happy to announce that the Gisborne Photo News is now available online. This includes all 257 issues from June 1954 through to November 1975, and comprises some 18,058 pages. Along with the Nelson Photo News, digitised previously and also available online, there

Creating a WAR File for Epubcheck

Note: I've made some changes to this post as a result of the build mechanism for epubcheck-3.0-RC-1 moving to using Apache Maven. More details can be found in our current repository on github. If, like me, you do a lot of EPUB creation, you

Serving Markdown Documents using a Simple Local Server

Recently I've been stumbling across many markdown documents, a format similar to the simple markup languages found on most Wikis that has become more popular at least in part because of github's use of markdown for creating documentation. The goal of the Markdown syntax (according to