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Blog

Hosting a Laravel app with AWS Beanstalk
Hosting a Laravel app with AWS Beanstalk

There are lots of possible hosting solutions available for Laravel, from Forge, to Vapor to the new Laravel Cloud. I’ll start out by saying that these other solutions are much easier to get up and running than beanstalk, but I thought I’d share some of the “fun” I had getting it up and running.

Testing window.open() in JavaScript with Jest
Testing window.open() in JavaScript with Jest

I recently had to write a test for a React component that opened a new browser window. To open the new window I made use of window.open() in my code. This made the component easy to write, but I had to think a bit differently about how to write the test for this.

Why did I become a writer?
Why did I become a writer?

There has been a lot of discussion on Threads recently about becoming a writer, but don’t give up your day job. I have seen a lot of arguments from all sides, some people saying they became a successful full time writer, others saying they would never give up their job, then there are others who became writers full time then went back to another job. Writing has always been a hobby for me, but this discussion has made me think more about why I write.

Adding social icons to the Bulma Clean Theme footer
Adding social icons to the Bulma Clean Theme footer

Version 1.1.0 of Bulma clean theme has been released. It has a small update that allows you to easily add social media links to the footer of your site.

Marketing an ebook with the 4Ps
Marketing an ebook with the 4Ps

I have seen a lot of threads from indie authors asking for advice with marketing their ebook. If I’m honest, I have never really had a strategy for marketing my books, I just assumed that I could put it out there and people would find it. In the real world, that does not seem to be the case.

Latest Posts

HTML is beautiful
HTML is beautiful

Building a modern website can sometimes lead you to be so far separated from the end result that is sent to the user. Developers can end up focusing on building sites with component based frontend frameworks, fetching data from APIs and installing hundreds of npm dependencies. We can become more interested in writing great code in their chosen programming language than what we serve to the website visitors. How did we get so far away from writing HTML?

Fixing a few SEO issues with my author website
Fixing a few SEO issues with my author website

When I launched my cozy mystery series, The Little-Astwick Mysteries, I decided to create a new website to promote it. But I made a few mistakes with SEO that have led to a few issues with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Here is how I fixed them.

Using Tailwindcss with Codepen
Using Tailwindcss with Codepen

I created a free account for Codepen to provide a demo with my blog post about ‘Creating a custom toggle in TailwindCSS’ but it took me a little while to figure out how to use Tailwindcss with codepen. So, this is what I did to get it working.

How NOT to make a website

Unlooked for Tales - a collection of short stories

By C.S. Rhymes

Free on Apple Books and Google Play Books

Nigel's Intranet Adventure

Nigel's Intranet Adventure

By C.S. Rhymes

From £0.99 or read for free on Kindle Unlimited!