Blog - C.S. Rhymes

Adding Twitter cards to Jekyll

Twitter cards are a great way of making links to your site stand out to other twitter users. They can be used to provide additional information and an image about your page, from within twitter when you expand a tweet. Examples include twitter summary cards that provide a title, description and image, or product cards that can provide information such as price or product category.

Upcoming Book Promotions

Just a quick message to let you know of a couple of promotions on my books on the Amazon UK kindle store.

Thinking about design

I was following a bus the other day and it was so slow. It started me thinking about the design of a bus and how could it be imporved with modern technology. Some of the problems with buses include:

Welcome to my new site!

Hello and welcome to my new site, powered by Jekyll.

Using the unique validation rule in a Laravel Form Request

Sometimes you want to ensure that a field is unique in the database so that someone can’t add the same item twice, such as the title for a post. Laravel provides a couple of handy tools for this, including the Unique validation rule, but there is a bit more configuration required to other validation rules to make the most of its abilities.

Why build a package?

In my day to day job I make use of a lot of packages. This got me thinking it would be good to create a package of my own, so I have decided to build a Laravel package. It’s got a long way to go yet before it’s ready, but I thought I would write down my thoughts about the benefits of building a package while it is still fresh in my mind.

Getting your project seen

Developers love building things and sometimes we want to share these things with other developers to help make their life easier. Creating you project and putting it on GitHub can seem like the difficult part, but letting people know its there and getting them to use it can be even harder.