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This article walks through the simple steps for setting up composer. Initially at project level, then, optionally, at the global level. Note: This article is for Mac(Unix)/Linux users, please refer the official docs for Windows. What is Composer? Composer is the dependency manager for PHP packets. In my opinion it should be in every web […]

This article provides a simple fix for the ansible error, “sorry, tersmitten.swapfile was not found”, by updating 1 (maybe 2?) .yml config file. If you have encountered the above error, or “ERROR! the role ‘swapfile’ was not found”, then chances are you are using a dependency that is no longer supported (or more precisely, it […]

This simple post should fix the “usr/local is not writable” issue with homebrew. Whilst on holiday I needed to use an old MacBook to crack on with some work. In order to do so I had to install the latest version of ansible, but encountered the permissions error “usr/local is not writable”. I found uninstalling […]

On a few occasions Yoast has inexplicably injected a noindex meta tag in the head of pages that I want search engines to index. I’ll get to the bottom of this when I have a free block of time. But, but for now, a really simple way to keep the meta tag away, is to […]

Sometimes it’s nice to have all the goodies wrapped up in a nice little function, such as wp_get_attachment_image(). This is a great function that generates the entire html for an image tag, including srcset and sizes. However, wouldn’t it be great if sometimes we could get all the goodness from this wonderful function, but just […]

It’s not uncommon to only want to show specific sidebar widgets or footer widgets in certain views. In the case below we didn’t want to show a client’s teaser widget of their recent installations when the visitor was already viewing any of their portfolio pages. So here’s a simple filter that does just that: /** […]

By default the directories (folders) of your website and other applications may be publicly viewable for all to browse. This is a potential security risk, but thankfully one that can be reduced very easily. Here are two simple options to reduce this risk by preventing the directories from showing their content as browsable lists: Option […]

The Yoast meta box sits just below the main editor. To demote it, aka, reduce its priority, just add this anonymous function to your theme (or better still, a custom plugin): add_filter( 'wpseo_metabox_prio', '__return_false' ); Or, you can use the more commonly quoted approach of explicitly stating the meta box’s positional priority to ‘low’: add_filter( […]

If you value your website’s search engine positioning then mobile-friendly websites are no longer a nice-to-have. On April 21st, 2015 Google’s mobile-friendly websites algorithm was updated to have a significant impact on search results! Since this algorithm was implemented it’s strongly believed that websites not ticking the right boxes for Google’s mobile support best practices […]

This site is delivered over https, using modern encryption methods. We advise you to do the same and get encrypted. It’s no secret that your bits can be seen by Peeping Toms when you surf the web. To be more precise, the bits are the streams of data between your device and the source of […]