Allegria Italian (Assignment Showcase)

This assignment was split into two halves, design and then develop, this will become a recurring theme as I write more assignment showcases. The brief for this assignment was to create a modern responsive layout and incorporate some JavaScript as well as using PHP to send a booking request via email through a booking form. The brief was to be applied to Allegria which is a real restaurant based in Lytham-St Annes which is just south of Blackpool, this came about as the module tutor is friends with the restaurant owner and felt their website needed updating and would allow the class to work from a real world example rather than something entirely made up. Once the assignments were handed in it was intended that the owner of the restaurant...
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Laravel: Uploading Directly to the Public Folder

I have to admit uploading an image directly the public directory using Laravel stumped me for longer than I would have liked as the Laravel documentation isn’t exactly forthcoming for a scenario in which this would be required. For the uninformed the Laravel documentation would much prefer you to upload files into the Storage directory and create a symlink between the files within the Storage directory and the Public directory, this symlink is created using the Artisan command line interface, this method works great within the development environment of Homestead and any hosting that allows you to have complete access to shell interface, however on shared hosting this may not always be the case.  There are workarounds for this however a...
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Corn, what is it good for? (Assignment Showcase)

As part of the first year of my foundation degree there was a video editing module, this module covered the basics of video editing in Adobe Premier Por and After Effects as well as storyboarding and script writing. The module brief assigned to us to advertise or showcase a product, this could have been anything such as a video game or sticky notes, the product I chose to advertise was corn. I don't for the life of me know why I chose corn but I found the idea of creating an elaborate advertisement for corn to be hilarious, the original concept was to have been a riff on perfume advertisements or fine wines. Unfortunately after the script and storyboarding was developed the pandemic struck and I was unable to film the advertisement so ins...
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Almost another year later.

I really am bad at updating this blog, aren't I? Personal Updates I have completed my foundation degree at Blackpool and The Fylde College and awaiting my final results, so far my grades are looking good and I'm hoping I come away with a distinction, I have started applying for jobs again but there seems to be a lot of competition for roles and I'm hoping I'll be able to eventually pull an interview at least and as of last week I have received my first Pfizer jab. Website Updates With some free time on my hands I've put some time into tweaking this website and fixing the issues I had put off for over a year, firstly the CSS has had a minor refresh with a new font, minor text highlighting animations and a revamp of the navigation eff...
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Personal Update

It has been over a year since I have posted to this blog, party out of laziness and party from being too busy to think of anything to write about. Last year I signed up to do a foundation degree in Web Technologies and Digital Media at Blackpool and the Fylde College, this came about after spending a good year or so trying to get back into the web development field and getting knocked back because I was considered either too inexperienced or my experience was too outdated to be relevant, the final straw was being told post interview I wasn’t passionate enough about web development as well as losing my retail job due to restructuring and having to take redundancy. I had previously considered going back into education due to my previous e...
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Symfony 4 on Shared Hosting

Over the last month or so I’ve been working on a project using the Symfony framework as it is sort of the basis for Laravel, apart from a few moments of pulling my hair out but that is mainly getting used to the database side of the framework as it uses Doctrine, I have really grown to like Symfony over Laravel as it feels a lot less bulky. But this post really isn’t to discuss the merits of Symfony vs Laravel, it is however to talk about the caching Symfony does for its Twig templates as well as the Doctrine database queries, the caching does over all reduce system loads when sites built with Symfony are loaded and reloaded by its users. In the dev environment changes to Twig templates and Doctrine queries aren’t cached quite as aggres...
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The Undecideds

This site is about 99% done apart from the problems with the symlinks as mentioned in the previous blog post and a few features I’d like to add but can’t decide on the implementation. Comments The problem with comments is three fold, do I want comments at all? And do I roll my own comment system much like this blog or do I hand it off to a service like Disqus, the easiest solution would just be to say no comments at all! But engagement with potential readers is probably good. Then the second easiest would be to integrate with Disqus or similar because all the hard work of creating the systems of banning abusive users and spam protection, but at the same time that’s not exactly showing off my own talents as I did lay the foundation for...
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The Problems With Shared Hosting

I, probably like a lot of people use cheap shared hosting to host my sites, its no fuss and its cheap but every so often you run into the limitations of shared hosting. my current hosting provider is Dreamhost, Now with Laravel when you upload a file it stores it in 'storage/app/public' as opposed to 'public' which is used to store all public files, you get around this by creating a symlink using Laravel's Artisan Console via a shell console. The problem is with Dreamhost even though it does provide shell access and the latest versions of PHP for the hosted sites the shell however seems to run PHP 5.6 of which Artisan is incompatible with, it errors out when you try to run Artisan commands, however Dreamhost does provide a guide to instal...
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First Post

This is the first post on this newly revamped and more database driven website, my original intention was to create a static website to host my portfolio and my projects but as time went on I decided it would be best to make it database driven so in future I don’t need to edit HTML even if it did mean putting the hard work in and creating all the systems necessary to do that. The first iteration of this site was created in December 2017 using vanilla PHP with no form of templating system and the only dynamic part was the Portfolio page, that was generated using a hand written JSON file to populate the websites I had previously worked on. Later on during my time learning the Laravel framework around August last year, I decided it woul...
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