The web is stateless, but often the apps we build are not. To facilitate state in web apps, PHP provides a session handling mechanism. Sessions are off by default, and enabled with the `session_start()` function. Read more about PHP session handling at https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.session.php If you have worked with PHP sessions…

Serving different content to different devices is standard practice on the internet. Every platform does it a bit differently and in this article I will show you how to detect mobile devices accessing a Shopify store. Shopify is a great platform for many ecommerce stores. Developing themes is simple with…

Digital Ocean has been my go to solution for hosting for many years. When the Spaces service, an S3 compatible object store, was introduceed, I jumped on board right away. The service performs well and allows me to manage all the web infrastructure from one location. The drawback with Spaces…

A compromised website sucks. A compromised website that an attacker can insert code into to manipulate your visitors is even worse! Out-of-the-box, Docker containers provide some security advantages over running directly on the host, however Docker provides additional features to increase security. …

WordPress is the leading content management system and it is often thought that WordPress cannot scale. That assertion is a bit misleading. It is true that out of the box WordPress does not scale well, however, WordPress has a flexible hooks system that provides developers with the ability to tap…

Controlling what a website visitor sees, based on their geo location, is a fairly common activity today. Most often, this happens on the server, before the content is generated for the visitor to see, but what if you do not have access to manipulate server side code and can only…

Lumen is a great framework to build an API off of, but it does not come with user authentication or authorization. I needed to create a small API that allowed users to create an account and access the service with a JWT. …

My obsession with using an iPad for web development started all the way back with the first generation iPad. Tools then were sparse, but I made it work by jumping through some hoops. …

This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through a link I will receive a small commission from the seller, at no additional cost to you. Back in 2011, I was getting frustrated with my aging development machine. It could barely keep up with me, though I resisted…