WebViews – Seeing all your website.

So what’s a WebView? They are just small windows showing a webpage. Here’s an image of a page with four views on, click it to go to the page:

As you can see, WebViews provides a way to see many of your webpages at once, no need to load multiple pages or to click through, you just need to open this one page. Furthermore, it’ll do some error checking for you too.

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SSH – A Brief Software Engineer’s Masterclass

SSH is a secure protocol for communicating between computers. There are many useful tools built on top of this protocol and they should be a part of every Software Engineers toolkit. This blog will detail how to connect to remote computers super quick and more securely, several ways to transfer files between computer (and edit them), and how to connect to ports so that services (such as databases) appear to be running locally.

Image of console using SSH

These commands are most easily ran on Linux OS’s but they have equivalents on other systems too. In particular the rise in popularity of mini computers, like the Raspberry Pi, which have no screens means these techniques are much more widely needed than ever.

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KeePass with Putty sessions in ssh

This blog is about launching SSH sessions through putty but from within KeePass, mostly using Windows although other Operating Systems may also work. Putty essentially organises and launches SSH sessions between computers; KeePass is a Password Safe storage system. By manipulating the form of the URLs in KeePass we can simply right click an Entry and select open URL to launch a putty session.

KeePass and Putty

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Controlling JavaScript with LazyLoad – a ShareThis example

Forgive me for the break in communication. Let’s get right back into it.

In the last few months I’ve been looking into website load times and implementing a few on my own. My hoster doesn’t run the most efficient servers and so my webpages really weren’t appearing as first as they might. One interesting area I looked into was javascript – in particular how the position and method of including can impact the rendering of a webpage and the speed it appears.

Some of the worst things you can do is include javascript files near the top of your HTML page. Unless you are careful, any javascript you include in the <head> or <body> sections will stop a browser from reading and rendering your page. This is because the browser does not know whether or not that javascript will output code and therefore require some rendering of its own.

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Kindle Formats, Calibre, Conversions and “The Last Ring-bearer”

I came across a book called “The Last Ring-bearer” (by Kirill Yeskov) recently, and decided it would make a nice addition to my Kindle collection. It’s not sold by Amazon so there’s no Kindle specific format – in fact it isn’t sold by anyone – at least not in Britain – so I needed to convert.

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PhpGedView, SourceForge and the US Government

I originally installed PhpGedView back in 2007. It’s an open source and free web program for managing family trees and based on the universal Gedcom file format commonly used in many genealogical websites and applications. I’ve been using it on and off for several years very successfully – all credit to the open source programmers – with very few problems. However its been on my TODO list to upgrade since maybe 2008. I finally got around to updating it.

Screenshot of the webtrees homepage.

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