Online Tool of the Month – realfavicongenerator.net

Following the migration of this website to WordPress I installed the ‘redirection’ plugin in an effort to handle the difference in the url structure used by Squarespace (my previous host/platform). This plugin allows me to redirect users using the old Url to the correct content and also see any 404 errors for resources I may have missed.

While reviewing this 404 log I noticed a few rather odd entries, such as

• apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png and
• apple-touch-icon.png.

Knowing that I never had such content on the site before I did a bit of Googling and found that these are favicons (the little square logos that reside on your browser tabs) that Apple’s Safari browser will attempt to load along with your page.

Now that I knew what the problem was, how do i fix it? I mean, I had a favicon on the site – why couldn’t Safari just use that one?

Online Tool(s) of the Month – For Finding Lat/Lng

I’ve recently been engaged by a client to write the mobile applications for his website (more on that in later posts) which plots ‘points of interest’ on a map. That probably sounds a little familiar as I have already developed the FillLPG for Android application which displays the location of LPG stations around the UK – and increasingly into Europe.

Working with mapping applications is always a challenge, but an enjoyable one for me as I find maps such an engaging medium. One recurring challenge for me is that I don’t speak ‘Latitude and Longitude’ so when I need to test my code, e.g. load the map for a certain location and perform a ‘nearby’ search, I have to determine some suitable coordinates.

A New Freelance Project – and a Chance to Use .Net Core on Linux

I was recently approached by a website owner, who had seen the FillLPG for Android application and wanted a similar mobile application, i.e. an app which displayed a number of points of interest on a map and allowed it’s users to select a location and have further details displayed.

With my experience with FillLPG I was happy enough that I would be able to create applications to render the map with the points displayed in the appropriate location. The big question is – where is the data coming from?

Taking control of my Domain

Some time ago I was watching a Pluralsight course called ‘Master Your Domain’ where Rob Conery explained how to break your reliance on the major service providers for email, source code, blogs and file-sharing and create your own domain to host your data.

Following the course I started hosting my own Git server, Blog and File Sharing service but Email …. well that was too big a step for me to take at that time. However, times change and when I started experiencing issues with my email that was the trigger for me to take the plunge.

Online Tool of the Month – unixtimestamp.com

As developers we know that one of the biggest problems when working with data is handling dates. It’s such a simple thing surely yet many of us fall foul of formatting issues and time zone offsets – and that’s when the date is actually human readable!

I remember when I first encountered a Unix Timestamp in the ‘LastUpdated’ column of a database table and thinking, ‘what the hell is that?!’.

Bear in mind that this was back in the days before the internet and before I had any real experience with Unix/Linux systems – every Windows application I had seen prior to this had it’s dates stored in the DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm:ss format.

Being faced with something like 1519571567 was a bit confusing to say the least – unless you know that this represents ‘the number of seconds since midnight (UTC) 1st January 1970‘ where would you even start to know what this meant?