The Caveena Solutions Blog

I once shared with a friend how mistakes as small as 3 letters can take down an entire application.

Whether it’s a website, mobile app or bespoke system, the running and delivery of web application requires a lot of moving parts operating in conjunction with each other. A server receives requests which it forwards to some server-side language to perform some action which often includes querying a database. Then you have third-party services such as APIs, intrusion prevention system and social networks. All these parts need to be properly configured so they can communicate with each other and in a world of typos that’s where the danger lies; mistype a command and you can be left staring at a wall of text hunting for the culprit perfectly hidden in plain sight.

My smallest configuration mistake used to be 3 characters long — I mistyped 3 letters and the connection died. Today I beat my record with a typo that took down an application because of a single character.

Well this was a very interesting problem to run into. We’d migrated a website to a new host and WP-CLI was throwing errors complaining about an issue with the FTP Connection. What, for real? What would WP-CLI want with an FTP Connection? It wasn’t all commands though; wp core version ran without issue but others like wp plugin list kept complaining. What’s more, running WP-CLI on another website on the exact same host proceeded without issue. What was going on?

If it happens once it’s a novelty. Twice, it’s a coincidence. Three, times it’s a habit. So if it happens four times would that make it an addiction? 🤔 From Parallax to scrolling colour changes to zooming in on image I had another idea to play around with sticky positioning and slides. As has been the case with all my experiments so far, it was surprisingly easier than expected with modern CSS.

Yet another set of experiments where I use modern CSS and JavaScript to re-create something that used to be difficult to do. This time it’s that “Zoom an image on hover” effect that’s common on e-commerce websites and photography portfolios. Like the other experiments I’ve done so far (see here and here), this was also surprisingly easy to accomplish — the hardest part was *GASP* math.

So I’ve been playing around with CSS and scrolling lately and this latest demo popped into my mind while driving home. I remember seeing this effect where some text remained stationary in the viewport but changed colour as the user scrolled. I always assumed it required some Javascript wizardry but could it be done with CSS only?

In a word, ”yes”.

Using parallax in web design isn’t new; you can easily find plugins, third-party libraries and no shortage of examples on the interwebz. I was searching for a pure CSS solution only to recall it had already been done with background-attachment and that I used this technique on a client project a few years ago! Silly forgetful me…

Let’s play a game: what is wrong with this picture?

If you’re like me and only skimmed it, you would probably have not noticed anything off. In fact, what I did notice was cPanel warning me that the (redacted) domain in question was reaching the limit of the allowed space. OK cool, I added it to my Todo app and went on with my life.

Dark Mode is all the rage now. And with All Hallows’ Eve 2021 (aka Halloween) creeping up, it’s the best time to release a Dark Mode scheme for our website.

While doing routine troubleshooting I noticed an error appearing multiple times in the server log (a truncated version is replicated below).

WordPress database error Unknown column 'actioned_text' in 'field list' for query SELECT ... FROM wc_admin_note_actions WHERE ...

Messages in the server log are not necessarily problematic but when the same one is logged multiple times that’s probably a sign to start investigating.

A few days ago a long-term client received a suspicious email which threatened to remove their inactive email accounts. Naturally the first thing they did was notify us. We immediately smelled a rat and asked them to forward the email to us for further investigation.