WebPA Development Plans For the past four(ish) years, I've been making changes to WebPA, the open source peer assessment tool, to ensure it can be used with the latest versions of PHP. Much of this work has been done behind the scenes. If you download the
accessibility First Steps into Accessibility Auditing A full-scale accessibility audit is costly, time consuming and most importantly, necessary. Additional regulations introduced in 2018 require public bodies, such as a university, to include accessibility statements on all of their sites.
dlam-feed Embracing Remote Working I was acutely aware that our previous working practices would not transition to a fully remote setup. We are a small team of three developers who are already semi-remote.
dlam-feed Turnitin Truncation At the University of Edinburgh, we are moving our self-hosted instance of Blackboard Learn to a SaaS instance. In preparation for this move, we need to upgrade our Learn building
dlam-feed Accidentally Exposing your Web Application Credentials In 2011 developers from Heroku developed the Twelve-Factor App Methodology, a list of best practices for portability and resillience of web applications. Heroku recommend you should store configuration differences between deployments in the applications environment.
sql-server Logging into SQL Server from PHPStorm on Linux Today, I came across an issue in work which meant I needed to access our Microsoft SQL Servers that provide a database back-end for some of our legacy applications. I thought that gaining access would be straight forward but it turns out accessing SQL Server from a Linux machine can be a bit tricky.
php Why OR and || are not the same in PHP The difference between or and || are not well understood by many PHP developers. On the surface, the operators appear to be interchangeable but this is not correct. Understanding the difference between these operators will make you a better developer.
WordPress Disabling First and Last Name Changes in the WordPress User Edit Page We recently launched our Academic Blogging Service at the University of Edinburgh. The service is built on top of a WordPress Multisite instance and uses the institution's single sign on