Pat Howe's Blog

Getting started with HTML5 offline web applications

This article explains the HTML 5 “offline” feature, which gives website creators an easy method to dictate what a browser should store for use when internet (network) connectivity is unavailable. It explains the default HTTP caching method that browsers use and then how to use the HTML 5’s application cache, with a short example web application that shows an offline mode image if there is no network connection. In this article, I’ll use “application” to mean any website, game or other type of product that is delivered via the internet

What does business strategy mean to you?

Over the years I’ve heard many things described as strategy. The word seems to have become symbolic of anything to do with a business achievement. That’s not what I have a problem with; it’s the “anything” rather than “everything”. The “anything” more often than not, includes one thing. For example, the company goal or the project plans. I have also heard budget setting or a margin percentage increase target described as “our strategy”. In this article, I will attempt to give a clear picture of what I believe a business

Convert or flip data between rows and columns in Excel

One of the things that I have to do periodically and always forget how to do is converting rows of data to columns or columns of data to rows. This quite often occurs when I’m collecting data from different sources and want to put them all in the same format in Microsoft Excel. From the 2007 version of MS Excel (I think), there has been a neat feature to enable you to do this. The reason that I always forget how to convert from columns of data to rows and

Catering for colour blindness in Windows 10

I came across a neat feature of Windows 10 quite by accident this weekend that will help me with my colour blindness. However, before I found it, I had a lot of frustration trying to “fix” the problem. I was typing away on my computer Friday night and it was just before 3AM when suddenly my screen turned black and white (greyscale). I looked in Windows Color Settings but that was greyed out as it is controlled by my GeForce graphics card software. I had a quick look in the

Switching from HTTP to HTTPS in WordPress

This short article goes through the simple steps to move your WordPress website from HTTP to HTTPS yourself without using plug-ins or other tools. With the increased pressure from internet browser manufacturers to move content to a secure web, the switch is important for those wanting a higher search ranking or performing any action other than basic information. There’s no magic involved in this move and I don’t go into details of all the things that you can do, I just show you how to get your website up and

Five Quality Assurance Testing Techniques

We had a very minor release of an application last week as the front end application and the back end procedures were operating double standards. The front end was asking for a value greater than or equal “>=” to a certain value and the back end said the rule only applied to values greater than this amount “>”. It took hours to figure out what was wrong and a minute to fix it. We were looking at the changes that we made in the last release suspecting that a bug

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

I’ve been meaning to write for a while from the perspective of website owners and operators about the new European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into force May 25, 2018. This is following my previous post “What effect does the GDPR have on my website” in which I looked at cookies. I’ve seen articles pointing out the highlights of GDPR just rewriting the articles using different language so I’ll try not to do that. I will keep it brief, using simple language and where possible will

Entity Framework Code First Example

In this article, I will walk through an example in an attempt to show Entity Framework Code First. In this Code First exercise, I will install SQL Server LocalDB, create a Visual Studio project, install Entity Framework and then create the database objects (including some test data) through the Visual Studio project using Entity Framework Code First. To start off it is probably worth mentioning what the Entity Framework is and why it is important in software development and also what Code First means. In the past, developers coded either

Chrome will show ‘Not Secure’ warning for HTTP forms

Google have started emailing webmasters to let them know about their plan for all web traffic to be delivered through an encrypted channel. This means delivering all web pages via HTTPS rather than HTTP. They are modifying their Google Chrome browser and have already made some changes earlier in the year. If a form delivered by standard text (HTTP) has a credit card or password field then Chrome already flags up in the address bar that it is ‘NOT SECURE’. The next step comes in October 2017 with the release

Publishing Visual Studio web app to Azure PaaS

In this article, I will use Microsoft Visual Studio to create a web application, published publicly as a Web App to the Azure cloud. This is the first in a series about using Microsoft tools and the Azure cloud that I want to write. This will just use a very simple example to show how quickly you can publish a website to the Azure cloud without any complicated servers to install or configure. It really is simple but will get more complicated in future articles when I will explore more

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