Add GTM to Gatsby using Helmet
One of my devs needed to add Google Tag Manager (GTM) to an older Gatsby project we built and he was running into issues implementing the GTM code provided by Google since the react-google-tag-manager package required a newer version of Gatsby and its dependencies.
The issue turned out to be that the strings needed to be escaped for Helmet/React to process it correctly. If you're using an older version of Gatsby, the snippet below should help you add GTM and call your events as needed. Just add it to your main template file.
How to Setup CI/CD of Jigsaw Site to Digital Ocean Droplet Using Bitbucket Pipelines
I created a new personal resume site and decided I wanted to build a static site since it wouldn't be frequently updated. I evaluated Nuxt, Gatsby, and a few others but settled on Jigsaw, a static site generator based on Laravel. I had never used it before and figured this would be a good learning experience while building something I needed. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to use and setup, so kudos to the Tighten team for putting together such an elegant solution.
I wanted to get a CI/CD pipeline configured to handle the site's deployment but couldn't find any working tutorials, so I'm sharing my solution in case it helps others. I'm using Bitbucket for this since it's a personal private repo, so I'm using Bitbucket Pipelines.
How to use Backblaze B2 with Laravel
I am working on a Laravel project and decided to use a Backblaze bucket as it's cheaper for storage when compared to AWS S3. I couldn't find a tutorial on how to get it working from scratch and I tested a bunch of Laravel B2 libraries that didn't end up working. The good news is that you don't need a special B2 plugin and instead can use the S3 package recommended by the Laravel docs.
If you haven't added the flysystem-aws-s3 package, add it to your project using composer:
How to Execute a Stored Procedure in Laravel 5.6
I've been stumped on this and tried everything I can think of but I can't get Laravel to execute a working mysql query to reorder an ordering column when deleting a row.
Here's a sample simplified query, which works directly in mysql:
Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and "Your connection is not private":Â
How to Copy and Paste into the Digital Ocean VNC Console
I recently signed up for Digital Ocean to test droplets for my development and linux management testing. I was securing the server and setup fail2ban, disabled the root login, and created a user account but forgot to change the user name from root to the user name I selected in my SSH client profile. I ended up locking myself out of the server and had to resort to logging into the admin panel on Digital Ocean's website and use their browser embedded VNC client to restore my access. I quickly discovered that one of the downsides of using this panel is that you can't copy and paste commands. Luckily there's a workaround and you can use the browser console to do sendkeys through Javascript.
Bring up the console in the browser developer tools. Here's a cheat sheet for keyboard shortcuts:
ASP.NET MVC Model Generator
In making the switch to ASP.NET MVC, I've moved away from using my old Data Access Layer that I've used for years and have opted to use Dapper as my ORM of choice in the quest for optimal performance. My DAL was actually pretty optimized for WinForms and WebForms (using straight SQL Queries and SQL parameters) but mapping it to models wasn't something I had in mind when I created it. I'm finding Dapper takes some getting used too but it is still pretty fast. The downside is that writing the code for Models to wire it up is proving to be a little tedious. To that effect, I wrote a little application that has helped me generate the models from a database dynamically. It's in it's infancy stages and something I cobbled together in less than 8 hours but it works. I'll add more features too as time goes on if there's enough interest or to satisfy my own needs. In the meantime, I'm open sourcing the project as it may help others and I'd love to see it become something grander if others are willing to contribute to it. There's also some useful bits of code that others may find useful to reference like dynamically reading fields from a database, pluralization/singularization of words, amongst others. You can find the repository on Github: https://github.com/gregvarghese/MVCModelGenerator
How to Get Browser Name and Version via JavaScript
Today I ran into a strange issue where Firefox version 28 and below rendered style widths different than Firefox 29 and above. Firefox 29 and above appear to have fixed the issue and render sizes to match Chrome/IE8+/Opera/Safari. Unfortunately, as old as Firefox 28 is, our client's legal review team is stuck on that version as IT refuses to let them upgrade. As such, we needed to add a kludge fix to the site to add a style to fix the issue for those running older Firefox versions. JQuery removed the version support from version 1.9 so here's a handy script that will allow you to detect the browser and version without any extra dependencies.