Ainsofs Blog: Technology insights from the Pacific Islands

Thinking of using Gitpod as your Cloud IDE? Read this first... I'm preparing for a hands-on coding workshop and wanted my participants to get coding as fast as they can. I decided to leverage Gitpod as a Cloud IDE. Here’s how I set it up including challenges I encountered and their remedies. 🧑‍💻 Gitpod Gitpod is a tool I've been using to set up an isolated development (dev) environment for troubleshooting. I have relied on ready made repositories from the open source community, but now was a chance to dive deeper. 🐳 Docker Compose Ready My repository uses docker and docker compose. Docker is great for providing consistent dev environments across multiple developers. It's also great for isolating your project from other projects on your machine so you can mix and match your tools. I dived straight in and got my repository loaded on Gitpod. Gitpods default image  supports docker, docker compose, php, and node out of the box. So it was as simple as running ‘docker compose u...

Tugboat offers a straightforward way to create working versions of your website or app for each branch in your repository, making it easier to test and share features before merging them 🚀. In this blog, we'll explore how we set up Tugboat QA for a Laravel 10 project using Jetstream with Inertia.js and Vue 3. Along the way, we'll discuss the setup process, some unexpected challenges ⚙️, and our experiences navigating the quirks of this useful tool 🔧. Whether you're curious about Tugboat or facing similar hurdles, this post has insights to help you streamline your development workflow 📈. Tugboat time! Whoop x2! I finally got a chance to take Tugboat for a spin on the weekend. What’s that? Its a service that lets you have working versions of your website/app for each branch in your code repository. So what? Well, it means each time your new feature is ready, you can spin up a new version of your app, then flick the link off to your client or QA team to test and review. And...

TL;DR: A climate change portal faced performance issues due to excessive bot crawling. After trying various solutions, including updating core and modules, scaling up the server, and exploring different security modules, the problem was solved using Drupal's built-in Ban module to block problematic IP addresses. The Autoban module was then implemented to automate the process, effectively improving the site's performance and resilience against bots.      🌐 Introduction In today's digital landscape, websites face numerous challenges, and one of the most persistent is the threat of bots. These automated programs can wreak havoc on your site's performance, especially when they crawl your pages excessively. Recently, we encountered this issue with one of our country climate change portals built on Drupal 7. Here's how we tackled the problem and restored the site's performance. 🔍 The Investigation Begins When we noticed performance issues on our climate change p...