KeithMcLaughlin.ie has a new design!

I am delighted to announce that my personal web design portfolio website at keithmclaughlin.ie has a new design!

I have wanted to get this new design live for months but have been too busy with client work to give it the proper attention.

The unfortunate events of COVID-19 resulted in less client work, which in turn gave me the time to work on the new web design.

Moving away from WordPress

The old website was powered by WordPress with a theme built using Bootstrap CSS.

The new site is powered by Gridsome using Tailwind CSS for the styling and layout.

I would love to hear your feedback on the new design :)

Local by Flywheel Upgrade Filesize = Wow!

A while back I came across a post about using Local by Flywheel for local WordPress development, so I decided to try it out.

That was a while ago and I didn’t have the time to fully check it out. So today I decided to go back to it to see if it was any good.

Upon launching the app I was greeted with a window saying an upgrade was available. To my amazement it was 639 MB in size!

Local by Flywheel

I can’t remember the last time an app was even close to that file size. I think it’s been a few years!

P.S. I case you’re wondering if I kept using it or liked it, the answer is no.

Extending a Navigation Menu in Partials in Laravel 5

This post is more of a reminder to myself on how to extend a menu in an included partial when using the PHP framework Laravel.

As of this writing I’m using Laravel 5.1.16.

Hopefully other people find it useful too.

Let’s say you have a similar folder setup to this in your project:

resources/views/
  -- layouts
    -- default.blade.php
  -- partials
    -- nav.blade.php
  index.blade.php

The default.blade.php template includes the navigation partial:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    ...
</head>
<body>
    @include('partials/nav')

    <div>
        @yield('content')
    </div>

</body>
</html>

In order to be able to extend the navigation menu from within index.blade.php you need to add @yield(‘nav’) to the nav.blade.php file.

<ul>
    <li><a href="{{ url('/') }}">Home</a></li>
    @yield('nav')
</ul>

Then from within the index.blade.php file you can extend the navigation menu using the following code:

@extends('layouts/default')
@section('nav')
    <li><a href="#">New Nav item</a></li>
@append {{-- @stop also works --}}

I’m not 100% sure this is the best way to do it, but I searched for a way to use @parent within the nav.blade.php file and could not find a solution.

Leave a comment if you know of a better way to achieve this.

Extensions in Google Chrome are Memory Hoggs!

While trying to figure out the problem in this post I wondered why Google Chrome was using up so much RAM on my machine. Turns out that every extension you install in Chrome causes it to run another instance of chrome.exe in the background. I had no idea! All of the instances of chrome.exe on my machine resulted in about 500MB of RAM being used up!

So, just a heads up… if you install lots of extensions be prepared to use up a lot of RAM.