Ian Brown - Web Developer & Full Stack Engineer

Plesk External SMTP with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Posted on 31st March 20201st April 2020 by ianb

It is pretty straight forward, but you may hit some odd errors such as: “554 Message rejected: Email address is not verified”, “Cannot connect to smtp.servername.com, port 25: Connection timed out” or “The server sent an empty reply”.

BuildKite and Nightwatch.js: Error reporting in build log

Posted on 26th January 20201st April 2020 by ianb

We use BuildKite for our CI delivery pipeline. It allows us to thoroughly test code before delivery to pre-production environments. Part of our test suite includes user interface and integration tests using Nightwatch.

How to: Add extra disk space to Plesk on Amazon AWS

Posted on 24th December 201925th December 2019 by ianb

It was surprisingly easy to add extra hard drive space to Plesk Obsidian even though it’s a virtual machine on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure. The underlying Linux disk drive space automatically extended once restarted.

Plesk SendMail Reject “You are not allowed to use sendmail utility.”

Posted on 27th November 201931st March 2020 by ianb

If you have installed/uninstalled the mail services in a hope that you can get the SendMail utility working for WordPress/PHP or you don’t see any mail in the queue and you can’t see anything wrong… check this!

Review: vintage Minolta MC Rokkor PG 50mm f1.4 lens

Posted on 12th November 201925th December 2019 by ianb

Can a lens from the 1970’s produce good results on a modern high resolution camera? Lets take a look.

Palm trees line the road while the sun sets behind. Photograph by Ian Brown

Thai tone cheat sheet!

Posted on 9th November 20199th November 2019 by ianb

After heading over to the same webpage and struggling to read their table of Thai tones, I decide to create a cheat sheet to help anyone interested.

SEO 101: How can I improve my keyword rankings?

Posted on 7th November 20197th November 2019 by ianb

I am often asked how to get ranked higher for certain keywords. These steps are simple and anyone can do it. It really is worth your effort!

HeatAsh log burner website main page with fire background

New website: a log burner installer in Birmingham

Posted on 31st October 20197th November 2019 by ianb

It has been a very long time since I last worked on a website for my bro, a log burner and wood stove installer in Birmingham. Being a web developer for the majority of the last two decades, you would think this would be a pretty easy thing to do, but it’s a little more […]

SEO 101: What value do web links have?

Posted on 7th October 20197th November 2019 by ianb

I have a great site. Excellent content. Awesome features. My customers are going to love it, but where are they? And why does my competitor always rank above me in search results?

Recovering an hass.io Home Assistant SD Card on Windows 10

Posted on 5th October 20197th November 2019 by ianb

Can it be done? I wasted two hours of my life trying the new Ubuntu Hyper-V instance that comes with Windows 10. Turns out you need it in enhanced mode if you want to plug in a USB card reader though. When I did that, I gave up trying to login, it would just keep […]