Ian Brown - Web Developer & Full Stack Engineer

A couple in wedding attire enjoy a smile under a tree.

Wedding of Thomas & Emma Vale

Posted on 25th August 202028th August 2020 by ianb

Nerissa and I are very happy to present Thomas & Emma Vale’s wedding photographs from the 15th August 2020.

Although I’ve been photographing weddings professionally for over a decade, it was a great help to have my wife join me in support. Together we are very happy with the result.

A photographer organises his photographs

WordPress: Remove unused images from your media gallery

Posted on 6th June 20206th June 2020 by ianb

A quicker site, much smaller backups, less storage costs and reduced data transfer charges. It all adds up to a decent saving across a number of websites. This is how I optimise WordPress media galleries and remove unused photographs and images.

HOW TO: Connect ZOOM to KHCONF via Live Streaming

Posted on 10th May 202021st August 2020 by ianb

The instruction manual to connect Zoom to KHConf is little difficult to read, a good YouTube video is much better! I have put some work into a video for anyone searching for a simpler instructions to connect the two services.

My sabbatical ends early due to COVID-19

Posted on 4th May 20204th May 2020 by ianb

In an unfortunate turn of world events on a totally unprecedented scale, I’m very happy to be returning to employment today. My employer, Iress, very kindly accepted me back early to help with some UI rewrites we have in the pipeline for one of our banking platforms.

Connect Zoom to KHConf via Twilio

Posted on 2nd May 20204th May 2020 by ianb

My idea is to have this running as an AWS Lambda for easy deployment and use a schedule to get the service connected behind the scenes automatically.

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!