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Every time I have a new web development project, I make it a habit to create a prototype on my PC first. It speeds up work. If you are testing a possible solution, you save the code and just press F5. You can see the result immediately. There is no need to wait for the page to finish loading. Among the many Windows-based web servers available, I use AMPPS. XAMPP, and EasyPHP. All are also available in Linux.
AMPPS allows you to create web applications with configurable Apache, PHP, and MySQL on your desktop. For basic needs, it is a complete package and comes with phpMyAdmin.
One of the reasons why I like it is its ease of use. Download it, install it, and it's ready to use. Everything is set up automatically. To start using it, go to https://localhost/ on your browser.
The second thing is that, unlike others of its kind, this one doesn't have any port conflicts with communication programs like Skype.
Working with WordPress? Try Local. WordPress Studio is a fast, free, open source desktop tool for local WordPress development. Available on Mac and Windows for now.
LocalHost.run is a client-less tool to instantly make a locally running web application on port 8080 available on an internet accessible URL using SSH tunneling or port forwarding. Can use a free lhr.rocks sudomain or attach a custom domain name for $9 per month when billed annually.
GF.dev has free tools made for geeks, check it out. Free For Developers is a list of software(SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings with free developer tiers. DevDocs combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface.
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NotePad++, Programmer's NotePad, Geany and BlueFish are some easy to use code editors. MarkDownPad is a markdown editor. CodeMirror is a code editor component for the web. It can be used in websites to implement a text input field with support for many editing features, and has a rich programming interface to allow further extension. CodePen.IO is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers to build test cases for learning and debugging.
Visual Studio Code (VS Code), is Microsoft's free source-code editor. Online version here. VSCodium is the telemetry free version. It has a lot of useful features like a built-in debugger, integrated terminal, live share and a large marketplace with plenty of free extension to choose from. Some of the extensions are Project Manager, Better Comments, Bookmarks, Prettier - Code Formatter, HTML CSS Support, JavaScript (ES6) Code Snippets, Hooks IntelliSense for WordPress, Error Lens, Quokka.js, Live Share, Rest Client, Browser Preview, Live Server, and Remote - SSH. Web Dev is a VSCode extension pack for web development, includes a lot of useful extensions. Here are VSCode extensions for WordPress development.
AI tools compatible with VSCodium: Cline is an AI assistant that can use your CLI aNd Editor, and Gemini Code Assistant.
Google AntiGravity is an agentic VSCode-based IDE, supports Gemini and Claude models. Zed is another option with AI support.
LM Studio, LocalAI, AnythingLLM, Jan.ai, and Ollama are desktop-based equivalents that supports a wide range of Large Language Model(LLM). Take note that any desktop AI would need a large chunk of disk space, Ollama for example will eat up at least 50 GB including the Large Language Model(LLM).
Here's an article about integrating Ollama with VSCodium.
Hugging Face is a collaborative platform that serves as a central hub for the AI community. It offers a vast repository of over one million pre-trained AI models, datasets, and applications. The free tier includes the CPU Basic Spaces Hardware allocating resources with 2 vCPU and 16 GB memory for running models and $0.10 in monthly credits. Here's a 10-minute getting started guide.
Google Gemma is a family of free and advanced open models(E2B, E4B, 31B, and 26B A4B) that run from cloud servers to laptops and even phones. The 26B A4B is a Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) model, which means it can handle a little of everything, text, image understanding, function calling, and thinking modes. But it requires a RAM of 32+ GB or a GPU. For a lower specs hardware, the E4B can be a good option. Gemma can be used for local agentic coding.
Llama 3 8B by Meta, Phi-3 Mini by Microsoft, Mistral 7B v0.3, GLM-4.5 Air, and StarCoder2 3B are other lightweight models for PC with low resources. Mistral Devstral 24B is for for code-heavy tasks.
Here's a guide on how to set-up Gemma 4 with Ollama.
To manually install Ollama on CachyOS or any Arch-based distro:
- In the terminal type: sudo pacman -S ollama
- Enable and automatically run Ollama on boot: sudo systemctl enable --now ollama
- Verify if installed: ollama --version
- Download the model, for example, Gemma 4 E4B: ollama run gemma4:e4b
- Run the model, for example: ollama run gemma4:e4b
If the device have a dedicated GPU, install the corresponding package for better performance:
- NVIDIA: sudo pacman -S ollama-cuda
- AMD: sudo pacman -S ollama-rocm
Jan.ai is available as FlatPak. To connect Jan.ai to Ollama:
- Go to Settings, then Model Providers
- Add Ollama as a Model Provider and set the base URL to http://localhost:11434/v1
- Open a new chat and select the Ollama model
If Jan.ai displays a "Forbidden" error in the chat:
- Close the application and stop the service: sudo systemctl stop ollama
- Edit the service: sudo systemctl edit ollama.service
- Add the environment variable under the [Service] section: Environment="OLLAMA_ORIGINS=*"
- Save the changes and reload systemd: sudo systemctl daemon-reload
- Restart the service: sudo systemctl restart ollama
Alpaca a GUI for Ollama is also available as FlatPak. Open WebUI is a self-hosted AI interface. It is a platform for running and connecting to any AI model, either local or cloud. There is a desktop version as FlatPak, but still in early alpha stage. More chat interfaces here.
Ollama Client by Sleek Addons is a FireFox addon. Use the endpoint: http://localhost:11434/
WebLLM is an open-source, in-browser AI inference engine that enables users to run Large Language Models(LLMs), such as Llama, Gemma, and Mistral entirely within web browsers using hardware acceleration. It leverages WebGPU to tap directly into the device's local GPU for high-performance AI processing. If the GPU isn't supported, it smoothly falls back to using WebAssembly(WASM) for CPU computation. The processing is handled in background web workers so the page and user interface never freeze while generating text. Not supported on FireFox yet, but it’s available in Chrome.
This is a YouTube tutorial on how to integrate the set-up with VS Code editor. This one is using Zed editor. While this one is using the OpenAI, and Google AI online providers.
My laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9560 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU which provides a 4GB GDDR5 dedicated VRAM. Would love to test it with Ollama using gemma4:4b model and integrate it with Zed editor.
Successfully tested gemma4:4b on Ollama, but it was slow, taking more than 1 minute for a normal conversation and it nearly maxed out both RAM and swap. So, I ended up trying TinyLlama 1.1B and its quite satisfactory for simple tasks, but code refactoring request remains to be desired.
Not to be outdone, OpenAI release their own state of the art open-weight language models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. Under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, they are optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware. The gpt-oss-120b model achieves near-parity with OpenAI o4-mini on core reasoning benchmarks, while running efficiently on a single 80 GB GPU. The gpt-oss-20b model delivers similar results to OpenAI o3‑mini on common benchmarks and can run on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory, making it ideal for on-device use cases, local inference, or rapid iteration without costly infrastructure.
In some of my web development projects, I encountered debugging minified files like HTML or JS. Compressed files are impossible to work with. Luckily, there are lots of free online source code and data formatting apps. Below are some intuitive, clean, and ad-free formatters I've used.
ExtendClass has XML, JSON, CSV, CSS, and HTML formatters, plus they have tons of tools, you can play with. Prettify codes with Prettier. It has no options, saves you time.
SQL-Format of course, formats SQL code, haha. It provides lots of options and has an error detection feature.
PrettyDiff is a unique tool among all others. On top of beautifying, it compares the difference between two files, minifies, parses tables and analyzes the code of popular programming languages. It has loads of settings and has error detection too.
Encoded data also poses the same problem as compressed files. To help check the innards, here is a good XML Viewer. JSON Viewer does what its name suggests. MotherEffin offers other tools such as a Base64 encoder or decoder, HTML Entities encoder or decoder, etc. Other encoders/decoders are URLEncoder, TextMagic's URL-Encoder-Decoder. and HTML-Cleaner is a very useful tool if you need to convert certain tags or characters, or remove chars and empty tags.
OmniTools is a FOSS self-hosted toolkit for editing images, audio, video, text, PDF, and data in general. IT Tools offer lots of developer tools, it has a Google Chrome extension.
When uploading or downloading files from servers via FTP, use FileZilla.
FileGator is a free, open-source, self-hosted web application for managing files and folders. Tiny File Manager is a simple, fast and small web-based file manager with a single file. No dependencies, no database required. Upload, download, edit, delete, preview and manage your files with ease. File Browser and Sprut are good options. Filemat is still in beta.
Filester is a WordPress file manager plugin, runs in the admin back-end, no need for a separate FTP client. If you don't have access to your webhosting control panel, you can still access files using Advanced File Manager.
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PHP is a widely used server-side scripting language specially designed for web development. As such, it is my main choice of programming language. Below are some of the best free PHP tools I've been using.
Want to retrieve the content of a website? PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser, it can find tags on any page using the tag selectors. It can even extract contents from web pages, including ones with invalid HTML. A very useful tool for scrapping.
PHP Payment is a PHP based payment library that supports PayPal, Authorize.NET and 2Checkout.
PHP regular expressions to validate and format a string.
Check any issues with markups using Markup Validation Service.
A client of mine needs to add subscribers to his Aweber account via API. The PHP code examples use League OAuth2 and Guzzle. To make it easier for development, use Composer to deal with dependencies. Packagist is the main Composer repository. It aggregates public PHP packages installable with Composer. Here's a clear instruction to install Composer in CPanel.
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JavaScript, or JS for short, is a high-level and object-based programming language. It enables one to create dynamic content, control multimedia, create animated images, etc. Along with HTML and CSS, JS forms the indispensable core of the World Wide Web(WWW). Below are some of the best free JS-based tools used in a web development project.
Svelte is a new front-end, open-source JavaScript framework for making interactive webpages. Several advantages over others are it involves less code, no virtual DOM and truly reactive. I would love to try it one day in one of my projects.
SurveyJS Form Library is a free MIT-licensed UI component that allows you to render dynamic JSON-based forms in any JavaScript application, collect responses from users, and send all form data to your database. You can use it for multi-page forms of any length and complexity, pop-up surveys, quizzes, scored surveys, calculator forms, and more. Essential plan is free.
Sweet Alert 2 is a beautiful replacement for JavaScript's own "Alert" and a lot more. It can show images and HTML content, but not an iframe. It's not just limited messages, it can accept input and display confirmation. Download it for free and have it integrated with just a few lines of code. Other options are AlertifyJS, and MicroModal.JS. To create an exit intent popup, use it together with Glio.JS which detects if the mouse exits the page. If not a fan of JS library, here's an exit intent tutorial with minimal code.
Here are JS based editors: EditorJS, QuillJS, SummerNote, SunEditor, Novel, Toast UI, MediumEditor, jQuery-Notebook, and Popline. EtherPad is an open-source, web-based collaborative text editor that allows multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously in real-time.
Currently, I use jQuery, but it has become old and needs to be replaced to cater to modern requirements. jQuery Pop Up Window plugin is a responsive all around script. See demo here. Another option is jQuery Modal. LightBox 2 is a jQuery plugin image overlay.
AreYouSure is a jQuery plugin that detects and alerts users to unsaved changes if they attempt to close the browser or navigate away from the page.
DataTables is a jQuery plugin, while Tabulator is a standalone JavaScript library. Both render static HTML tables into interactive ones. Other options are GridJS and AG Grid.
jQuery.Payment, is specifically built for credit card and number formatting and validation. It formats the input as it is being typed! The strength of Formance.js is data formatting and validation. It is actually based on jQuery.Payment but the validation is extended to string inputs.
Wouldn't it be nice if the email input is also checked for typos or misspellings? That's what MailCheck exactly does and more. It also offers suggestions. See it live in action at KickStarter's sign up form.
jQuery Validation, Validate.js, Parsely, and Validetta are general-purpose validators. The error notifications are displayed inline. Parsely, on top of the individual field's errors, it also shows a bulk error message on top of the form. Parsely and Validetta can show floating alerts.
jQuery.validationEngine, is a jQuery-dependent library and is my favorite. It doesn't generate any conflicts and presents eye-pleasing error messages. Its documentation is also comprehensive. However, credit card validation is weak. Luckily, it can be integrated with third-party specialty scripts such as jQuery Credit Card Validator via the funcCall feature.
DropZone.JS is a file drag and drop jQuery plugin. Spectrum, and TinyColorPicker are color picker jQuery plugins. Cash, and Umbrella JS are lightweight jQuery alternatives. If you got tired of using jQuery and prefer native JavaScript, try this jQuery to JavaScript converter.
If a BootStrap fan, try Smoke. Check the demo here. Add watermark on images using Brianium's, and Patrick Wied's watermark scripts. JS libraries working with local storage.
Responsive Nav is a JavaScript library for responsive navigation.
Motion is a robust animation library for modern web projects using JavaScript. Anime.JS is another option.
JS function with RegEx pattern to validate link:
function isLinkValid(link){
return /^(http|https|ftp):\/\/[a-z0-9]+([\-\.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*\.[a-z]{2,5}(:[0-9]{1,5})?(\/.*)?$/i.test(link);
}
PageFind is a search library for static sites, it can run on any website framework, and only requires a folder containing the built static files of your website.
LeafJS is an open-source full featured JS library for mobile and desktop friendly interactive maps. It is using OpenStreetMap.
JSFiddle is a very neat tool to try out JavaScript, HTML, and CSS codes. It has separate inputs for each and a window to view the results. It's a self-supporting development environment as almost all popular JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, Prototype, and YUI are supported. After saving the code, it provides a link to share and edit afterward. No account needed for NextLeap, and Scaler online JavaScript compiler.
ESLint, JSLint and JSHint are free JS code debuggers.
Google hosts JS libraries here. Other alternatives are CDNJS and jsDelivr.
Here's more JS resources: Convert string to a title case, Loop and Iterate, Arrow function, Fetch function, Promise vs Async, Await.
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HTML is a computer language used to create websites. A link or hyperlink is a special text that's "linked" to another page. This allows navigation through the web.
It is called HyperText because as what "hyper" connotes, one can go to any place on the Internet where the link leads to in no particular sequence. Markup specifies the code for formatting, both the layout and style, within a document. Using tags, content is formatted into italics or bold, for example.
HTML is constantly evolving to meet the demands and requirements of the ever-growing Internet under the direction of the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C). The current version is now HTML5. Below are some useful HTML resources I've collected.
Quick, what's the code for ©? No need to grab that book or search online, go to HTMLSymbols and Entity Code, haha. It has a complete list of all HTML symbol entities and their equivalent names and numbers. They grouped the entities into tabs, and each entity has a description of what the symbol is used for.
Got an HTML5 website project? No need to start from scratch. HTML5 Boilerplate is a ready-to-use template. The template includes the latest version of jQuery and Normalize CSS to get ahead of the task. List of HTML5 new tags.
Use QuackIt's HTML Table Generator. However if working with more complex tables with computations, its easier to use Excel or Google Sheets and then use the Excel to HTML Converter. Free HTML code generator. CSS button generator and other UI elements.
To fix and clean messed up HTML code, try HTMLWasher. If looking for more more advance features there's HTML Cleaner.
If interested in MarkDown instead, learn its basic syntax here.
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As a web developer, most of the time I collaborate with a web designer or with other developers. Working on the same files can cause severe version issues. Version control software maintains document versions and tracks changes. Below are some open-source tools available that I've come across.
Apache Subversion (SVN) is a popular version control system, even used by Google Code for distributing their codes. Tortoise SVN is an easy-to-use interface for Windows PCs.
Personally, I use Git. It is a Source Control Management (SCM) tool with a lot of features, such as branching and merging. Unlike SVN which is centralized, it is truly distributed. However, compared to SVN, it is much more complicated. You can learn more about it at Git-SCM. Create an account at GitHub.
Mercurial is an easier, faster, and more efficient version of Git. It comes with extensive documentation and can support large development projects.
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Being a lone wolf web developer, I have to be knowledgeable about as many things as possible, and that includes MySQL database administration. Two of the tools I'm using are Percona's configuration wizard and query advisor. The configuration wizard creates a basic configuration file based on your requirements. The query advisor is used to troubleshoot a query. Both services are free, but you need to sign up first in order to use them. So far I tried the configuration wizard and the DB is holding up pretty well.
After you've setup and run your database, at some point you'll encounter all sorts of problems. But even if you don't have any experience, that isn't a big deal. All you need is MySQLTuner. It is a Perl script that reads the current configuration, reviews it, and offers suggestions to increase performance and stability. I've tried using it on one of my projects and it worked wonders.
When I was assigned to transfer a WordPress website to another server, I encountered this bottleneck. The compressed WP database file is a huge 1.2GB! Uploading it via phpMyAdmin is causing the server to run out of resources.
Through searching, I've found SQL Dump File Splitter by Rusiczki that separates the DB's structure and data. It then splits .sql data into several manageable parts. You just need to specify what file size each would be and it will take care of the splitting. You need to upload the structure first and then the data. Uploading the data files is a breeze as they are named in sequence. Even if you missed the order, you know that it doesn't matter.
I thought this would be difficult, haha.
WP phpMyAdmin, Database Manager – WP Adminer, WP Reset – Most Advanced WordPress Reset Tool, Database Reset, WP-DBManager, and Advanced Database Cleaner are some WP database management plugins.
If using Xano as backend, here's a video tutorial on how to overcome its rate limits.
Riak KV is a a distributed NoSQL key-value database with advanced local and multi-cluster replication that guarantees reads and writes even in the event of hardware failures or network partitions.
PouchDB is a open-source JavaScript database designed to run within the browser. It enables applications to store data locally while offline, then synchronize it with CouchDB and compatible servers when the application is back online, keeping the user's data in sync no matter where they next login.
MaxMind's GeoLite is a free IP geolocation dataset with country and city details. Requires account and attribution.
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Data is more than just numbers and text, it is information that may be of value. It takes special skills to turn meaningless data into an understandable, impactful, and engaging presentation. Patterns, trends, and correlations are easily recognizable using data visualization tools and services.
I've been involved with quite a few web projects that require graphs, but with advancements like HTML5 and CSS3, data presentation goes beyond the standard lists, tables, and graphs that people are used to. There are now tools that take visualization to a whole new level.
Let's begin with ones that require good old coding. Personally, I use ChartJS for my projects. Here are some JavaScript(JS) based visualization libraries: D3JS, Chiasm, Dygraphs and JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit(JIT). If you prefer Python, Bokeh is for you.
For non-developers, whine not, as there are online services that allow you to generate stunning visuals with less tinkering.
Tableau is a commercial service, but they offer Public for free. Public is an AJAX-based application that creates auto-updating visualizations. It can connect to dynamic data sources such as Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel 2007 or later, Microsoft Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket, OData, .CSV files, Statistical Files such as SAS (*.sas7bdat), SPSS (*.sav), and R (*.rdata, *.rda) and Web Data Connectors.
It can support a whopping 15,000,000 rows of data per workbook. The finished visual is saved in your Tableau account, which allocates a whopping 10GB of storage space. The end product is also website embeddable. You can download the desktop app here.
Connect the Dots shows you how your data is connected by analyzing it as a network. Try it and be amazed. Easel.ly converts textual content into visuals. GapMinder's Bubbles have some interesting graphs about the population. Use Knight Lab's Timeline to create timelines, haha. Microsoft is offering the desktop version of PowerBI for free.
How much easier can data visualization be with these tools? Duh.
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It is very cumbersome and time-consuming to make up data for testing web applications or software in general. To make things easier next time around, I've searched on test data generators and found some good services to use. See them below.
For personal information, FakeNa.Me offers basic details like name, address, phone number, and email. The email is a ready-to-use but temporary account from Teleosaurs.Xyz. Additional info such as username, password, gender, date of birth, and even US social security number are also provided. Fake Name Ganarator is another site, but with more data and easier to use.
In e-commerce applications, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover test credit card numbers can be obtained from Stripe and Paypal. You can assign any CVV, expiry date, and personal information to the number. Just make sure that the expiry date is in the future.
Mockaroo is a full-featured commercial data generator. You can add any type of field. And I mean any type, CC numbers, JSON arrays, formulas, even naughty strings. That means data that can cause errors, haha. You can download up to 1,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats for free.
In the same mold is GenerateData, but it is limited to only 100 test data points. OnlineDataGenerator allows you to export a whopping 100,000 rows of test data. They have other generator tools. DatabaseTestData is another option.
For testing API code using fake data, connect to Fake Store API endpoints. To test REST and SOAP API connection try ReqBin.
ExtendClass is a developer's dream. It is an all-in-one toolbox. It provides code testers, checkers, formatters, converters, etc. What I like is the CSV and JSON random data generators. It can definitely save a chunk of time. Also check out the RegEx Tester.
RegEx101 is another regex tester.
For email validation I use this: /[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,}$/.
For phone: /^\+[1-9]{1}[0-9]{3,15}$/. To remove the \+ for international number support, if not needed.
For date with format DD/MM/YYYY: /^(?:(?:31(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[13578]|1[02]))\1|(?:(?:29|30)(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[13-9]|1[0-2])\2))(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$|^(?:29(\/|-|\.)0?2\3(?:(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?(?:0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|(?:(?:16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))$|^(?:0?[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])(\/|-|\.)(?:(?:0?[1-9])|(?:1[0-2]))\4(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$/.
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Did you know that WordPress(WP) powers 32% of the internet? It controls a whopping 60.2% of the CMS(Content Management Software) market! If you're going to build a start-up website it will probably be a WordPress. It so happens that's my specialty, haha.
Follow these steps to manually convert static HTML website to WordPress.
One of the best things that made WP very popular is the plugin. It is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be used to extend the features of the site. Hence, it is so easy for users to add functionality without knowing a single line of code. There are literally thousands available for free download at the official plugin directory. WP Hive is a curated WordPress repository. MyThemeShop also offers some free plugins.
Managing all of the plugins would be one helluva job, haha. Don't despair, in order to make it easier to install the plugins, use a plugin manager and bulk installer like WPFavs. You'll need to create an account on their site and create your favorites list. You can group the plugins together and install them in a few clicks. WPCore has the same functionality.
Web applications are very possible with WordPress, for example you can create a CRM using Zero BS.
For easy installation and development in your Windows desktop, use LocalWP. Try and test WordPress without installing for free, using TasteWP. Without an account, the site will be up for 2 days, with account up to 7 days. If you save an instance of WordPress PlayGround, it will be up until the tab is closed. There is a VS Code extension, and WP plugin.
Enable maintenance or under construction mode with Under Construction or Maintenance.
No need to edit your theme's functions.php use Code Snippets instead. WPCode has truckloads of ready to use code snippets and other features like a built in search and replace. Easily integrate visual and functional elements using Shortcodes Ultimate. Share code snippets in WordPress.
If your theme doesn't support excerpts, no problem. Enable it with Advanced Excerpt. Control what widgets are displayed on the sidebar using Custom Sidebars. Control the visibility of menu links via logic with If Menu. Header, Footer and Post Injections insert custom codes in the locations specified by its name. Use TablePress for what else? Tables, haha.
WP Auto Republish and Inline Related Posts just does what their name says. Better Search Replace does what its name says. Useful when changing from one domain to another or making mass edits to the content. A very nifty feature is the ability to review the changes before committing. Bulk Delete posts, media, users etc.
Add maps using WP Go Maps.
You'll also be needing help to manage the plugin, theme and WordPress core updates. My preference is Easy Updates Manager. In case you encounter errors with the update, use WP Rollback.
MainWP is a multi-site management plugin, you can update the WP core, plugins and themes. Also backup and scan. Another option is ManageWP.
When migrating a WordPress site to another web host or domain, the best free plugin to use is WPVivid, which also has a staging feature. Other options are Duplicator and MigrateGuru. With both, the migration is being processed on their server, so there is no need to download files.
A progressive web apps are websites built with modern web technologies that offer a native, app-like experience on any device from a single codebase. It is an easier and practical option compared to creating a separate app for Android, iOS, and Linux-based mobile OS. They are installable, work offline, and load instantly, bridging the gap between web functionality and mobile app performance. A PWA consists of a Web App Manifest(governs how the app looks and behaves when installed on a device), Service Workers(a special type of Web Worker with the ability to intercept, modify, and respond to all offline and online network requests using the Fetch API), and Secure HTTPS(a secure HTTPS endpoint and other user safeguards making the user experience secure from end to end). PWA Builder is a community guided, open source project by Microsoft to help developers build and publish PWAs. Super Progressive Web Apps is a WordPress plugin.
List of free WordPress plugins.
FixMySite blog is a good resource for WordPress tips, and guides.
Adding custom REST API endpoints.
ClassicPress is a lightweight, stable, instantly familiar free open-source content management system. Forked from WordPress without the Gutenberg block editor, hence the name. Obsolete JavaScript libraries like jQueryUI are replaced by modern libraries and native HTML5. WordPress plugins are compatible if they don't have any dependency with Gutenberg blocks.
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The European Union requires websites to show information about cookies being used. The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR requires visitor consent regarding the use of cookies. Although this law is exclusive to European visitors, I've decided to implement this.
Searching for the fastest way to do it, I stumbled on a few free-to-use cookie scripts. See some below.
Attacat's is a button simply to inform you that your site uses cookies. CookieInfoScript has a lot of customization, but it only displays information. The code is hosted on their site. Dare to Think have 2 versions, one with the "Accept" button, and the other just displaying the banner. It is self-hosted, so you have to download the files.
CookieConsent has a cookie preference center, where visitors can update their cookie settings. It requires coding, but the instructions are easy to follow. Another option is ComplyDog's Cookie Consent Banner.
Here is Orest Bida's implementation of the cookie consent. SilkTide's Consent Manager is self hosted. Here's a list of free cookie consent management scripts.
GDPR Cookie Compliance is a free WordPress plugin with premium features, the free version is usable.
Complianz have automatic recurring monthly scans in the free version with no pageview limitation. Some customization to display as a floating widget and to show the widget using a link.
WPLP Cookie Consent and WPConsent have cookie scanning too.
Pressidium Cookie Consent is 100% free but no auto-scan. Simple GDPR Cookie Compliance, EUCookieLaw, and IceGram Cookie Manager have basic features but free. Compliance by Hu-manity.co plugin only with no web application also provides a simple banner.
Google has released a new Google Tag Manager feature: Google Consent Mode (GCM), still in Beta. It is the new API developed by Google to measure conversions while still respecting user consent. It helps to honor both marketing and privacy efforts at the same time. With the Consent Mode, you can modify the behavior of Google tags based on user consent. Currently, some paid services are supporting GCM. They offer a free account limited to a maximum of 100 pages scanned. CookieYes has a monthly 5,000 consent log cap, they also have a WordPress plugin, while CookieBot has none.
To scan for cookies use CookieServe.
Consent-O-Matic is a browser extension that recognizes many common Consent Management Platform(CMP) banners, and automatically apply the preferences.
Here's an interesting take on why most websites don’t actually need cookie consent banners.
Accessify have a lot of accessibility tools and wizards. Embed.IM have a free to embed accessibility widget, customization requires an account. Sienna is free forever, no string attached.
AccessYes by CookieYes, and Ally by Elementor are free WordPress plugins. Accessibility Font Resizer and Zeno Font Resizer are simple font resizers.
OctoParse, and WebScraper.IO are web scraping services and they have a free plan.
Asana, and FreedCamp project management tools have free plans. Super Productivity is a open-source desktop based task manager and workspace tool combining tasks, time tracking, and notes.
LibrePlan is a free, open-source web-based project management application. It is designed to help organizations plan, monitor, and control projects collaboratively in real-time. Managed and supported by an open-source community, relying heavily on donations. While the Community edition is free, the Enterprise edition is available via a commercial subscription, and designed for professional environments with additional deployment flexibility and support.
Clockify.me is a time tracker with free account for upto 5 users.
BuiltWith shows you what services and platforms a website is using.
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To remain anonymous while browsing the web, use Chrome's Incognito or Vivaldi's and FireFox's Private Window. Privacy centric browsers are Brave, Helium, LibreWolf, and Arc. WaterFox has a mobile version. Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that prevents websites or apps from tracking or storing information about your surfing habits and whereabouts. It is robust software; in fact, it was developed by the US Navy itself.
Floorp is a UI focused fork of FireFox. For the environment minded users there's Ecosia.
FireFox-based Zen browser help you focus by being minimalist. It has a unique implementation of Firefox's built-in features. Among the many browsers I've used, it is the one with the most intuitive design. To mimic the Private container of Floorp in Zen, install the Temporary Containers. Aside from the usual extension, it has Zen Mod, try SuperPins.
For FireFox, these are some add-ons: Marker and Web Marker - Draw on Websites are web page drawing and highlighting tools. New Tab Notifier display toast notifications for new tabs with one-click switching. Read Aloud is text to speech voice reader. uBlock Origin ad blocker. DocsAfterDark, dark mode for Google Docs.
BetterFox has a set of about:config tweaks that result in a faster, more private and secure FireFox.
Here are some of the Google Chrome Extensions I'm using: Marker.IO: Capture a screenshot of the visual bug, highlight, crop, and fill in the form to create a ticket. Read Out Loud, text to speech voice reader. ReadLite, reading mode. PrintFriendly. RainDrop bookmark manager. BitWarden password manager. Inspect CSS: Does just what the name suggest and much more. DocsAfterDark: Google Docs Dark mode. There is also a Google Sheets Dark Mode. Side Space, Vertical Tabs - Tabybara, Vertical Tabs in Side Panel, and Link Map offer vertical tabs support. Manganum: Sidebar with Gmail and Google Calendar, and Tabwise: Vertical Tabs & Workspaces display tab icons in grid layout. Here's more web development extensions.
To view the source code of a Google Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, zip file, or the page in the Chrome Web Store, Firefox add-on gallery, use CRX Viewer.
Phi is a Vivaldi mod for a full vertical UI experience just like in Zen. Here's how to create a backup of Vivaldi's user data and create a new profile with the same settings.
Flow Browser is a Chrome-based wannabe Zen clone. It is super minimal with very few customization. The sidebar has grid-based pinned tabs. But its power feature is the floating address that also acts a command palette similar to VS Studio IDE. It still in beta. This is a browser that is worth watching closely as it matures.
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Cron is a software utility present in any Unix-like computer operating system. It is used to execute commands at a specific time, date, or interval. These commands or tasks are known as Cron Jobs. These jobs automate maintenance or administration tasks like performing periodic backups, deleting or downloading files, etc.
Cron Jobs are stored in a configuration file called the CronTab(Cron Table) and can be accessed in the /etc directory. Only system administrators can edit it.
However, setting up a cron job is daunting, especially when dealing with scheduling a job. To get a deeper insight, read this beginner's guide.
To help you get started, use the CronTab Generator. It has an easy to use language. You may then combine it with Crontab Guru which converts the cron job into a human-readable format.
Here's a sample cron job to run a PHP script every day at 1:30 AM:
30 1 * * * wget -O - 'https://sample-domain.com/sample-directory/sample-file.php?param=sample' >/dev/null 2>&1
If the cPanel cron job is not available, use Cron-Job. It's free. FastCron offers 5 cronjobs with 5-min interval in the free plan.
Zapier, Make, and IFTTT automate integration of different platform. N8N has a free self-hosted community edition.
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Sometimes you think that your website is slow, when in fact it is your internet that is slow. To test internet speed, try Fast. It instantly gives you the details on page load. Of course, there's SpeedTest. If you don't like to remember these sites, just type "speed test" on Google Search, then click on the RUN SPEED TEST button.
I once experienced my ISP blocking me from a site I was working on. It turned out my IP was listed on AbuseAt. If that happened to you, just get your IP here and confirm if it's listed here. You can then request its removal.
If you own a website, the last thing you want to happen is downtime, so it is very important to use a website monitoring service. UptimeRobot offers free site monitoring that sends email alerts every time your site goes offline. The free plan has a 5 minute monitoring interval and you can add up to 50 monitors. It comes with 1 status page. Not bad for a free plan.
There are four monitor types, but I'm using only the http(s) and ping. In http(s), the service regularly sends requests and decides if it is up or down depending on the status returned. While the ping type involves sending Ping(ICMP) requests and the status is determined "if responses are received or not." This makes ping ideal for monitoring the server and confirms if the problem just affects your site or is caused by the server itself.
I'm using it on my website and I find it very effective. It is able to detect and notify me about blips in uptime.
DownTimeMonkey offers a whopping 60 monitors free, with a 5 minute interval.
BetterStack Uptime free plan provides 10 monitors with a 3 minute interval. What's good about their service is they offer a status page with https support. Check out our status page.
Use DownForEveryoneOrJustMe to know if a website is down. If you need more details or your very "own" status page, try UpDownRadar. ShopifyStatus and CloudFlareStatus let you know if these services are down.
Look for a co-working space, virtual office, private office, meeting/conference room, or event space? Use ServicedOffice, CoWorker, and CoWorkerBooking.
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