It only takes one README.md file to create and deploy a VuePress site. The simplicity is the beauty of the project. It’s also possible to vuepress eject and get a fully blown Vue site that compiles in components and works offline. Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the base…

The central Marketing and Communications Office is looking for an individual who is driven to create Web user experiences that bring the university brand to life and encourage action. We are looking for someone with solid website design and UX experience. The individual will need to have enough HTML/CSS/JS experience…

Remove 96.48% of unused CSS on build to improve performance — Recently Andrew Del Prete and Full Stack Radio posted about removing unused css declarations when building Tailwinds CSS into a Laravel project. It sounds like magic but behind the scenes it is searching through all .html, .blade.php, .js and .vue …

Going it alone is a recipe for failure — A university is filled with people doing incredible things. I’ve work in and around higher education professionals for 15 years. I’m constantly amazed by their ingenuity and willingness to share their lessons learned. Ideas are just ideas without the support of others “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening…

The importance of open source contributions — There are many PHP deployment options, I’ve been exploring Deployer.org (version 4.x) over the last few weeks. Starting with a local build zero-downtime Laravel script that ships only the final code to the server is a little slow, so let’s make it a little faster. When deploying, seconds matter Of all the tasks, npm:local:install…

Why Medium makes it to my daily reading list — Last year I purged as many incoming requests for my attention as possible. Medium has become something I’ve adopted, enjoy and think it’s worth giving it a shot to stick around. Video games or watching too many movies wasn’t the problem, to be honest I’ve never done much of either…

Moving beyond Envoy Laravel Envoy (version 5.4) was a nice leap forward from Rocketeer, which ported Capistrano’s zero downtime deploy to PHP. Laravel’s response, Envoy, is a “do it yourself” minimalist tool compared to Rocketeer’s pre-built recipes that were almost plug-and-play. Working with one or two projects, using a service…

A journey from discovery, testing to insights of an A/B website test at Wayne State University — Last year at Wayne State University we re-focused the admissions area of wayne.edu to reduce the depth of the site (from five to two levels deep) and bring more resources to the front page. As a result the landing page highlights the six most popular audiences and their navigation items. …

Living in Michigan requires anyone on a lake to take their boat and dock in before winter and put everything back in the spring when the lakes thaw. My dad, brother and I have been doing this dance since I remember. …