The newsletter popup that showing up in 70% of the news sites I visit, at least those sites that I visit via Twitter or Flipboard.

I don’t know since when the trend started, it started to feels like a boilerplate or industry best practice, everyone starting to follow suits, plugins available everywhere, and blog posts about how to craft effective marketing newsletter started to shows up.

While it would be nice that it’s easy for me as a user to be able to subscribe to a site that they enjoy reading, but personally I think it’s a step too much when the enormous overlay dialog that covered almost the whole page (specially in mobile phone) shows up the moment the page loaded, I’m not sure how much sign up those sites will get for the dialog to shows up on page load rather than a link to it, I know for sure it annoyed the hack out of me.

When I first moved my blog to Azure, there is no MySQL provided by Azure themselves, but from their partner ClearDB. But now since Microsoft already announced that they are providing Azure MySQL In-App server, though it is still in preview, I’m switching to Azure MySQL In-App, away from ClearDB.

The reason why I’m moving away from ClearDB is not because it is expensive, for my use case it is very affordable, I’m moving away because even with my Azure credit, I still have to pay for the service separately, making me not able to fully utilize my credit.

Azure’s App Service Plan D1 (Shared) doesn’t allow to use SSL and SNI, so after changed the plan to Basic B1, that support SSL, and now I can install Let’s Encrypt and use it for my blog.

However to setup everything needed for Let’s Encrypt to work and automate the process is tedious, but luckily for the this extension, stuff is easier (read easier, still not as easy as few button clicks). To get the started, get the extension.

Recently I need to transfer Azure subscription from one of my account to another one. I was using Developer Program Benefit subscription for my blog for quite some times, until recently, I just realized that I have another subscription from another Microsoft Account, so I decided to transfer that subscription to my current account, having one subscription to maintain is easier.

But my problem is that my Visual Studio Enterprise subscription was with my other Microsoft account, and I don’t want to migrate my blog over to that account, so I decided to just transfer the subscription over.

While I can’t find the link to trigger the transfer, so I log a ticket with the support to ask about how to transfer Azure subscription. The support called me all over the U.S in 2 hours, and help me through the process. It was pretty straight forward, I just need to reply the email sent by the support to both of my email address, to approve the transfer, and it’s done within an hour.

After I got my Visual Studio Enterprise subscription transferred over, it is time for me to switch my resources in Azure to the new subscription, it is quite straight forward.

A while back I worked on a small library with the SharePoint Online’s taxonomy, building the tree structure, and filtering the taxonomy data from SharePoint using JavaScript.

While most of the information can be found at SP.Taxonomy.js namespace in MSDN and many resources online. But I’m struggling with one particular method of Term, according to the MSDN, the function to search for a term under a term will be

SP.Taxonomy.Term.getTerms(termLabel, lcid, defaultLabelOnly, stringMatchOption, resultCollectionSize, trimUnavailable)

This is different than searching for a term under the term store or term set level, which need to use the SP.Taxonomy.LabelMatchInformation for the request. So the code for searching for term in a term will look something like this:

From previous post, I managed to set up WordPress on Azure, so now is time to move on. To move my existing WordPress over, very obviously I need to do backup, transfer, and setup.

From my previous post about moving away from HostGator, so I’ll have to move my WordPress as well. Thankfully Microsoft given away some free credits for Azure through Visual Studio Dev Essentials few months back, so I use the opportunity to migrate WordPress from HostGator over to Azure.

At first I thought it will be a troublesome process, as I might need to setup a VM, and install PHP, MySQL myself, but actually it’s very simple to setup WordPress on Azure.

I’ve been using HostGator for many years to host my blog, I’ve been wanting to migrate to DigitalOcean or other cloud hosting provider, but I haven’t found any motivation to do so previously, and I’ve found it last year (I’m cheap, I waited till it expiring so that I can move away), the main and only motivator is that HostGator keeping my password in plain text in support case.

Last year, I did upgrade my package so that I can support multiple domain, I’ve purchased extra domain so that I can host demo site for my clients, but I never really use it that much, so I raised a ticket to HostGator to request for downgrade my package, and before my ticket go through, I’ll need to key in my login and password for verification purpose.

UI and UX design wasn’t something that I’m good or decent at, and most of the time when developing some features, UX often come to my mind last, and usually ended up with following some most basic form of structuring the elements on the web page without giving much thought.

Recently I saw an amazing idea for Lego set posted in Lego Ideas page, so I decided to go and support the idea, so that it get make by Lego and I can get one for myself. So by default, when I saw something nice and I wanted to support it, I feel excited, and I immediately click the “Support” button.

To deploy Laravel on shared hosting is not too complicated compared to self hosted environment. This example show how to configure Laravel on shared hosting, on a subdomain. I’m using HostGator here, but it should be just same for other hosting solution.

SSH

I used to figuring out how to get Laravel works on my hosting without SSH, but life will be easier with SSH ability so that we can use the composer command we use on local development.

It’s simple to SSH into HostGator server. Based on their guide page, we just need to SSH into the server using our CPanel login, using port 2222. For example: