Duppy conqueror in the digital jungle.

"Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life."

H.i.M. Haile Selassie I

Software posts

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 5

In this series I'll show how to setup a high performance, mobile friendly AMP Blog with custom Jekyll plugins while using GitHub pages as a free hosting provider. We create a staging environment and setup an automatic deploy and testing with Travis CI.

31 Jul 2020: Today we have a look how we can modify our website-theme to be customizable and fullfil the requirements to be recognized as a valid AMP Page. We add Structured Data for Googles Rich Results and Open Graph for Facebook shares.

... read more

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 4

29 Jul 2020: We want a professional setup, so to achieve additional security to ensure that we are not deploying a broken website we want our output tested. One easy way is to setup an automated test that parses the html of our generated website and checks for syntax errors as not closed html-tags and broken links. This is a kind of E2E test, which can be done with very few lines of code.

... read more

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 3

28 Jul 2020: On of the biggest drawbacks of hosting your Jekyll blog with Github Pages is that the standard build limits the plugins/ Gems you can use quite strongly. In this article we have a look how to setup Travis CI to actually build with custom Plugins/Gems and publish it to the hosted GitHub Pages. We overcome GitHub Pages limitation and get a feature rich site by skipping the standard build and let Travis CI do the heavy lifting for us.

... read more

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 2

24 Jul 2020: In this article we have a look how to setup Travis CI to automatically build our Jekyll website.

... read more

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 1

22 Jul 2020: In Part 1 we create a Vanilla Jekyll Blog, serve it for local development and bring it online, all for free and within one hour.

... read more

JAM Day 1 - Content Management, Products & Categories

16 Dec 2019: On Day 1 of our JAMstack journey we explore working with Products and compare the CMS options Forestry and Netlify CMS with a bareback setup which skips the CMS altogether.

... read more

JAM Day 0 - What are we going to do?

9 Nov 2019: After reading a couple of articles about the current developments in the JAM Stack (Javascript, API, Markdown) I got really excited about getting my hands dirty and build a little project. Since the usual tutorials often lack the requirements of real-world applications I got the idea of creating an functional online shop, utilizing shiny new tools as StackBit which are available for free.

... read more

Problems with the facebook share? The wrong text or image shows up?

11 Dec 2015: Every CMS offers widgets and helpers to share your blog/website in popular social networks as facebook. To get the share-button in is usually very easy but a bad surprise often follows when we see which content and image shows up (or not) in facebooks share dialog. We will have a quick look at the basics of open graph parameters and how they need to be included to in the website or blog. Once this is set, we will use the facebook debugger tool to ensure we get the latest content included and we are happy with the results.

... read more

Free software tools for your success

8 Dec 2015: We are going to introduce a software strategy for a fictional brand called FantasticContent.Online to demonstrate how different free tools can be combined to a rock solid base for many kinds business relying on teamwork. We will not be limited to a certain product, but want to have a look on aspects surrounding successful projects. We will see how to organize teams flexible, build short communications and make the life easy for the business and marketeers. Ready? Let’s go ….

... read more

faster, cheaper, safer

19 Nov 2015: The commonly used CMS (Wordpress, Joomla!, …) are all server-side applications which require sophisticated features from the hosting environment, such as a database and activated PHP or Python compilers. Your website-project is of reasonable size, aimed for exposure, performance, and SEO rather than direct interaction with visitors as in community sites or e-commerce? Then you might not need any paid hosting at all anymore. Sounds good? Let’s dive into pre-compiled websites and what they have to offer …

... read more

CMS ... Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Django, Typo3 or Plone

17 Nov 2015: Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Django, Typo3 and Plone are some of the most common Content Management Systems (CMS) today, delivering millions of websites every day. But what is a CMS and what purpose does it serve? Thanks to the open-source community, small projects, start-ups, or businesses with very limited budgets are able to get online with low-cost websites. This article explains some very basic concepts and what kind of issues you can expect when using any CMS…

... read more

Also check these blogs:

Understanding Open Source Software

9 Feb 2020: A rather interesting summary of the history and basics of Open Source Software and it's philosophy. Learn something new every day!

... read more

Introduction into JAM Stack

8 Nov 2019: The JAMstack isn’t a specific set of tools, but a new, modern way of building websites & apps. Any dynamic programming during the request/response cycle is handled by JavaScript, running entirely on the client. All server-side functions or databases actions are abstracted into reusable APIs, accessed over HTTPS with JS. Be it SaaS, third-party services or custom-built. Templated markup should be prebuilt at build time, usually using a site generator for content sites, or a build tool for web apps.

... read more

Styling form elements

15 Jun 2015: Styling of form elements is often a pain in the ass. There are always designers who really really want their custom checkboxes and dropdowns. If you are reading this article you know how hard this can be. Here is how a pro deals with this problem.

... read more

Nginx and WordPress

30 Jun 2015: I've ordered a new virtual private server because the old one was a bit to slow for »that one project«. Here is how I configured it to run WordPress with nginx and fastcgi_cache.

... read more

View all educational posts ...

Community News

Rasta.Online Goes Reggae

30 Jul 2020: We love music and for us is Reggae more then entertainment. It teaches and calms us down in troubled times, it makes us happy and life wouldn't be the same without it. To share our love and passion we added a new section on the website, where you can explore and enjoy our personal favorites, uplifting song by brilliant artists. BigUp yourself and keep the fire Blazin'!
... check it out
Want to get published here?

15 Apr 2020: Due to a big commercial workload in the last months we've not be able to follow up on the latest article series again. After some discussions we decided now to open up opportunities for non-related technical bloggers to contribute and reach our community with high quality content. So if you feel the urge in your heart to get published here on rasta.online, please feel free to shoot us an email to contributions@rasta.online with what you have in mind. For the sake of our dear readers we'll ensure though that we keep this blog advertisement free and maintain the integrity and good spirit in which this project started.
Deep dive into JAM Stack ... a new series of articles is in the works

8 Nov 2019: It feels good to be back in this community. Through our recent changes the hosting structure I stumbled over the extended JAM Stack approach for delivering contemporary web solutions. Even though Rasta.Online works with its basics for multiple years now, after all this blog is build with a Static Site Generator, nailing the "M succesfully. We are promoting the underlying ideas since the 2015 article "Faster, cheaper, safer" but never did more then scratching on the very surface of what is possible today. To change that a series will follow how to create a functional ecommerce solution, which is cheap, reliable and fast. Stay tuned!
... check it out
Rasta.online is now proudly served by github pages

24 Oct 2019: Our community pages are now moved to githubs free hosting service github pages. While updating the current hosting situation, a lot of further improvements and a revitalisation of the community is in progress. Stay tuned for further updates.
... research
Rasta.online on github

18 Nov 2015: This blog is for educational purpose and promotes open source solutions and tools. Therefor are all published articles free to re-use and the websites source-code is available to everyone in its github repository.
... research

Explore the music ...

Featured Artists

Rasta Blog

Software posts

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 5

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 4

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 3

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 2

High Performance AMP Blog with Jekyll - Part 1

JAM Day 1 - Content Management, Products & Categories

JAM Day 0 - What are we going to do?

Problems with the facebook share? The wrong text or image shows up?

Free software tools for your success

faster, cheaper, safer

CMS ... Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, Django, Typo3 or Plone

Also check these blogs:

Understanding Open Source Software

Introduction into JAM Stack

Styling form elements

Nginx and WordPress

View all educational posts ...

Community News

Rasta.Online Goes Reggae

Want to get published here?

Deep dive into JAM Stack ... a new series of articles is in the works

Rasta.online is now proudly served by github pages

Rasta.online on github