Blogs on Rihards Steinbergs

Decade of technology updates

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:31:59 +0000

Recap of the last decade

It really hasn’t been ten years since I last updated this site. The now page gets updated a few times a year. But it might as well be ten years since the last proper update. Both content wise and technology wise.

Last time I wrote about this, I talked about in the HTTP/2, SSL & Hugo post. Which already is a bit of a hint of what was exciting and new, and what were the big changes back in 2016. Updating my server to support HTTP/2, moving from Jekyll to Hugo, and all the trouble involved.

Acquia Dev Desktop access from local network

Sun, 05 May 2019 16:07:03 +0000

While typically I prefer something like Drupal VM over Acquia Dev Desktop (and that’s a different topic) I’ve found myself using Dev Desktop more recently, due to how easy, reliably, and quickly it can spin up new copies of Drupal.

For a project I just recently had to test and fix some Internet Explorer issues. Usually I’d use something like BrowserStack, but it happened to be so that I was working from home where I have access to my PC, so I thought why not use that. It would be native testing and overall a smoother experience than BrowserStack (debugging IE11 on BrowserStack can get very frustrating).

Toxic Positivity

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 13:12:00 +0000

Not every single day needs to be full speed, full of determination, bravery, efficiency, well planned out, etc. In fact, I believe that this is “toxic positivity” and is harmful.

What is toxic positivity and why do I think that this amount of positivity is toxic?

My first encounter with the term was on social media. The endless discussions about how people should be full of determination, motivation, drive, happiness, and so on. And while it’s well meaning, it feels to me that it has spiralled out of control and has become a detriment to being honest with oneself and those around you.

Symfony 4: Login Event Listener

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 18:12:00 +0000

Background information

This might be documented somewhere already, and probably also blogged about already. But at the time when I was implementing this myself my Google-fu was failing me.

So I thought I’d document this seemingly very common feature, in case someone else is stuck and is searching for an answer.

Keep in mind this is for Symfony 4. At least that’s the version I wrote and tested this for.

100 Days 100 Commits

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 14:15:00 +0000

I’m a firm believer that deep inside all of us there is a desire to create. To create something that adds value to the world; something that will make it a better place.

There’s also a desire to consume, and we’ve lost much of our desire to create and time to it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for the past months. I find myself too frequently falling into the consumption trap, because it’s easier to consume than it is to create.

Bitbucket Pipelines, PHPUnit, PHPCS and CodeCeption

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 17:01:07 +0000

Background information

For a while now I’ve been thinking about starting a new project, and as with most such cases I’ve been thinking that I need to do things better and more proper this time around.

One of those things has always been the automated testing parts of the project that have fallen behind or lacking in many ways.

So I set a small private repository on Bitbucket to see what my options are, what I could work with, etc. and started looking into the various tools like Jenkins, Travis, and CircleCI.

WordPress tips to make your life easier

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 06:04:07 +0000

During the past ten (on and off) years I’ve worked on around thirty WordPress projects, some have been great, and some have been not so great.

And over the course of those years I’ve collected many links, tips, hints and ideas that make WordPress development much easier than it might seem to new comers.

So here’s my list of hopefully helpful items when it comes to WordPress development and in general running a WP site.

HTTP/2, SSL & Hugo

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:04:07 +0000

Given that I don’t write blogs anymore all that often you might have not noticed that I’ve once again made changes to it.

This time I’ve added HTTP/2 support (with SSL of course as that’s a requirement), the site is now also powered by the wonderful Hugo on a new Linode VPS that’s running Debian 8 Jessie.

The theme (now for Hugo) has also been updated and streamlined to be even smaller in file size. In addition to only using SVGs now, so the icons should be as crisp as they possibly can be.

Dealing with a large amount of redirects

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 13:04:07 +0000

A while ago I was asked to create thousands of redirects for a customer. They had decided to change their domains and the URL structure of most of their pages, so dynamic or smart URL redirecting wouldn’t work.

Adding thousands of Redirect or RewriteRule in the Apache config (or even worse, .htaccess) always seemed like a lousy way of doing it. So I did some research to find out if there’s a better way of doing it, and sure enough there is. It’s called RewriteMap, which lets you point to a file that contains the forwarding / redirecting URLs.

Moustachify gets a mention in the New York Times

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:04:07 +0000

2014 update: it would seem that Moustachify no longer works, and I’m guessing this has to do with missing dependencies. Perhaps a project for another rainy weekend, just like the first version was.

Every now and again I check how my sites are doing by going through Google Analytics. Usually it’s just to check the average visitors and such, but sometimes there are nice surprises (or then sometimes not so nice ones as well).