Technology Tussles

Managing complexity in an ever changing world

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  • Building a WordPress Plugin for the Block Editor

    Recently I needed to create a new wordpress plugin to display the results of an API. I figured that it should be a relatively easy task. My initial issue was that a lot of the immediate results that I found for how to do it related to the old WordPress editor and not the new (more)

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  • Amazon API Gateway 403 Bad Request

    Today I spent several hours trying to get a new API on Amazon API Gateway authenticating with an API Key. I don’t always find AWS the easiest platform to work with. The documentation is often incomplete and not entirely well-organised. The documentation for API Keys is located here, and the process can be summarised as (more)

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  • Grappling with Grav

    In my search for a lightweight WordPress alternative which uses real CSS I stumbled across Grav. Out of the box I was quickly impressed with the ease of installation and the quality of the documentation. For some the use of markdown rather than a full WYSIWYG editor might be an issue, but I actually like (more)

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  • Posting to Twitter using X API v2

    Having successfully posted to Instagram using their API, I also wanted to post to X. I knew from memory that this would not be so easy. X uses oauth authentication, and in the past I have found this to be particularly problematic. A bit of searching turned up a couple of useful videos on youtube. (more)

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  • Post to Instagram API from PHP

    Having spent a whole morning fighting Facebook to change a phone number, it was a relief to get back to the issue. Creating an Instagram Post via the API. The documentation is daunting, and the process is long-winded, but as I discovered the actual solution is straightforward. Create the App The first thing you need (more)

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  • Facebook Phone Fiasco

    I spent most of my morning trying to change a phone number on Facebook. The original task seemed unrelated. The brief was to send new posts to Instagram from PHP by the API. My experience of APIs is they are usually easy to implement, once you have worked out how to authenticate. Today proved to (more)

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  • AWS Lambda function billed for longer than execution time

    Over the last few weeks I have been updating a number of old AWS Lambda functions to bring them up to date with Node 22. In doing so I came across a curious anomaly in one of my new functions. Under most use cases the Lambda took less than two seconds to return a value. (more)

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  • Making multiple async https calls from AWS Lambda

    Following on from my last post, I needed to update another old AWS Lambda to Node 22. This required me to make several https calls from an external API and then combine them together to create my result. Using https.get to make an asynchronous http request The first step was to include the https library, (more)

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  • Updating AWS S3 get object Lambda function to Node 22

    One of the annoying things about software engineering is that working code doesn’t necessarily stay working. About eight years ago I wrote an Amazon Web Services Lambda Function using Node JS (I think version 10). Five years ago when the node version was end of life I updated it to Node 12 with no changes (more)

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  • Building an Audio Player in Flutter with Just Audio

    I recently needed to create a reusable Audio Player for a Flutter App I was working on. After a bit of research I decided to use the Just Audio plugin. As is often the case I found that the documentation was useful for standalone implementations, but not entirely helpful for reusability. The first step is (more)

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