Gary Cheetham | SEO and Online Marketing Consultant

How to build an effective content strategy for 2020

Regardless of your industry, if you want to reach your audience effectively in 2020, producing great content should be your top priority. The stats are clear, quality content brings in leads, quality content promotes your brand, quality content helps to establish your organisation as

How to build quality video content for social media

No online marketer can afford to ignore the video trends that have been developing over the past three years. We're now in a video-first world. The rise of online video should have come as no surprise. Most users now consume their content through an

Social Media

Peak Social: Surviving the Groupocalypse and Cashing In

The history of social media can be understood as a gradual progression in the interconnectedness of human society. Today, for the first time in history, the arc is beginning to bend the other way.

umbraco

Mocking UmbracoHelper and using it with Dependency Injection

The Umbraco APIs are full of examples where the developers have made tough design choices. The UmbracoHelper is the one, from my own experience at least, in which the reasoning behind the design is not immediately obvious. In many cases, the way the UmbracoHelper

umbraco

Dynamic Umbraco Sitemap.xml Without Plugins

It's easily possible to create a proper sitemap.xml, with the right URL, in a vanilla Umbraco installation with these three easy steps: Create a "XML sitemap" document type and template in the backoffice Add a line in the template for the "XML sitemap"

umbraco

How to create a robots.txt in Umbraco and edit it from the backoffice

It's very easy to create a robots.txt in Umbraco which you can edit from the backoffice. You can achieve this natively without installing any packages or writing custom code with these simple steps: Create a "txt file" document type in the backofficeAdd a

umbraco

Import any CSV File into Umbraco with the Umbraco LINQPad Driver

I've recently successfully imported data from a large CSV file into Umbraco using Shannon Deminick's useful Umbraco LINQPad driver. Here's a high-level overview of how I did it: You can import any valid CSV file through this process, and infact, it would work with

javascript

Introducing Captain Botbeard - A Swashbuckling Twitter Bot

@glcheetham Learnin' without thought be labor lost; thought without learnin' be perilous - Confucius— Captain Botbeard (@CaptainBotBeard) 5 July 2016 @glcheetham I be indebted to me' father for living, but to me' teacher for livin' well - Alexander the Great— Captain Botbeard (@CaptainBotBeard) 5

umbraco

What I'm Looking to Learn at Umbraco CodeGarden 2016

Guess what? I have a a ticket to Code Garden 2016. Jealous? What? no?!? Wait, what - You don't even know what that is?!? What's that? - Sit back down sir or I'll stop the bus and ask you to leave?!?!? *Ahem* Well, in

javascript

Comparing Objects in Chai Doesn't Work as Expected?

Here's the gotcha of all gotchas. If you compare two objects in Chai with .equal, you're not going to get what you expected. These two objects are clearly equal, however the test fails: × should equal PhantomJS 2.1.1 (Windows 8 0.0.0)

unit testing

Implementing IOC in Umbraco 7- Inversion of Control Like a Boss

I've devoted a significant amount of time this week to finding the best way to implement inversion of control for proper dependency injection in Umbraco. After much brow-furrowing and much to-ing and fro-ing with some of the Umbraco devs (shout out to @clausjnsn for

javascript

Killing Switch Statements in React with the Strategy Pattern

I saw this article about building multi-step forms in React recently - and although it's a very well-written and organised article, I was concerned about the use of the switch statement in the render() method of a React component here: // file: Registration.jsx var

dev ops

How to Notify New Relic of Deployments From AppVeyor

During app deployments, previous company policy required us to prepare a sacrifice so that the favour of the gods might shine upon us. I was first asked to see if this process could be automated to save overhead - but I soon realised that

visual studio

Reconfigure a Project to Use IIS Express in Visual Studio

Apparently, back in the day, they had enough spare RAM on their development machines to run a full copy of IIS. We're not so privileged today, but if you inherit one of these projects, you may end up looking at error messages like this:

javascript

Compile TypeScript and Package with Browserify in a Single Gulp Task

OK - the topic of packaging your js with browserify using Gulp has been done to death. However, integrating TypeScript into this workflow can be a little bit of a challenge because browserify doesn't take a regular gulp file stream as input. tldr;Just

javascript

How to Get Syntax Highlighting for TypeScript in GVIM on Windows

urghh... Looks terrible doesn't it? It's not provided by default, but if you need to work with a TypeScript project in vim then you'll certainly need to set up syntax highlighting. The good news is that it's very easy to get going with a

unit testing

How To Test JsonResult in ASP.NET MVC

Here's a quick NuGet of wisdom! (Haha, just kidding, there is no wisdom in NuGet) Writing a unit test for an ActionResult Json() is a bit of a head-scratcher for some, but all it requires is a simple cast operation. Example controller: public ActionResult

book review

Book Review: Magicians Of The Gods by Graham Hancock

This is the first book on "alternative" history that I've read, and it's proven to be a compelling and rewarding read. I picked up this first-edition hardback copy of Magicians

unit testing

News Flash! You Don't Need node-jasmine to Test node.js Apps with Jasmine

When setting up my test suite for Heroes Of Deep Space, I was tempted to use the previously helpful node-jasmine module. I'm (at the time of writing) using Jasmine 2.4.1, and with this version I was able to get a gulp test

javascript

How Do I Organise Files in A Phaser.js Project?

Among newer JavaScript developers, the manner and order in which JavaScript code is executed is often a source of confusion. Not quite grasping how your code is "seen" by the JavaScript interpreter can make it quite hard to organise your game's source files in