Excited To Try

I’ve played around a little with the new Gutenberg editor as it progressed from Alpha to Beta to Live. Honestly though, I’ve always been too busy to really spend enough time on it.

It had great promise right from the start, and so I was excited to finally get to build a new site from scratch using it.

First Outing And Already Impressed

And I have to say, I am impressed. It’s much faster than the old text ‘classic’ editor and much much more flexible. While it doesn’t go everything that the likes of Elementor and Visual Composer do (yet), it certainly gives them a run for their money for fairly basic sites.

The new layout also means much less scrolling up and down which I have always hated.

And did I mention it’s fast! Even when saving it seems almost instant!

Six out of five stars WordPress!

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post Gutenberg – Great Stuff appeared first on perkinstuff.com.

Firstly, I had to identify which system to use. To do this, I started by looking at the available open source solutions and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. There are quite a few out there, but the system that stood out by a long way was Floreant POS.

Floreant POS is a completely free and very capable open source POS system produced by a company called Oro Cube. They make their money by providing paid support and development services. Floreant also has a big brother called ORO POS which is available for a very reasonable monthly subscription.

After evaluating the differences between the two systems, we concluded that Floreant delivered everything that was required for smooth day to day operations at the restaurant.

Reformatting The Receipt Reports

One ‘problem’ that we hit was that the default receipt reports were formatted for a wider printer than the Epson TM-U220 printers already installed at the restaurant. Fortunately, Floreant allows the possibility of modifying the receipt reports.

There isn’t a huge amount of information about how to do it available though, so it took a bit of effort to work it out based on numerous snippets found through Google. It’s actually very simple, although technically a little awkward as it requires an older version of the Java JDK and Jasper Reports.

There’s a video on setting up the environment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQl_VPs4BQ

So, off I went and set up a virtual machine just for the job.

Once set up, it didn’t take long to reformat the reports to the required width. We also made some other changes such as larger text for the kitchen printer.

Download

I thought it would be useful to provide the modified reports for anyone else out there who wants to use Floreant with Epson U220 or similar receipt printers. So without more ado, you can download them below:

Download floreant-1.4-1770-receipt-reports-for-epson-u220.zip

They’re provided ‘as is’ and have been tested with Floreant 1.4 build 1707 although they may well work with other versions.

Installation

To install the modified reports, first extract the files from the ZIP file you downloaded above. This will create a folder with the same name as the ZIP archive. Copy the contents of this folder into the ‘config/printerlayouts’ folder in your Floreant installation folder overwriting the existing files there. Shutdown and restart Floreant and you are be good to go!

If you have any questions about this or Floreant in general, please make a comment below and I will try to answer as best you can.

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post Download Floreant POS Receipt Reports For Epson TM-U220 Printer appeared first on perkinstuff.com.

For one reason and another, I had a requirement to run a test cron job but with irregular timing to simulate the real scenario of users connecting irregularly.

The trick is to run the cron job on a normal regular interval, but then introduce a pause before it delivers the payload. So in the example below, the job runs every 10 minutes but pauses between 0 and 590 seconds. Thus making it appear semi-random.

First create a simple bash shell script, in say /home/me/demo.sh:

#!/bin/bash
sleep $(($RANDOM%590))s
echo "Hi this email was sent at ${CURRENTDATE}"

The second line tells the script to wait for a random amount of time between 0 and 590 seconds.

It’s important to note that 590 seconds is slightly less than the 10 minute (600 seconds) interval we use in the crontab below which gives a maximum of 10 seconds before the next job starts. Unless you specifically want overlapping jobs, then it’s a good idea to adjust this to allow enough time for each job to complete before the next one!

Next, edit your crontab file:

crontab -e

And add the lines:

MAILTO="<email@domain.tld>"
10 * * * * * bash /home/me/demo.sh

This will run the script and send an email at a random time every 10 minutes or so.

Obviously, you can add your own commands as required.

And as a Brucie bonus, note the MAILTO= setting on the first line. If you ever wondered how to get email notifications from your cron jobs, this is one simple way that will send all of the output created by the job to the email address configured!

Or you can suppress any emails by setting it to MAILTO=””.

And anyway that’s it! Happy cron-ing!

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post Run A Cron Job With A ‘Random’ Time Interval appeared first on perkinstuff.com.

The only way seemed to be to set up a separate Facebook acccount in the name of the group.

Messy, inconvenient and probably technically also against Facebook rules.

The Facebook Page Way

Then I found this post. Not perfect but a lot simpler than logging in and out all the time if you also have a page alongside your group, or want to set one up:

How To Link A Facebook Group To A Page

Anyway, hope someone finds it useful! Enjoy posting!

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post How To Post To A Facebook Group As A Facebook Page appeared first on perkinstuff.com.

Nullmailer is a tiny MTA that is a drop in replacement for the more complex mailers mentioned above. All that it does is accept outgoing mails and forward them via your normal SMTP mail relay server. The examples in this article are based on Debian Linux but should be helpful with other distros as well.

It’s easy to install:

sudo apt-get install nullmailer

Any other mail transfer agent you have installed will be removed as part of the install process.

Configuration (/etc/nullmailer)

Once installed you can modify the configuration files in /etc/nullmailer.

/etc/nullmailer/remotes

This is where you configure the remote mail relay server that your outgoing emails are forwarded through:

<your relay mailserver> smtp --starttls --insecure --port=<portno> --user=<username> --pass=<password>

If you have control over the relay server then I find it easier to leave off the –user and –pass options and instead whitelist the sender IP address.

/etc/nullmailer/helohost

This is where you configure how your server will identify itself when connecting to the remote relay host. This is used when connecting to the remote relay server and literally controls the name used in the SMTP HELO command:

myserver.domain.tld

Will connect to the remote relay server using:

HELO myserver.domain.tld

It’s best to use the fully qualified domain name of the server here, as defined in DNS. Ideally also add a PTR (reverse lookup) record that resolves to the same.

And that’s all! Just a little bit easier than postfix, sendmail or exim!

There are other configuration options as well, but I’ve never found them necessary. There is a link to more information about that at the end of this article.

Testing

You can send a simple test email from the command prompt using the following:

mail -s "Some subject" -a "From: <your from email address>" <your to email address>

so as an example

mail -s "Some subject" -a "From: <steve@senderaddress.tld>" <test@receipientaddress.tld>

You will then be prompted to enter a Cc: address (use ENTER to leave blank) and the email content (use CTRL+D to finish). Hopefully if you have everything set up correctly, the email will arrive in your inbox. It’s a good idea to also test using an external recipient mailbox located on another server just to ensure that the emails are being relayed correctly.

Mail Queue

All mails sent through nullmailer are processed into the mail queue directory. On Debian this is in /etc/spool/nullmailer/queue.

There is no timeout on sending mails, so if there is a problem with delivery it will keep retrying forever. The simple solution to this is a daily cron job such as below which will delete all emails in the queue older than 24 hours:

find /var/spool/nullmailer/queue -mindepth 1 -mtime +1 -delete

You could also modify this to just copy the mails somewhere else for your perusal. In my experience it’s not necessary though as it’s only occasional system alerts using email address such as root@localhost that get stuck.

Need More?

There are some great articles on using nullmailer that go into a lot more technical detail at http://troubleshooters.com/linux/nullmailer/#_Configuring_Nullmailer

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post Nullmailer: A Simple Mail Transfer Agent appeared first on perkinstuff.com.

So, finally I’ve spun up a server, created a virtual host and run through the famous WordPress 5 minute install (blindfolded!). It’s been a long time in coming but finally here it is – my brand new blog!

What’s It All About?

I take an active interest in most things Internet and IT related with a passion for developing software and building servers.

A Thing A Day Keeps The Grey Matter Pink

I try to learn at least one new thing each day. This is where I am hoping to pass them on, one post at a time.

So, thank you for reading my first post and stay tuned for useful things!

Found This Useful?

If you have found this useful, why not help to support the site and buy me a coffee or perhaps a cheeky beer? Thanks!

Websites Built For You

You may also like Websites Built For You which focuses on web design and development in WordPress, PHP and Javascript.

The post Welcome appeared first on perkinstuff.com.