Blog on Mark Koh

Are Sliders And Carousels Good Or Bad In Web Design?

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sliders — or, as one web designer calls them, “interactable ghost towns” — are everywhere, especially on WordPress sites where they are one plugin click away. They look pretty and seem to save space. But the data says they are bad for your website, and you should not be using them.

Nobody sees your slides

Visitors bounce fast, skim text, and decide within the first 10 seconds whether to stay. Hiding content inside a slider is a barrier to entry — and people simply do not click through:

Setting Up Thunderbird for Your @yourdomain Email

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you have an email address at your own domain (like you@yourcompany.com ), the best way to use it is with a proper mail app — not through Gmail’s “Send mail as” feature. Gmail’s approach looks convenient, but it quietly causes delivery problems:

Replies carry the entire quoted conversation and images, making messages heavy — spam filters are more likely to reject them.
Some recipients get your email while others silently don’t.
Bounce messages blame a “misconfigured account” when that isn’t the real problem.
Your sent items and read status don’t sync between your phone and computer.

Setting up a real mail app takes about ten minutes. This guide walks you through it with Thunderbird — free, and it works the same on Windows and Mac.

How to Reduce Gmail Storage by Deleting the Right Emails

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You’re running out of Gmail storage. You spend an afternoon deleting hundreds of old emails, and the storage bar barely moves. Frustrating — but the problem isn’t the number of emails. It’s which emails you’re deleting.

The Math

A regular email is tiny — about 50KB of text. An email with a typical attachment (a PDF, a photo, a slide deck) is around 2.5MB. That’s 50 times bigger.

One email with a 25MB attachment takes up the same space as 500 regular emails. Put the other way:

Deploying a Contact Form on Hugo with PHPMailer via SSH

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Static sites don’t run server-side code, but a contact form still needs it. Here’s how I wired up a PHP/PHPMailer contact form on a Hugo site deployed to shared hosting via SSH — and what went wrong along the way.

The Setup

The site is built with Hugo and the output is rsync’d to a cPanel shared host. PHP is available server-side, so the contact form posts to a contact.php file that sits alongside the Hugo output in public_html/.

Building Digital Products for Southeast Asia

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Southeast Asia is not a monolith. What works in Singapore may not work in Kuala Lumpur, and what works there may miss the mark in Jakarta. Here are some lessons from building products in this region.

Mobile-First is Non-Negotiable

A large portion of users in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines access the web primarily via smartphone — often on mid-range Android devices with slower connections. If your product isn’t fast and functional on a 3G network with a 4-year-old phone, you’re losing users.

Running Drush in zsh shell

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After upgrading to macOS Catalina from Mojave, the default shell is zsh.

To run drush in zsh:

Open up your .bash_profile
Copy the content to .zprofile
Restart your terminal

Setting Up your Email on your Android

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You can always change your password here .

Requirements:

Your email address: mark@example.com (You’ll need to get this created before accessing)
Your email password

Quick settings

Your domain

Enter your website address and the settings below will update to match.

	Server	Port	Security
Incoming (IMAP)	mail.example.com	993	SSL/TLS
Outgoing (SMTP)	mail.example.com	465	SSL/TLS

Username: your full email address (for both incoming and outgoing)
Password: your email password
(replace example.com with your own website address)

Step by step

Go to Add Account

Go to Email

Setting up your Email Application (Apple Mail)

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You can always change your password here .

This is for Mac OS X users. Windows users can use Thunderbird.

Requirements:

Your email address: mark@example.com (You’ll need to get this created before accessing)
Your email password
Your “email access domain”. This is provided in the email.

Start Apple Mail. Mail > Accounts…

Select Add Other Mail Account…

Fill in the blanks. Click Create

Your account needs manual configuration. Click Next

Setting up your Email Application (Outlook)

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You can always change your password here .

Your mail server supports autodiscover, so in most cases Outlook sets everything up for you — you only need your email address and password. Enter those and Outlook detects the rest. The manual server settings (steps 5–8) are optional, and only needed if automatic setup can’t find your account.

Requirements:

Your email address: mark@example.com (You’ll need to get this created before accessing)
Your email password
(Optional — for manual setup only) Your “email access domain”, provided in your welcome email.

Setting Up your Email on your iPhone (or iPad)

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You can always change your password here .

Requirements:

Your email address: mark@example.com (You’ll need to get this created before accessing)
Your email password

Quick settings

Your domain

Enter your website address and the settings below will update to match.

	Server	Port	Security
Incoming (IMAP)	mail.example.com	993	SSL/TLS
Outgoing (SMTP)	mail.example.com	465	SSL/TLS

Username: your full email address (for both incoming and outgoing)
Password: your email password
(replace example.com with your own website address)

Step by step

Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Add Account

Change your password

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Email (cPanel)

Your domain

Enter your website address to get your exact login link below.

Go to https://example.com/webmail (replace example.com with your website)
Log into your email.
Don't click on RoundCube or Squirrel or Hordes.
Go to top right hand corner. Look for your email.
Click on "Password & Security".

Common Settings for Mail Clients

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You can use the following settings to configure your domain email in any IMAP-capable mail client (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, iPhone, Android, etc.).

Recommendation —
Windows: Thunderbird
Mac: Apple Mail or Thunderbird

Before you set up your mail client, you can change your password here .

Quick settings

Your domain

Enter your website address and the settings below will update to match.

	Server	Port	Security
Incoming (IMAP)	mail.example.com	993	SSL/TLS
Outgoing (SMTP)	mail.example.com	465	SSL/TLS

Username: your full email address (for both incoming and outgoing)
Password: your email password
Authentication for outgoing (SMTP): yes — same username and password
(replace example.com with your own website address)

Taxonomy Term Translation

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Having a problem with taxonomy term translations in Views?

Try this
1. Download this module http://drupal.org/project/i18nviews
2. You can now add “Taxonomy term: Name (translated)” to your fields.

Your taxonomy should now display the right language.

Pathetic sad maggot

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

(Letter to Head of Brand Business or CEO, thanks)

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a formal email. We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on January 22, 2013 that a company claimed Zoso Int’l Ltd were applying to register “markkoh” as their brand name and some markkoh Asian countries top-level domain names through our firm.

Revamp

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just revamped my website. Phew! The last revamp was about 3 years ago. I upgraded to Drupal 7 from Drupal 6, cleaned up the CSS, and added the portfolio and images. They say a mechanic fixes his own car last. From now on, I’ll always update my own website first. One has to take care of oneself before he can care for others.