Articles
You Need to Use a Password Manager
Life in a digital world has become much more security focused in the last 20 years. There are now so many rules and recommendations for how you access sites and apps that it’s easy to get confused and just give up. But there’s good reason to do what’s being recommended. You trust the sites and apps you use to handle your information appropriately and while that may differ for social media compared to banking services, you should always expect that your access credentials are secure.
September 17, 2021
Moving from Wordpress to Hugo
For a very long time now I have had a blog powered by Wordpress. It has worked well all through that time and been easy to use - when I have actually written something. But it’s always required a server to host it, either a shared server years ago or a cheap (and small) dedicated virtual machine for a few dollars per month. Servers not only cost more compared to other options, they need to be fed and cared for which takes up more time than just focusing on the content. While I’m defintely a technical person who likes some of the infrastructure stuff, I’m also a believer in us all having a limited amount of time to do the things of value. These days, managing a server is more important in order to keep it up to date for the many vulnerabilities and security patches coming at an increasing pace. Miss a critical security patch for the wrong bit of software and your server and the data in it might no longer be yours.
August 22, 2021
Create a Checklist Plugin for TinyMCE
The TinyMCE editor is a very useful and easy to implement add-on to your web app. For the most part it is free to use and develop with and is licensed with the LGPL license, but some plugins for different editor functions are only available under their Premium Features offering. If you think the premium plugins give you what you want and you are going to make money from your work, it’d probably make you feel good to buy one of their plans.
May 3, 2020
The World Has Changed
In the last month the world has changed and it’s not going back to what it was in the near future. People will behave differently. Work will be done differently. We will all interact differently. Three months ago asking for multi-gigabit VPN capacity that can handle all your staff would have been at the bottom of the priority list in your business. But here we are and that’s probably what most people have wanted most in their work lives in the last couple of weeks. For the next few years this will be what is expected.
March 31, 2020
Installing Google Firestore for Php
Using the NoSQL database Firestore with PHP means you need to install a few tools to make it work. The alternative is to use the JavaScript option but when the Firestore access is put into the more secure mode then the backend option with PHP may be needed. The Google docs point to installing the gRPC library for PHP via two options, either PECL or with Composer. But as with many technical docs, seem to miss a step or two that leaves the reader a little lost and probably frustrated. Hence I’ll step through what I did here with PECL for Ubuntu 18.04 in WSL on Windows 10. (BTW – I thorough recommend Windows Subsystem for Linux in Windows 10 for web development; it’s a good middle ground of dev tools and productivity experience. Grab the new Windows Terminal app to get that easy terminal access to the WSL instance too.)
February 2, 2020
Chrome70 vs Symantec Certificates
Chrome 70 is about to dis-trust a whole lot of certificates. So you paid lots of money for a “proper” certificate for your HTTPS website after Google gave non-HTTPS sites a hard time? Well, hopefully you aren’t still using an older Symantec issued certificate as Google (and others) is about to stop trusting those certificates. Chrome version 70 is due for release in September for beta users and will NOT trust certificates issued before December 1 2017 from Symantec, Thawte, GeoTrust and RapidSSL.
August 18, 2018
Backup to an AWS S3 Bucket
While this is not an uncommon thing to do, I couldn’t find a straight forward example for both databases and file directories. So of course, I had to write my own (albeit based on a database only script from mittsh). For the TLDR; just go to GitHub. It’s written in python using the ubiquitous boto3 and just reads the config and source databases and directories from a JSON configuration file. In probably less than 5min you can have completed your first backup and then just schedule it from then on out.
July 8, 2018
MySQL Fails to Update on Ubuntu
So your Ubuntu server doesn’t want to upgrade MySQL using apt-get and fails with the following error? mysql_upgrade: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES) while connecting to the MySQL server Upgrade process encountered error and will not continue. Thankfully the fix should be fairly easy to carry out. For some reason the password for the MySQL user debian-sys-maint has got out of sync in the MySQL database compared to that stored in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf.
January 15, 2018
Pressing Pause on Work
The French legislation that was signed off in May 2016 and is in effect as of Jan 1st 2017 will be something studied closely by most other countries in the next few years. Part of the law changes (which included other changes to allow employers to more easily dismiss staff) was to have companies define a time when their staff can effectively disconnect from work email. Almost all companies have been trying to rapidly adopt a “mobile first” approach to their business, mostly to catch up with their customers who are now using mobiles more than any other device. The flow-on effect of this has been to then try the same with their own work force and for good reason. Give your staff the right information at the right time in order to better serve your customers and improve their experience.
January 9, 2017
Wordpress 404 With HTTPS
The time had come to switch this blog to HTTPS given the ease and cost ($0) of deploying certificates from LetsEncrypt. So that was easily done under Apache – create a new conf file for the SSL site in /etc/apache2/sites-available, and then update the old conf for the non-SSL site to redirect before requesting a new cert using certbot-auto -d blog.yoursite.com –apache. WP handled that just fine but only the admin pages and the main home page displayed as expected, other pages were just a 404.
January 8, 2017