Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've had some trouble troubleshooting a problem with a site. Regular browsers had no problem, and the certificate appeared fine. However, Bingbot was getting failure (503) on trying to access robots.txt. Once I allowed that to be available via http, the problem went away. Looking further I found some ideas: - Bingbot had ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > This is as true today than it was more than five years ago when first posted. Due to the ongoing hacking of accounts and passwords on popular web services, it is a good time to consider the following suggested security practices. If you feel you do not have the time to deal ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Especially the first year for a child, there is an enormous amount of growth and development for a child. Parents of course will worry obsessively, and breast-feeding mothers will become anxious and paranoid about feeding. Here are a few guidelines to help. - WHO and CDC growth charts, use WHO for the first ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 scp, the secure version of cp, aka copy, is pretty great, since it is straightforward to copy one or more files or directories from any one machine to any other machine (and the command could be running on a third machine). SCP Syntax Note: it is best to use sudo, and full paths ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've reached the end of my patience for underpowered devices. I've entertained quite a few thin clients, including: Various Netbooks Chromebook Apple TV Chromecast Fire Stick Intel Compute Stick NEC MobilePro 770, 780, 790 (more on this below) Return on Investment The return on investment (ROI) of any device can be considered on ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: This started out as a page about MOSH, but I've moved on to AutoSSH, which is way easier without much configuration, and better at what it does. I had not been aware of Mosh (mobile shell), though clearly its own level of awesome is not a reason for that. Basically it replaces ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Site performance comes down to two issues: Perceived relevance Perceived responsiveness Actually, perceived responsiveness could be considered an aspect of relevance (but not the other way around). To be relevant is to be speedy and relevant. Catch 22 - Speed vs. Functionality For WordPress, the architecture is one where responsiveness goes down logarithmically ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 In Thailand, due to a period of mourning on the death of the King of Thailand, many websites have removed color and gone black-and-white (grayscale) for home pages, and some for all pages. There is a fairly easy way to do this with CSS, with the exception of images used as background images ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Star ratings, which indicate review averages, can be useful indicators of quality on search results pages. There are several tactics to include star ratings (or rather, rating/review stars). There may be an interesting use case for not having a root page / in a WordPress website. That is, forcing a redirect from root ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Public video can easily be hosted and streamed on YouTube at no cost. But for those who want some restrictions on the video, YouTube has only limited options. Currently YouTube only allows sharing private videos with up to 50 YouTube accounts, via including their email addresses or Google+ account, in the video manager. ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The WooCommerce team is introducing a huge amount of integrated functionality. WooCommerce must be considered a platform at this point (with WordPress as a much more generic, broader platform). Think of Windows and Office. Windows is a generic operating system and Office is a set of applications. While the analogies only go so ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 2019 Update - I simply no longer use remailers. Everything gets shipped directly to Chiang Mai, Thailand whether that be from Ebay, Amazon, or more often, Lazada (the Amazon of Southeast Asia). I pay the extra shipping charges (at least on Amazon, as in many cases the shipping costs are the same on ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Disposable diapers are a blight on the planet and the pocketbook of parents everywhere. They are made out of plastic and go into landfills. Soiled diapers are toxic waste but they are hardly ever treated as such. Even when the cost of diapers are around 10 THB (~$0.30 USD), with upwards of 4,000 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Update 03-JUN-2024 - I'm migrating off most of this (Woocommerce -> Stripe links) the only functionality that seems important is a simple newsletter. The Alo Easymail Newsletter was great but hasn't been updated in 4 years which means it is out of step with the latest PHP / MariaDB used in WordPress these ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Google's EU user consent policy > > When using Google products that incorporate this policy, certain disclosures must be given to and consents obtained from end users in the European Union where EU data protection law requires such disclosures and consents. > > For end users in the European Union: > > ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The Command Line Interface (CLI), aka shell, aka command prompt, is a powerful, key, and underlying interface to most operating systems. However, there are huge usability problems. The main issue is one of recognition vs. recall which has to do with human memory. While there are endless comparisons between GUIs and CLIs most ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 My son at 10.5 months has six teeth, four up and two down. He's had them for a while now. He is very fussy around his mouth, because his mother has consistently forced a washcloth into his mouth to clean his teeth and gums. This means he avoids any cloth around his mouth ... Read more
Updated 23-Aug-2025 In February 2016, I wrote about the Coming of the 'Bots. Now it is September, and indeed there are more on the horizon, as well as a few I missed from 2015. However, bot utility is fairly constrained now and likely into the future, mainly because the mental model is one around artificial ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Apparently Progressive Web Apps are a thing. (Thanks Leon!) Anyone know of any agencies who've developed #ProgressiveWebApps esp. with service workers? We have a work project for you...— Leon Paternoster (@leonpaternoster) September 12, 2016 While the technology was announced (apparently) in 2015, in the March 2016 Google I/O there were many training and ... Read more