For those of us early adopters who managed to snag a 50 user (or 10 user) free google apps accounts, things are sweet. New users have to cough up $ 5 USD/mailbox/month (or $ 4.19 USD/mailbox/month provided yearly billing). What Google really wants is the $ 10 USD/month or $25 USD/month enhanced cloud services. Yeah, ... Read more
If an important page is added or updated with important changes, then it behooves one to submit that URL to the various search engines, especially Bing, Google, and Yandex. Strangely enough, this is not as straightforward a task as one might think. First of course, one needs to be registered with the various Webmaster Tools, ... Read more
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam. You get spam with your analytics. These are not real visitors, just spam in the logs. Here is how to de-spam your analytics. Google Analytics Spam Filters Admin > Account > Filters Add custom filter, exclude by hostname Filter Pattern .*(hostname\.tld|hostname\.tld).* Note that a filter can have ... Read more
Two very popular content management systems are in their teenage years now: WordPress will be 14 this year, and MediaWiki will be 15. Those are a lot of years on the web. As teenagers, these two successful and interesting projects try and act like the adults they want to be. Unfortunately, this can lead to ... Read more
This is a terse collection of commands and utilities I find useful for shells. There is little distinction between programs and commands as commands are programs (and are installed or come pre-installed) and programs have commands. Also included is a shell (Fish Shell) and some other shell applications/utilities (Mosh, Nano). bc - basic calculator See ... Read more
Nano is pretty awesome, fully open source, and has mnemonics for most commands. Note that I use Fish Shell on OSX, CentOS and Ubuntu. Various benefits accrue, when scripting and also autocomplete and such. Various Commands and Such Set Nano as default editor of git in OSX Search and Replace Apparently this is also case ... Read more
If a phrase could sum up what we've seen so far in WordPress in 2017 it would be something like: > Bureaucratic nonsense, shitty design, tone deaf development. The Core crew and their work on Plugins has recently turned from tragedy to farce. While these hardworking plebes have put in the hours, their result is, ... Read more
Detecting a visitor's location can provide a semi-customized experience that can work out well. However, it can also lock visitors into an assumption that is incorrect, and that may create a worse experience. For example, changing default languages based on location is not a good idea (it is better to use cookies and reasonable defaults, ... Read more
Recently, I'm on a server that chrony just barfs on, so my preferred time mechanism doesn't work. Indeed, ntpdate doesn't work as well. Turns out that ntpdate is obsolete (or being obsoleted). After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that running ntpd from the commandline is possible, as long as it is not currently ... Read more
> Note: as of june 2018 I've discontinued use of Piwik. While it is reasonably good as a solution, the MySQL component requires too many resources, and frankly what it does better than Google Analytics in terms of actual data doesn't provide much value in my current use cases. Piwik is an open source, free ... Read more
Link disavowel is desired someone (a competitor, or simply a derranged troll) has created low-quality links to your site. In some cases, in competitive, global markets, this may actually be the result of perhaps hundreds of domains created for the purpose of wrecking large numbers of competitors by providing Google with evidence of negative behavior. ... Read more
As with security in general, escaping the scourge of WordPress form and content spam requires a layered approach. Here is what works. Databases and Behavioral Anti-Spam The first step is the one that nowadays works the least well. In the beginning we had Akismet, and things got better, but this is an arms race, and ... Read more
While there are Webmaster Tools for Naver and Webmaster Tools for Baidu, both of those do not have an English interface. While it is possible to muddle through, it would only be worthwhile if targeting the Chinese market (in China) or the Korean market (in Korea). Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster ... Read more
GSuite is the latest term Google is using for what used to be called Google Apps for Domains. Google Cloud is now a provider of GSuite (along with many other services). GSuite is akin to similar offerings by Microsoft, Yandex, and more anemically, Amazon Workmail/Workdocs, and Apple. CNAME Records calendar = ghs.google.com. drive = ghs.google.com. ... Read more
Yandex is likely the 4th most important Search-based provider, with Google, Baidu, and Bing being ahead in terms of overall traffic. Yandex is certainly like Google and Bing (and Amazon) in terms of offering a combination of email and file storage along with file sharing and file editing tools for organizations. Essentially it is a ... Read more
Spending time looking into AMI (Amazon Linux), it is as usual with the plethora of Amazon products, sometimes hard to get info about what it is. I take this not as a bad thing (though it does take time) but rather a feature that emerges from the *let's develop lots of stuff all at once" ... Read more
When dealing with cloud-based office productivity applications (documents and spreadsheets), the main contenders are obvious: - Apple iWork - Google Docs, Apps, Drive, GSuite - Microsoft Office365 While Apple's offering is relatively unknown (little noted, therefore little discussed), the real sleeper is Amazon's WorkDocs and WorkMail The Kit and the Kaboodle Here I will deal ... Read more
Telegram is my favorite go-to chat. Unfortunately people are invested in their use of Facebook messenger, Line, Hangouts, etc., and you have to be where they are to chat with them. I have one guy who is only chatting on the apps I don't use: Facebook and WeChat. Sure, I might see a Facebook chat ... Read more
Woocommerce is a fantastic, though complex, time-consuming, and/or expensive ecommerce system. That said, it is the most popular on WordPress, and has a lot of potential for the future. It is getting a lot of development effort at Automattic, and has a fairly extensive functionality set, and some loosely- and tightly-coupled extensions and sister-plugin functionality. ... Read more
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 a problem ... Read more
> 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 with this, ... Read more
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 for everything. ... Read more
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 the dimension ... Read more
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 SSH, but ... Read more
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 to the ... Read more
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 in CSS ... Read more
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. In addition, ... Read more
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 far, WooCommerce ... Read more
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 days. Mailbluster ... Read more
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 of these ... Read more
> 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 the international ... Read more
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 intelligence which ... Read more
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 presentation events, ... Read more
This is a handy checklist since Bing conveniently forgets a few settings, and also doesn't fully support a few features (and so generalizes, naturally). - Currency differential in bids and budgets. Bing treats a number as a number, even when Adwords campaigns in Thai Baht is imported into a US Dollar Bing account. Use the ... Read more
Whitelist these CIDR IP blocks to not accidentally lock out or block spiders. These are for the following search engines: - Baidu - Bing - DuckDuck - Facebook - Google - Yahoo - Yandex 100.43.80.0/24 100.43.81.0/24 100.43.85.0/24 100.43.90.0/24 100.43.91.0/24 107.21.1.61 111.13.102.0/24 114.111.95.0/24 115.239.212.0/24 119.63.196.0/24 119.63.199.0/24 122.81.208.0/22 123.125.67.144/29 123.125.67.152/31 123.125.68.0/24 123.125.68.68/30 123.125.68.72/29 123.125.68.80/28 123.125.68.80/30 123.125.68.84/31 123.125.68.96/30 ... Read more
Baidu has decent webmaster tools. There only comes a problem if one does not read or write Chinese. However, Google Translate can do a decent job. Also, it is possible to create a Baidu account using a non-Chinese phone number for verification. Why Register a (non-Chinese) website with Baidu While it is the case that ... Read more
> Note: as of 2017 I no longer use webmin or virtualmin, though I still believe it is much better than Cpanel and other related. This page will not be updated over time with information about Webmin and Virtualmin, and perhaps Usermin, and Cloudmin. Basically Webmin and Virtualmin are similar in functionality to the more ... Read more
See also discussion of Image Optimization for the Web Note this is a brief note, as WebP is less interesting than originally thought. Yes, this format is out there, and yes, it can in many cases reduce the size of images by a certain amount. However, browser support is not complete (therefore you still need ... Read more
It seems that there are some simple things that are not managed well on the security front, specifically the lack of encryption of the data stored in the database. While backups can be encrypted (by most backup tools) the data itself is not encrypted in the database. The main counter to that is if the ... Read more
I've spent time recently in Google Adwords and things are as or more complex than ever. I'd say more. Here are a few issues that confront the Adwords User: - Ad display - Ad extensions - Keyword match types - Ad group to keywords to ads configuration - Dynamic ads - Tracking templates - Landing ... Read more
> 05-Nov-2016 - Note: I've reached the conclusion that I will entertain no more underpowered devices as they are ultimately so limited their return on investment vastly underperforms overpowered devices. This means Intel Compute Sticks are no longer acceptabe acceptable. The Intel NUC is now what I consider to be the future of the desktop. ... Read more
Mary Meeker - Internet Trends - 2016 Takeaways - Macro and Micro It was great to get some macroeconomic trends in this year's report, so we can see not only inside the industry but externally. And folks, it does not look good for many. - 3bn global internet users, growth flat at 9%, decelerating if ... Read more
> This is a set of notes and remarks rather than anything comprehensive or systematic. The main point is learning from the fact that there is a development lifecycle in terms of consuming software products, and make better adoption decisions through a set of heuristics. By development, we need of course to expand this to ... Read more
I've moved my workflow, task, and idea lists to Trello. This is a good tool and I see others use it effectively for project and task management. Also, it is a fast web app and they have mobile apps, all free. Project and Idea Management with Trello Use of Trello is meant to improve my ... Read more
Wow, what a strange week. People normally don't or don't have to change their email clients and calendar apps very often, but of course we can blame this one (at least part of it) on Microsoft. With the retirement of the greatest Calendar app ever (for mobile and desktop), Sunrise is... well... heading off into ... Read more
With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche.1 The title of one of Nietsche's early essays is On the use and abuse of history for life As an occasional developer, generally just scripting, hacks, and sysadmin stuff, and of course troubleshooting WordPress js/css/php, Node has entered my daily life in the form of the Atom editor, and now ... Read more
Release Cycles and Lifecycles of software (and hardware) are interesting. How these releases are structured, who does them, and the planning and development process is fascinating from a rollout-of-features perspective. Development release cycles can also be applied to services. Operating System Release Cycles Of course we know how Microsoft is getting into trouble with their ... Read more
This page is for ongoing issues and awesomeness that is ImageMagick As of early May 2016, there is a big exploit out there called ImageTragick, but a recent patched version should help. The main fix is to edit the /etc/ImageMagick/policy.xml to include: ## Installing ImageMagick on CentOS sudo yum install -y gcc php-devel php-pear sudo ... Read more
Looking at recent data, what I see is the death of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Too bad for the former (you had your chance), and expected for the latter (and no, Edge isn't showing any real adoption rate). One surprise is how Safari is showing uptake on the Mac platform. I find this browser basically ... Read more
My air conditioner died a few days ago and while it is a bit uncomfortable (I’m in Thailand and it is the hot season, so it gets up to around 34c in the office), it is insufferable to work when a 90 thread kernel process has 90% of the processor. It is really hard to ... Read more