Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 Turns out that ntpdate is obsolete (or being obsoleted).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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The EU-Vietnam Trade Treaty is still under discussion regarding the implementation details as of early 2017, due to the complexity and the level of reform needed to implement it on the Vietnamese side. Negotiation concluded on 02 December 2016, and the treaty will take force in 2018. The EVFTA is just one of ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Zurb's 21 Responsive Design Trends That Will Shape 2017 is useful reading. Of course not everyone will agree on 21 trends, and 21 isn't actually helpful to focus on. Nonetheless, many of these should/will need to be dealt with in 2017. Here are the one's I found most useful: Split Screen Divide a ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Instead of a post about 2017, I want to postmortem 2016. It has been an enormous year of reckoning, being faced with previous decisions and facing them anew. Client chaos, a move into the suburbs, my son's development from months 2 to 14, and several injuries have made this a stressful year. In ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Colorblindness Colorblindness affects approximately 5-8% of the population, mainly males. The visualization of these kinds of colorblindness is eye-opening, to say the least. The most common form of colorblindness is deuteranomaly, which is red-green. The colorblindness simulations show the color red as indistinguishable from a certain shade of green. Actually to my eyes ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 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 ... Read more
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