It’s been a little while since I wrote one of these and once again I want to talk about security. If you have a WordPress site than the hackers want in. They are interested in co-opting your site for their own interests. Whether it is to run their own programs or redirect you to their…
Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute. That was the message WordPress was giving me. I had done something stupid. I was impatient and navigated away from the update page while it was working. I didn’t panic. I was sure I was not the first person using WordPress to have this problem…
A few weeks ago the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox Quantum. It’s about time! Firefox has been around since 2003 as the successor to Netscape Navigator. If you remember the Browser Wars of the late 90’s you will recall Microsoft Internet Explorer and Navigator battled it out for how people would view the web. Web developers…
Last year the Windows 10 Anniversary Update introduced a Linux Bash Shell running Ubuntu 14. I was trying it as a LAMP environment to do development in a local environment. It was good but incomplete and did not allow me to run Laravel. Fast forward to 2017 and the Windows 10 Creators Update has a…
I have been using Wappalyzer for a while now. It’s a little cross-browser and cross-platform plugin that allows you to see what technology a website is using. This comes in handy as a developer in being able to see what content management system a site is using but that is just the beginning. It will…
A few weeks ago when talking to a client for who I develop an internal web application he mentioned they wanted to start collecting analytics on the users. I use Google Analytics on all of my web sites but I wasn’t sure about using it on a web application that was not public. I was…
One little letter in a URL is what separates a secure connection from an insecure connection in your web browser. That is not to say there could not be malicious code lying in wait for you at the site you are connecting to. The five letters in https, the little lock that appears in the…
At more than one time in our life we are all faced with the need to ask for help. It’s one of those things that independent minded people find hard to do. One of the things about being a programmer that I like is that my job is about helping people. Whether it is building…
In the dictionary resilience is a noun defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”. We can all agree that this past month has tested a lot of people’s resilience. Hurricanes are among the most destructive forces that repeatedly and predictably hit the United States. It’s one of those things we plan for.…
So my wife and I finally took our summer vacation. We went down to Santa Rosa Beach in the Florida panhandle where we kept one eye on the sand and water, and the other on Hurricane Irma. It really was beautiful weather which belied the devastation happening in the Caribbean and what was soon to…