At work, I’ve spent much of the last several weeks working on deploying a proxy service. A proxy is a service that can retrieve and cache Web pages on behalf of a large number of users.
In theory, you can use it to save bandwidth and protect your users by stopping viruses and such before they reach the users’ desktops. In practice, it’s mostly used to make sure your employees aren’t screwing around on Facebook at work.
No, not that Enterprise.
Nope. Try again.
This is about “the enterprise,” the notion of organizations that upgrade software less often than once every six weeks, and one vendor that wants to push things along, no matter the cost to the users…
I had a software installer that needs to be distributed with its license key, but in a way that keeps the users safe from themselves, and us safe from auditors. Find out how I did this in about an hour with NSIS below…
Continue reading “Super-Simple Self-Extracting Installer with NSIS”
Here’s a link to my slides for the #wcstl presentation “Making Simple Things Really Complicated: High Availability for WordPress”. Enjoy!
Someday soon, I’ll try to pull out the most important notes from the slides and put them here, to make the search engines happy. (Or can Google and friends handle PDFs these days? I really don’t know.)
A while back, I picked up a Cisco ASA 5505 for cheap on eBay. This is where I’ll be putting my notes on configuring, updating, et cetera…
Over the next few days at least, I’ll probably be updating this entry frequently, as I continue to experiment with the 5505, and learn what I need to do and how to do it.
Continue reading “Cisco ASA 5505 Notes”
If you have anything to do with building or maintaining a Web site these days, there’s a decent chance the site uses WordPress. One study shows WordPress being responsible for over half of the 100 most popular blogs online. Another source from two years ago says WordPress is the engine for over 60 million Web sites. If you’ve used it, you probably aren’t too surprised by that; WordPress is pretty awesome.
Like any software, WordPress has to be maintained (at least a little bit, for security updates and such). And if you only have one site, or a few sites, that’s easy enough – log in every so often, hit the “Updates” link in the dashboard, and call it a day. But what if you work for a hosting company, or you’re a consultant/freelancer, and find yourself with fifty or more sites? That’s a lot of clicking.
Continue reading “Managing Dozens of WordPress Sites with InfiniteWP”
Google, trying to live up to their old “Don’t be evil” slogan, recently announced that they’re working on an end-to-end email encryption extension for the Chrome browser. And they’re not doing anything weird or proprietary; they’re building an implementation of PGP, in JavaScript.
Continue reading “Easy Email Encryption”
$WORK paid for me to attend a three-day class on IIS 8. “IIS Administration, Troubleshooting, and Best Practices.” Since I’ve gotta take notes anyway…
Continue reading “IIS 8 Workshop Notes”
Let’s say you want to move your email from one provider to another (Google to Outlook, your ISP to your new ISP). If you don’t run your own mail server1, you might have to do this every few years. I’ve done it three or four times in my life, and I’ve only been using email regularly for maybe fifteen years.
Continue reading “Using PHP to migrate email between servers”