Coding articles and tutorials ranging from JavaScript to PHP and Content Management Systems.
I come from a .NET background where I was spoiled by the ease of use and integration of Visual Studio. Recently much of my development work has moved to the open source and the world of Drupal 8 where I have gotten by until recently with Sublime Text and Atom. Since I have started writing custom modules, I needed a way to effectively debug my code and I had heard good things about the PHP...
I have been using Scotchbox for a while now and continue to be impressed by it’s simplicity and ease of use compared to other Vagrant environments I have used in the past. Recently I started working on a Drupal 8 project that required the use of a PostGreSQL (PostGres) database. Thankfully, when I checked the Scotchbox 2.0 documentation, it appeared that PostGres came packaged up with the...
Last week, I was thinking about registering a new domain name for my new project. My first choice was GoDaddy. I had shortlisted a few TLDs from GoDaddy, but I was not able to buy a domain name for less than 10$. GoDaddy runs a promotion wherein new customers can register a TLD for USD 0.99. I’ve been using GoDaddy for three years. Hence, I was not eligible for this offer. I...
403 access forbidden error message is displayed on the browser when you try to open a file whose public access has been blocked by the webmaster or because of a permission problem. In other words, the web server is saying that you are not allowed to view the file. If you’re a webmaster (blogger) and if you’re facing this issue, then it ‘s obvious that you don’t have much...
TTFB aka first-byte time is nothing but the time taken by the first byte to reach the client machine when the client seeks a response from the server after the browser running on it makes an HTTP GET request. A small TTFB value indicates that your web server is fast. A high TTFB value denotes that your site is slow in responding to the browser’s HTTP GET request. To fix the problem...
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that this site was throwing error establishing database connection or internal server errors last week. The issue which was caused by the Linux out of memory manager has now been fixed, and the site is now live 24 x 7. I’m using this server to host some other WordPress websites as well. Fixing the error was a very...
Since two weeks, my website was frequently crashing because the MySQL server stopped abruptly at random times of the day. This issue started when I was on a holiday. My site was down for several hours. I configured crontab to start MySQL server when the service had stopped. This didn’t help. I enabled query cache to reduce the load on the server. I use NGINX Fast CGI cache, APCu, and...
The dreaded WordPress white screen of death means something has gone wrong and is preventing your website from loading. In most cases, the white screen of death will prevent both the front and back end from loading correctly and all you can see is a blank white screen in your web browser. The white screen of death is often caused by a faulty plugin or theme. In some cases, corrupt files, a...
All my websites are hosted on an unmanaged VPS. The VPS has enough of RAM and a decent CPU. It can handle ten high traffic blogs. I had never faced any problems until last week when my website started displaying error establishing a database connection to the visitors instead of the content. This error was reported after I changed one of the table’s structure. Why the heck did I change the...
This is post 8 of 8 in the series “Prevention and Protection Strategies” Intrusion Detection Honeypots: To Lure or Not To Lure Managing Access to Information Resources More on Limiting Damage to Information Assets Post Authentication Methods Usable Security? User Friendly Factors SQL Injection Explained Web Application Database Vulnerabilities to be Aware of The use of malicious code...
This is post 7 of 8 in the series “Prevention and Protection Strategies” Intrusion Detection Honeypots: To Lure or Not To Lure Managing Access to Information Resources More on Limiting Damage to Information Assets Post Authentication Methods Usable Security? User Friendly Factors SQL Injection Explained Web Application Database Vulnerabilities to be Aware of SQL injection has been a...
The Internet has brought us a wealth of conveniences and everyday tools that we could not live without and more importantly a dependency that we cannot break. In the workplace the Internet has become a part of our day to day lives. We rely on instant communication with our co-workers, friends and colleagues as well as access to a multitude of information at our fingertips. Children from younger...
All files and directories created in a Unix environment such as Nova are assigned permissions based on the level of access available to different user groups. In order to understand permissions better, we will discuss users, groups and ownership. Users Unix is a multi-user operating system. It serves many users who have ownership or certain privileges of resources on the system. You have recently...
Nova is a Unix based web server which is used through various computer studies courses at UMUC. If you are taking one of my web design classes or are enrolled in another UMUC class that uses Nova, the information provided here should be helpful. Nova is the server you will be using to setup your web directories for publishing content online. In order to set up a Nova account you will need...
Software Setup For this class you will require three main applications, a text editor, an SSH client and an FTP client. A text editor will be used to write your HTML documents. SSH (Secure SHell) is a text based application which will enable you to setup your Nova web server account, which we will be using to host your web pages online. Finally an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client will be...
Drupal can be installed on any number of environments, but since it was developed primarily to run on an Apache server with PHP and MySQL database, it makes sense to mimic this environment as much as possible in a development sandbox. There are LAMP applications for both Windows (WAMP / XAMP) and Mac OS (MAMP) which can serve as a Linux replacement, however recent innovations with...
Lately I’ve been carrying out some work involving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). There is tons of information about FOIA on the web including on the official foia.gov website, however I decided to summarize the main points of this law in an easy to read / digestible format. This article is broken down into three main parts, a brief intro, the main areas covered in the law, and...
I recently migrated this site to Media Temple’s managed WordPress hosting plan. For a number of years I had been running a dedicated server through CoreNetworks, which I have been extremely happy with. More recently however I have come to realize I no longer have the need for dedicated server and began researching cheaper managed hosting alternatives, which brought me to Media Temple. Over...
For a while now I have been using WAMP as my daily driver for Drupal development on my Windows 8 machine. For anyone who is a Drupal developer and uses WAMP (or a variation LAMP stack on Windows) has probably felt the pain it brings in terms of sluggishness, incompatibility with native Linux applications (Drush anyone?), and a headache administer PHP modules. I won’t even get into the problems...
I am a software developer and online educator who likes to keep up with all the latest in technology. I also manage cloud infrastructure, continuous monitoring, DevOps processes, security, and continuous integration and deployment.