I have used the free Pingdom service for nearly 9 years to monitor the health of this site. Over the years it has been a helpful service and at times they would add even more useful features. Then came 2014 when SolarWinds, a public-then-private-then-public company catering to businesses with their analytics products and services, acquired — Continue reading »
The GDPR Mess
📆 June 8, 2018
With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) being in full force since May 25, 2018, one must assume that the privacy and security of users are now fully protected. I think it’s an understatement to call that claim an over-exaggeration. GDPR is a European regulation designed to protect the privacy of European citizens, giving them full — Continue reading »
A Simple Post-HTTP-to-HTTPS SEO Checklist
📆 September 14, 2017
With Chrome version 62 arriving next month Google will begin making good on the promise of warning users when they land on non-secure (non-SSL, non-TLS) sites. This will be subtle at first with a light gray warning on pages that contain any input forms. This warning message will get progressively prevalent and prominent with every — Continue reading »
WordPress Global Replace http to https
📆 August 18, 2017
If you are dealing with the pain of migrating your site from non-secure plain http to secure SSL/TLS https, then you are also dealing with the headache of making sure the elements on your pages such as images have https sources instead of http. The reason is that if your pages are accessed over https — Continue reading »
The Long, Hard and Possibly Foolish Path to SSL/TLS Security
📆 July 3, 2017
... or TLS 1.2 on Fedora Core 14/FC14 and other older Linux versions With the chorus of secure browsing getting louder and becoming more prevalent, HTTPS migration is becoming inevitable. Going secure is a pretty major undertaking, fraught with numerous pitfalls. It starts with the source files that produce the html pages and it could — Continue reading »
HTTP to HTTPS Migration
📆 November 6, 2016
A universally secure internet may have its defenders and detractors but like it or not, Google is going to force site encryption (https) across the board. First it was the SEO penalty threat, supposedly giving higher scores to secure sites but it doesn't seem like that worked out great. I think Google recognized that just — Continue reading »
Online Ad to Block Online Ad
📆 September 25, 2016
An online ad on YouTube for an application to block online ads. Oh the irony 🙂 — Continue reading »
The Great SYN Flood of China
📆 April 29, 2016
I wake up yesterday morning and while still in bed I get the dreaded site-down alert from Pingdom on my smartphone. When a Web site goes down there are a number of simple preliminary steps one takes to pinpoint and fix the problem. Is the ISP having an outage? Are the modem and router up? — Continue reading »
Give a few Sats