Blog Archive

A General Theory of Backups

In working with people who are new to web design and development, I have often found that backing up a website is one of the last things on their mind. They’re more interested in the fun stuff. Backing up your website is more like a chore. It’s the computer equivalent of cleaning the litter box. …read more…

Where We Went Wrong

I was going through some old files and I found this video from a long time ago… http://cdn.kjodle.net/techblog/video/VIC20_ad.mp4 There is so much to talk about here I could go on for hours. A lot of it has to do with my fondness for Commodore computers. (My first computer was a Commodore-64; my second one was …read more…

In Search of a new Anti-Spam Plugin

This site runs on WordPress, and like all WordPress sites, it attracts more than its fair share of comment spam. For a long time, I used Akismet, which is the anti-spam plugin developed by the WordPress team, so I knew I could trust it to work well with WordPress. I was happy with Akismet, but …read more…

Change a MediaWiki Password via phpMyAdmin

Having problems changing a MediaWiki password? With a little SQL magic and phpMyAdmin, you can easily change any password from the database.

d12 Message Blocks WordPress Plugin – 2.5

I have recently updated my d12 Message Blocks plugin for WordPress. It adds two new message blocks: one with a title and no icon, and another with neither a title nor an icon. You can get it from the WordPress plugin repository. Development snapshots are available on my Git repo.

Software Updates on Ubuntu

Unlike some operating systems (*cough* “Windows” *cough*), Ubuntu is pretty good about letting you know that updates are available, and how large they are. If updates are available, a convenient window pops up just after you log in that provides this information to you. However, there are times when you don’t want to update just …read more…

S3cmd on Ubuntu with DreamObjects

Bucket

I use DreamObjects a lot: as low-cost online storage, as a CDN for large files (especially podcasts and image files), as a CDN for files I want to have access to from a lot of different locations, and as a place to store WordPress backups (using Ipstenu’s fantastic DreamObjects Backups plugin). The price is great …read more…

Installing Get Simple CMS via the Command Line

If you’re patient, installing software on your website via FTP isn’t a bad way to go, although it takes forever and depending on the quality of your internet connection, you may have connectivity issues causing the entire thing to hang. (Although I’ve installed some pretty big packages via FTP at McDonald’s of all place—my local …read more…

The Joy of DokuWiki

I’ve been working with DokuWiki a lot lately, because I’m adapting it to use for internal communications and project management at work. I’ve never really worked much with DokuWiki because I’ve tended to use MediaWiki for most wiki projects. MediaWiki is powerful and robust and has a lot of features out of the box that …read more…

Installing Moodle on WebFaction

I recently started using WebFaction as my main webhost. They are more reliable and cheaper than my old webhost, and like my old host, they have a custom panel—they do not use cPanel. Nothing against cPanel, but I’m not a big fan of cookie-cutter hosting options. One thing I like about WebFaction is their hosting …read more…