Owning a website involves much more than just buying some hosting and installing a CMS. It requires a unique set of skills and attributes. These posts will take you behind the scenes of being a webmaster, helping you to develop the attitude and tools necessary for hosting a successful website.
I create a lot of booklets. Usually, this is because it’s a great way for me to put together some files and take them with me. I can slip them in a briefcase or backpack, and pull them out to read whenever I have a few spare moments. I recently had a situation where I …read more…
So I did a thing, and I posted it to Reddit: Most applications in Linux come with a man page—essentially, an online manual. You can invoke this for any installed app with man <application> where <application> is the name of the app in question. I will say that the quality (and size) of these vary by …read more…
I scanned a rather longish document (241 pages), which resulted in a 101.7 MB document. I needed to get the file size down, but couldn’t find a decent way. Finally, after quite a bit of googling, I found this link. I don’t know why, but it worked. It got that 101.7 MB document down to …read more…
The server migration is complete. There’s a long story here, but the bottom line up front is that I now host all my websites save one at Opalstack. Additionally, I have moved all my domain registrations to Gandi. Hopefully, I will be with Opalstack for the rest of my life. And seeing that Opalstack is …read more…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I recently migrated all of my sites to a new web host, which meant downloading all my files and databases from my old web host and uploading them to my new host. It’s not exactly that simple, because my new host does some things radically different than my old host, but it’s close to that simple. …read more…
Although I like Macs and I love Ubuntu, I spend most of my time in a Windows environment, because most of the people I work with use Windows. I need to see what they see and see it how they see it. So, Windows it is. Windows is not a bad place to do web …read more…
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