The biggest mistake novice website owners make is going with big name, cheap shared hosts, GoDaddy, BlueHost, 123-reg, IONOS and similar. They have great cheap deals which are very tempting for new businesses. Most of these brands are owned by Hosting Group Europe and Endurance International Group. Why are these brands not ideal, just search [Read the full article…]
Recipe for a Raspberry Pi Kiosk
I recently set up a Raspberry Pi as Chromium Kiosk so I could display a webpage on a wall mounted TV screen. I have written what I did in an easy to follow recipe format. If you follow configuration steps carefully you should be successful in setting up your Raspberry pi to work as a [Read the full article…]
WordPress Plugin install fails with Forbidden, you don’t have permission to wp-admin/update.php on your server
This issue is fairly common on servers that are running Apache with mod_sec ( mod security ). Mod security is a complex system that looks at the sort of web traffic ‘bay guys’ use to hack servers and stops them. In this case it is thinking that your actions are suspicious and blocks them. This [Read the full article…]
Problem with WordPress 4.8 screwing up your website layout?
WordPress 4.8 has just been released, and many web designers have reported that their layout have been mucked up with this release. *** UPDATE *** Since writing this blog post I have written a plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-paragraphs-option-to-text-widget/ – that solves this problem in a very neat way. *** There could be multiple reasons for this, but [Read the full article…]
Hugo: I’m receiving the message “We were unable to load Disqus.”
When building a Hugo site you may well get the message “I’m receiving the message “We were unable to load Disqus.” ” It took me a while to trouble shoot on mine. Basically Hugo them developers have a habit of setting the baseurl in the config.toml as “/” Your site will seem to work – [Read the full article…]
Google Compute Engine Snapshot automation
Google Compute Engine comes with an incremental snapshot capability. The product doesn’t have a specific automated method to take snapshots and to tidy them up either, but scripting using the gcloud command line is fairly straight forward, once you understand the power of the command line. I have seen many attempts at automating this using [Read the full article…]
Using GIT to deploy scripts to production servers
This is how I use GIT to deploy script configurations to multiple servers. In this instance I have fail2ban configuration that I want to be able to deploy to multiple servers easily & quickly I assume you are root – otherwise prefix commands with sudo as appropriate I also assume that you have remote root [Read the full article…]
Submit A Post via Front End using Gravity Forms
The following is a Gravity Form Form, that allows you to submit a post via the front end. It can submit as ‘draft’, ‘pending review’ or even ‘published’. Feel free to try it, and if you include a valid WordPress tip or other news I may even publish it.
How to Extract URLs from Google SERPs
These steps are how to easily extract URLs from google SERPs Install Chrome Install Chris Ainsworth’s Extractor ‘bookmarklet’ http://www.chrisains.com/seo-tools/extract-urls-from-web-serps/ Install ginfinity plugin for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ginfinity/dgomfdmdnjbnfhodggijhpbmkgfabcmn Set Google search to return 100 per page Run the query Click on the bookmark This summarises the steps detailed and provided by Chris Ainsworth at http://www.chrisains.com/seo-tools/extract-urls-from-web-serps/
Backing up to gcloud storage from Linux/Virtualmin
Using Google Cloud Storage as backup for your linux server is inexpensive if you use the nearline storage option. This is cheaper that Amazon Web Services (at the time of writing) The process I use is as follows. Backup locally Create storage bucket / folders, set lifecycle Script to move backups find way to execute [Read the full article…]
