Mostly Harmless

Remember some years ago now all the (justifiable) furore around how long you could connect a vulnerable Windows PC to the net for before it got hacked / infected? The statistic ended up being 20 minutes, i.e not long at all.
I’ve not seen any similar research (at least as widely publicised) for popular web apps, [...]

I Decided back in the Summer that I would ditch Servage when my renewal came around in the Autumn, I’ll discuss why in a separate updated final review. In short I wanted a system I had as near to 100% control over as possible, so that meant a VPS. Hosting my own and my family’s [...]

Interesting to see this post from WP developer Donnacha, on removing various popular nasties from a wordpress install after it has been hacked or compromised.
At work we often see instances where it is not possible to simply return a user’s CMS install to a pre-hack backup and then upgrade (the safest course of action) because [...]

I’ve been pleased to see the inclusion of an update warning in recent versions of Wordpress when new versions are released. Coupled with the plugins page that now tells you when updates are available for your installed addons the system is becoming a lot easier for the non technical user to maintain, even if [...]

If you run an email server, you may be interested to have a look at Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services tool. Providing you can authenticate yourself as the administrator of the IP address in question you can view statistics on the volume and type of email sent to hotmail / live.com / msn. This includes [...]

Learning to use the command line is one of the hardest things about moving to Linux, however once you’re used to it, doing things becomes second nature and you actually miss being able to use the terminal in those cases where you have FTP access but no shell account. For some things using a GUI [...]

I was lucky enough a week or two back to get a day away from the screen up in London to attend Nominet’s registrar information day. The event had a sensible start time of 9.30 for registration (presentations starting at 10.00) making travelling up the same day just about possible (i.e getting up at 5 [...]

I’ve spent the last day trying to get support for a Tracks install on Servage that went from running a little bit slow to not running at all, here is what I found out. It also provides a little insight into how not to deal with customers problems with third party scripts.

Because of the lack of any decent statistics tools at Servage.net (as mentioned in my review) – I’m going to be looking at the various statistics packages offered for free by third parties, the first of which will be Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics offerings. As the attentive will note, the tracking code is now [...]

Servage.net, my current host who I reviewed last week have just introduced a new anti-spam system. Whilst this is a welcome addition, there are a few issues to be aware of…