New ISP

June 27th, 2009

Yesterday I got connected to my new ISP. Today, I installed my 3rd network card into my linux server and made the connections. Everything works fine.

Tomorrow, I will set the new ISP as primary connection and the old ISP as secondary/backup connection. I don’t know yet how I will do it but I’ll find a way. I will most probably change my inernet.check script to check for internet connection using ping for example and if primary is down, set secondary up otherwise set primary back on. It is an idea πŸ™‚

And the next step after that will be to set up DNS servers that will switch from one ISP to the other AND to my backup server which is already running in another location somewhere.

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Auto tweeting

June 26th, 2009

Rene got his plugin fixed so all is cool now.

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How to actually migrate your site to joomla

June 25th, 2009

I decide a while ago that I need to change my attitude, lose my dream of creating a CMS in C interfacing as CGI/SSI and get my site out nice and clean like everybody else.

So after comparing reviews and recommendations, I got stuck with joomla.

Now, I don’t know about you technical guys, but I find joomla very … weak. For one, it does not support sub-categories. you have a section and a category and that’s about it. In my case, I have a lot o sub-categories. So this called for a plugin (not yet installed).

What really pissed me of is that my main page (now) has a very nice image-only horizontal and a vertical menu. I used gimp to create the images which look very nice compared to what my site actually looks like πŸ™‚ So I spent the ENTIRE day trying to figure out how in the name of God I can create an image only menu in joompla. Fact is, I tried a lot of stuff, including the core menu functions, nothing worked. I even installed a plugin called simplelists but to no avail.

So, sinceextensions are slowing things down and complicating everything, I decided todrop that, especially sice somebody on te joomla forum said that the core supports this thing (read more here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=304&t=262138&p=1744717#p1744717 )

As of this writing, that guy has not yet replied to my inquiry, BUT, being a genius that I am ( πŸ˜€ ), I discovered something very amazing: RAW Html module. Yeah, I get to place whatever html code I want wherever I want it. This is pretty neat because I just copy-pasted my menu code andvoila, it’s up and running. It’s that simple.

Whoe the hell need extensions andstuff when you can have your own custom html wherever?! You have some html/js/css code you need to migrate and there is no apparent way to do it? Raw html.

Who said life is not easy? πŸ™‚ All we need now is multilevel categories and I could say that all is ok.

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The blog is live on twitter

June 25th, 2009

I just installed 2 auto tweeter plugins, one of them is working, the otehr is not πŸ™‚ This basically means that from now on all my posts will get published to tweeter. Unfortunatelly, the plugin that did work, is pretty simple and does not have too much options. I hope I’ll be able to get the other one running.

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Secunia PSI 1.5 is out

June 24th, 2009

get it here while it’s hot πŸ™‚

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Joomla ftp layer configuration

June 23rd, 2009

As many, I was also having problems with the ftp layer configuration at step 5, getting

The FTP settings are not valid or your FTP server is not compatible with Joomla!: The function “STOR” failed.

I tried most of the suggestions in some of the topic from the joomla forum, but to no avail. Including but not limited to iptables configuration, ftp configurations, etc. Finally, I figured to chown the files and folders to the ftp user. That solved my problem.

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Automatically banning email addresses

June 21st, 2009

Starting with today, a filter is running on my mail server which will automatically ban every bouncing email address.

The ban only has effect on the webdirectory for now, like the filter will automatically delete all submissions associated with the banned email address.

Soon, I will write another script to be run automatically on a cron job that will ping all the email addresses currently in the web directory to validate all the addresses. I will also add a validation to the submission form so that banned emails will no longer be able to submit.

Considering the amount of bouncing emails I used to receive daily, this should reduce the amount of most-probably-invalid submissions in the web directory.

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Apparently my blog got hacked

June 19th, 2009

It appears that last night my blog got hacked. All the posts were gone.

Lucky I made a backup few hours earlier since I had another DB corruption in some other schema because of Β small bug in some other software.

Guess I’ll go over security one more time to checkif I missed anything or not.

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Finally migrated the attachments as well

June 18th, 2009

I just finished checking all posts with attachments. Everything is fine. My migration script is a total and absolute mess but it did the job pretty well.

What’s left is to confert the BB Codes to something more WP-friendly. I’ll do that at a later time whenever I’ll remind myself of it πŸ™‚

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New categories

June 18th, 2009

I’ve added a few more categories and included some of the older, migrated, posts in them. This should make searching and reading a bit more pleasant.

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