Secure Your WordPress Site

| April 17, 2014

There are millions of WordPress sites online currently. This makes it a big target for hackers, as an exploit can mean a large amount of sites can be attacked.

Now I’m no security expert and by no means is this everything you should do, but I think I have the basics down and these are my minimal recommendations for all self hosted WordPress sites.

Security Tips

WordPress Updates

Always keep  Wordpress installations up to date. Not only to these add nice new features they also fix bugs that could otherwise leave your site vulnerable to hackers.

Passwords

All passwords should be long and complex. This means they should be 14+ characters and contain letters (upper and lower), numbers & symbols for maximum protection.

Here is a site to generate random passwords: http://passwordsgenerator.net/

(more…)

10 Reasons You Need 10 Reasons

| April 16, 2014

1. You’re bored

Yeah, you are probably really bored. What else is there to do all day?

2. Titles So Dramatic It’ll Make You Explode!!!

No, not really. You’ll probably find it mildly interesting and look for less that a few seconds. *Boom* I think I just exploded.
[adinserter block=”2″]
boom
(more…)

Waterproof Tech is Cool

| April 16, 2014

Recently I have got two new pieces of water proof tech an S5 and a 1TB Silicon Power A80. I’ll post some photo samples and maybe a review on what I like and dislike about the Galaxy S5 sometime, I have to say I love this AMOLED screen.

Both have the same water proof rating IPX7, which means they should be able to withstand under 30 mins in 1 meter of water.

Anyway, I didn’t want to put my phone in water but there are plenty of people doing it on YouTube, I think it is pretty impressive. All these years I have been keeping my phone away from water as much as possible, now I no longer fear leaving it at the side of the bath.

A Site For My Dog, Mr Blue

| March 6, 2014
Blue

Some people might find it weird, some cool but I love my dog and I wanted to dedicate a site to him.

I also wanted to try out OpenLiteSpeed so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to test it out.

http://mrblues.club/

Speedtest: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/W4kUr/http://mrblue.eu This is also using CloudFlare to cache so isn’t really a test of OpenLiteSpeed, but Cloudflare is super quick at serving cached static HTML.

 

Recovering databases from .frm & ibdata1 files

| March 3, 2014

Recently one of my VPS servers crashed, became unresponsive & needed to be reinstalled. The only backup of the database was one that I had from a few weeks ago, so that wasn’t of any use to me.  These instructions are made for Debian so may differ slightly depending on your distribution.

I asked my provider for a complete tar ball of my VPS so I could try and collect the lost data from it. If you are unable to access your VPS/server your provider may be able to provide you with a tar ball of your VPS or the files you need.

Prerequisites (ibdata + .frm files):

  • /var/lib/mysql containing ibdata1 and the databases you wish to recover. The name of the database will match the directory name, these should contain .frm files.
  • Another MySQL instance with access to the file system. This should be a new MySQL server setup just for this recovery. You should not attempt to transfer your database to an in use MySQL server.

(more…)