Posts

Even with a markup language as simple as Markdown, it is nice to have an editor that complements the language. I use Markdown frequently to write posts on my websites along with writing documentation when developing software. I’ve used many of these following editors and I am sure we will have a different opinion on which one is the best. I’ve also tried many other editors that I couldn’t care enough about to even mention here.

Keeping your MySQL server backup as current as possible is important. I’ve seen (and have done this myself) people backup using mysqldump once a day, week, or month without any backups in-between. There are a few problems with backing up your database this way. The first problem is that running mysqldump is very slow on large databases and could lockup your website for a significant portion of time. Secondly, you can lose all data that occurred since the previous backup. The third problem is that you cannot restore data from a specific point in time. If your application starts corrupting data after an update, you would have to restore from the last known backup instead of being able to restore data right up until the problem started to occur.

This post is going to cover how to take a USB device and write software that can interact with the device without having publicly available documentation. I came about writing this post when I found an old AverMedia RECental USB button in a box of electronics. I wanted to repurpose the button and this is the result of that process. The device used while writing this tutorial was a very simple in that it only sent two different interrupts (pressed / released) along with a method to create LED animations. I only worked with interrupts and control transfers; I didn’t look into bulk transfers.

After spending many hours working on your website, you want to ensure that it stays up and running. There are many tools available to monitor the status of your website and infrastructure such as system logs for identifying bugs and monitoring how much traffic is being received. Then there are third party services like StatusCake and Uptime Robot that ping your servers frequently and attempt HTTP requests and compare the result to predefined rules. These services are great for monitoring uptime but they lack the ability to identify non-fatal server bugs on the website. Such bugs could include not being able to edit profiles, create new posts, etc.

Running your website’s administration panel on a private network can help increase security along with increase your website’s performance if you perform demanding administrative tasks. This post will cover the idea of running a website admin panel on a private network instead of making it public while still having full control over the public site’s data. I haven’t yet done this in a production environment, but the site I’m currently working on will most likely implement a method similar to the one below.