When changing the base URL of a WordPress site to use https, sometimes when visiting the login page (https://example.com/wp-login.php) the site will refuse to load. I have run into this issue several times and this will show how to solve it.

Running a server can be difficult and it is very easy to leak important credentials. Much easier than you want it to be. I ended up leaking a dangerous file from one of the WordPress websites I manage, named ‘wp-config.php.save’ to the public internet. It contained passwords to the site database, cookie keys and cookie salts. This created a couple issues, namely the fact that anyone who could access the database server could have had full write permissions. There are a couple reasons why I don’t think this happened, and most of them are due to great default protection by Azure, so I got extremely lucky. I am going to dive in to the events leading up to the incident and then what I did to resolve it.

I just finished deploying the first dynamic part of my new website! You will notice now there is a new section on the sidebar that displays a random assortment of links from around the web. This is my “Neat things” list.

The moral of this story is don’t trust client side analytics.

I enable uBlock Origin (a tracking/ad blocker) on ethohampton.com. Seriously, on my own website. I don’t even have ads that I might need to block. So why, you might ask don’t I have my own domain on my unblocked list?

I recently watched a CGP Grey video that talked about what people should do instead of setting New Years Resolutions. He suggested instead to set a theme of some sort for the year (or quarter). I decided that college is a great place to try something new and “get my life together”. This is the intro post to this mission and will go over some of the things that I have tried to start doing this term.

It bothered me for a while that I had to type sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade in order to update my Ubuntu Linux system. It just felt like there had to be an easier way to figure out what to update and just upgrade it with one command in an easy to use way.

Eventually I realized I could just write my own bash script and execute it from the command line. This post will go into a bit of detail about how I did that.