I have decided that I don’t want to focus on search engine optimization anymore. Quite frankly it’s too much work for what I gain from it and I seem to be doing just fine without it. Why the shift? Well I started looking at where and how I find entertaining websites. The only one I found through a search engine in recent memory was https://rogerhub.com and even then it was through his final grade calculator. Websites like Nick Craver’s, Paul Graham’s, Joel On Software, Tiffany Matthé’s, among others, were all found organically from reading other websites or stumbling across them on Twitter.

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.

Hello! A friend recently asked me (and I am summarizing here), “Ethan, I want to start my own blog where I can publish articles and then create a mailing list. What should I use to do that?” I thought, “Well that’s a great question Phil! Let me get back to you” so I am using this blog post as a way to do that. My Blog What do I use to host my blog? Well a couple of things actually, Hugo, Forestry.io, Cloudflare and a nameless hosting provider. Eventually I will move to be hosting my own website behind Azure but for now I will be sticking with my current set up.

I recently started to watch “The West Wing” and have starting thinking a lot more about the impact that leaders in society can play on the world. Inconsequential decisions at the time can lead to either great success or great failure further along down the road. The following is a “position paper” of sorts that describes a struggle I think many people have. One of the hardest things programmers have to do is keep all the information they gather looking at code in their head at one time. Where was that function called? What was that variable set by? How does that code result in that output? Over and over again they gain knowledge to keep for a few minutes then loose it and replace it with something else. Often programmers get into a state of flow where they don’t notice time go by and are only focusing on the code they are working on and nothing else.

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.

As the snow slowly melts away and the birds come out again, my mind drifts back to a weekend at the beach a couple weeks ago. Celebrating my grandma’s 80th birthday I was sure I was going to have a good time. When my family arrived I was greeted by a tall two story house that extended off into the distance. The furnishings inside all melded together into a nice calm blue that carried hints of the ocean throughout the house. Sleeping arrangements were made and it was decided that I should sleep in a twin bed next to an expansive window on the second story. By the time I made it up to bed it was pitch dark outside, all you could see were the twinkling of fishing boats gently rocking in their sleep.