Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, September 22, 2020.
I discussed migrating from Google Analytics
and Jetpack to Matomo in a
previous post. Though I haven’t used it for a significant amount of time I am
finding it very useful.
There are two ways you can self-host Matomo. As a plugin for WordPress or as
an independent web application. The WordPress plugin is the most accessible
and most straightforward option for analytics on one WordPress installation.
However, if you administer more than one website, the dedicated web application
is a better option.
The only real difficulty I ran into was getting GeoIP working. That is due
primarily to a lack of Debian packages for the correct PHP extension and no
clear subheadings for system managed updates of the GeoIP databases.
#Assuming Matomo installed at /var/www/html/matomo#Assuming geoipupdate places the databases in /usr/share/GeoIP/cd /var/www/html/matomo/misc/
for DB in `ls /usr/share/GeoIP/*.mmdb`doln -s /usr/share/GeoIP/$DB ./
done#All .mmdb databases are now linked to the system databases updated by geoipupdate.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, September 21, 2020.
I spent last week working on passing my Life Provider exam for Oklahoma. I
have now passed it. It will take another week to get my license but I will be a
licensed life insurance agent soon.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, September 14, 2020.
After doing some research on alternative analytics options, I have removed
Jetpack. Matomo can do
everything Google Analytics and Jetpack can
without any third party data sharing.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, September 11, 2020.
I use SSH keys to protect all of my SSH logins. The following shell code starts
only one ssh-agent and adds all ssh-keys to that agent. I recommend adding it
to your ~/.bashrc file, so the proper environment variables are set up.
if [ `ps -C ssh-agent | wc -l` -ne 2 ]; then ssh-agent -a $HOME/.ssh/agent.sock > $HOME/.ssh/agent.env
source$HOME/.ssh/agent.env
for key in $HOME/.ssh/*.pub; dopkey=`basename -s .pub $key` ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/$pkeydonefi
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, September 10, 2020.
For these last two weeks, I have posted eight days out of ten applicable days.
I am running out of ideas that don’t involve politics, and training for my
new job has impacted my free time. Most of the problem is finding nonpolitical
topics.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, September 4, 2020.
A day or two after I posted my complaint about businesses not training
employees,
I accepted an offer at a company that does train their employees. Yay. I am not
sure how it is going to affect my post rate here though.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, September 3, 2020.
WordPress and several other pieces of web software written in PHP are notorious
for using old and broken algorithms for securing passwords. If you are using
a PHP version of 5.5 or newer, you should get okay security by default.
However, even phpass’ developers recommend not using their software if you
can use PHP 5.5 or newer. I strongly suggest installing and enabling the
PHP Native password hash plugin,
especially if your WordPress install was ever run on any of the PHP 5 family.
The plugin’s two most significant advantages are it actually gets updated to
include new, more robust algorithms, and it automatically migrates passwords to
the newer algorithms on login.
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, September 1, 2020.
I have been dealing with the issue of many people wanting one year of
experience with tool A, but they won’t train you on the differences between
tool A and tool B, which I do have experience on. But they need someone with
experience? A person with one year of experience in a tool isn’t an expert on
the tool. They are a moderately experienced beginner. Also, since Tool A and
Tool B do the same job, the differences in how those tools work is maybe a week
or two of adjustment, not a whole year of adjustment.