Technology

After my earlier post on setting up Lighttpd for simple sites, I thought I'd follow up with how to add SSL / TLS / https to your lighttpd setup. Increasingly, search engines and browsers are encouraging the use of https for all websites, so this is becoming more important. These instructions continue to be for Debian (or suitably similar) flavours of Linux.

From time to time, I want to run a simple website on a server as cheaply and simply as possible.

That usually means running on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with as little memory as possible. It therefore means not using a web hosting control panel such as cPanel, because that comes with its own RAM requirements (usually, 1 GB as an absolute minimum) and may have license fees as well.

I've set up lots of servers that run the Debian flavour of Linux. It's light-weight (works on little RAM, if installed in a minmal configuration) and extremely stable.

But for a particular purpose I recently needed to run a server using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

I hit a newbie gotcha that had me stumped for a while, but once I'd solve it, it was really simple.

Two Factor Authentication

Two factor authentication (2FA) is a good thing.

A password is secure, as far as it goes. Only you know it. So only you can log in.

But if someone else learns your password, they can log in. So you add a second factor. As well as something you know (your password) you need something you have in order to log in. This may be your mobile phone, or a small gadget to generate a passcode.

This is an especially good idea for any website that may cost you something - mobile banking, for example.

A few years ago, I posted about the anti-virus software provided by AVG. At the time, their free version was very popular, and maybe still is. My post was about them earning extra money from their free users by changing their privacy policy in a somewhat unsavoury direction.

Here's a problem with Microsoft Word that's bugged me for ages.

Quotation marks in Word

Sometimes I write a document in which I quote either another document (a book, for example), or report direct speech. I might do this with single-quotation marks (') or with double-quotation marks ("). It's useful to have the choice here, because you sometimes quote a document in which something else is also quoted. Having single and double quotation marks allows or this to be made clear.

"She said, 'What's that you're eating?'"

as opposed to

I'm a big fan of Piwik, an open source analytics suite. Think Google Analytics, StatCounter, Sitemeter, etc. … only self-hosted an open source. There are many benefits of using it:

Yesterday, the Drupal Security team issued a Security Advisory for the Mollom module, SA-CONTRIB-2018-038. The module is now marked as "unsupported".

The security team is marking this project unsupported. There is a known security issue with the project that has not been fixed by the maintainer.

Here's a technical problem I encountered a while back.

Someone wrote a blogpost using the Wordpress platform. I wanted to post a comment. I wrote my comment, and entered (as requested) my name and email address.

I then received a message that I have to log into my Wordpress account:

"You are being asked to login because {my email} is used by an account you are not logged into now."

So I enter what I thought was my Wordpress password, and I discover that I have remembered wrongly.

Drupal 8 and 9 use Composer for package management, but Composer requires more memory than is available on most shared hosting environments. This post discusses the problem, and explores a way of working around it to get things working.