Archive for the 'Site news' Category

Secure

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

Now, the problem with making bold claims about “this site is secure” is that someone will happily come along and prove otherwise: the rather unwise claims from John McAfee about the “unhackable” BitFi Bitcoin Wallet, and its subsequent embarrassment by those all-round clever guys at Pen Test Partners shows that for sure, so I’m not going to make any such claims about this site, but what I will say is that if someone does hack it, at least they’ll be serving up malware over secure transport.

That nice chap Lee H-W has sorted new hosting: more space, better controls, and the glories of HTTPS now that Let’s Encrypt has made SSL certificates affordable (i.e: free). He even did all the work, which was nice, though some clever tools helped, and the move seems to have been pretty seamless. To be fair, it was seamless last time, but I had to do a bit of fiddling.

HTTPS is a good thing (TM), as browsers are increasingly flagging up plain HTTP as a security risk, and sending the logins over HTTP probably wasn’t ever a good idea.

A previous upgrade of PHP on the old hosting broke my Gallery, and I may not ever re-instate it, as these days Google or Amazon will host the GB of photos for nothing…

Upgrade

Monday, July 15th, 2019

I finally got round to upgrading PHP (which was a 2-click operation) and upgrading WordPress on this and PubBlog to 5.2.2. Thankfully I didn’t get hacked in the time I was running a vulnerable version.

Spam Spam Spam

Thursday, February 15th, 2018

Comments are registered users only for a while, thanks to spammers. I’ll get a better filter installed…..

[edit]

I’ve chucked a few quid to Akismet and installed that. Spam Karma did me very well, considering it’s not been updated for years now. I’ve also updated WordPress to the latest.

Thirteen

Sunday, January 1st, 2017

This blog has just passed it’s thirteenth birthday, and we’re at the start of a new year, a year that’s to be honest, brought little to be happy about in many ways: the loss of many celebrities (and for once, the word celebrity is actually valid here), and, perhaps more importantly for some of us, the unexpected loss in November of Steph Clarke, who should be an inspiration to anyone wanting to do stuff in their community. I was lucky enough to meet her a few times, and her energy and commitment to help people was just unreal. A sad loss to the local community, both online and off. I usually use this post to say how strong the online community is (which is still true), so it’s sad to lose such a big part of it. There’s an ongoing drive to do something good, however small, in her memory- #stuffforsteph, which I’d urge anyone to take part in.

2016 has, generally, been pretty poor- personally, nothing major at all- but we’ve had the idiocy of Brexit, with the corresponding rise of hate crime, a quite spectacularly inept prime minister, and the election of a dangerous halfquarter-wit in the US. In the computing world, we saw the IP Bill pass into law, so someone besides me knows you’re reading this, and the Digital Economy Bill is on its way. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Looking forward to 2017, I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year: let’s hope for a better one: as Brownhills Bob said online recently, we can at least hope that Trump might fall out of an aeroplane and hit Farage on the way down.

Moved

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

Hopefully, no-one noticed, but www.piglet-net.net has moved from a virtual server I shared with a few people to a more usual hosting arrangement. Thanks to Lee H-W for giving me loads of time to move.

The move was straightforward: back up the MySQL DBs, copy the files over, import the DBs, change a couple of config files, bodge /etc/hosts to check it, and switch DNS while the 2 sites were a mirror of each other.

GR8

Saturday, December 31st, 2011

With another year passing, I’ve now been blogging for 8 years. There’s a lot more people blogging in Walsall and the surrounding area now, and many of them have real content, instead of the random rants and ramblings I come out with. There’s been some newcomers quite recently, which is nice, as blogging is often seen as ‘old hat’ now….

Best wishes for 2012.

Updated

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

I’ve ugraded pigblog and pubblog to WordPress 3.3.

Updated

Monday, July 4th, 2011

As a not total, but more pleasant contrast to todays Windoze fun, I’ve updated both blogs to WordPress 3.1.4.

[edit]

And now to 3.2.

Upgrade

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Upgraded to WordPress 3.1.1.

Update

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

I’ve updated this and PubBlog to WordPress 3.1.