Category Archives: Computer

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Synchronizing my devices for reading stuff later

  By nick • July 25, 2012

Meanwhile I have different devices and apps plus cloud automators to read stuff later,  the stuff being articles found on RSS feeds,  twitter,  google plus.
To retain some overview I created a simple picture

The services are:
www.wappwolf.com
www.ifttt.com If This Then That
www.getpocket.com (fka Read It Later)
read.amazon.com
www.crofflr.com

Browser PlugIns, Extensions:
Send To Kindle (Chrome)

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Privacy and protection tools for safer browsing

  By nick • November 11, 2011

Tools for ‘Safer Browsing’

…. helping to protect your privacy (to some extent….)

Protection Tools

Basics: you run antivirus (e.g. antivir.de offers a very good freeware one) and a firewall.

Additions: e.g. Computerbild Abzockschutz (translate yourself 😉 ). http://www.computerbild.de/artikel/cb-Special-Sicherheits-Center-Internet-Abzocke-COMPUTER-BILD-schuetzt-4406145.html

Fire Fox PlugIns  (Sequence follows my personal rank of importance…)

Chrome

  • Some of the above FF addons are available on Chrome or in slight variations

Tools outside browser

Beware – depending on your location the use of these tools is legally not permitted or e.g. prohibited by your company

also see https://plus.google.com/111122095369026968993/posts

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Website Load Performance Optimization

  By nick • March 23, 2011

The form is use to update GDocs is so slow on my Iphone 3G that I decided to do some improvements.

Before the doing comes some reading as this is my optimization primer 🙂 I mainly followed Yahoo!s guide provided through Yslow, btw a great Firefox plugin:  Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Online you can use http://gtmetrix.com, which combines Yslow and the corresponding tool from google.

Main Learnings are:

  • Reduce number of http calls
    • Use only single files   –> only use one file for CSS and html –> done  (copied css into html)
    • Use only one image (background, CSS) –> n/a
  • Set expiry headers –> done
    I tried the variant with setting the header in the HTML file <meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”43200″ />, in this case the browser shall reload the file if the version in the cache is more than 12hours old (for a first test). Seems to work but I reset it to allow further testing
    For images and other stuff you need to create an .htaccess file in the folder, e.g. including the following:
    # 1 YEAR
    <FilesMatch “\.(ico|pdf|flv)$”>
    Header set Cache-Control “max-age=29030400, public”
    </FilesMatch>
    Now YSlow is happy on that one 🙂
    More details on caching and apache are here: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html
    Cross-Checking can be done using redbot.org or fiddler
  • Reduce file size by debeautifying it: http://prettydiff.com/
  • Enable compression (gzip)
    i followed this guide with code to be entered in the .htaccess: http://serverfault.com/questions/137823/how-to-enable-either-gzip-or-deflate-compression-via-htaccess and added .ico as additional picture type to not be compressed.

After all there is also (at least) this online tool to measure IPhone and Android load times (I didn´t find an app for to IPhone to do that):

http://www.blaze.io/mobile

 

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Pressplay Theme für Page2Cat anpassen

  By nick • March 25, 2010 ,

wp-content/themes/pressplay/category.php

<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>
<div></div>

<?php if( function_exists(‘page2cat_output’)) { page2cat_output($cat); } ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php if (function_exists(“post_class”)) { // for pre-WordPress 2.7 ?>
<div id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>” <?php post_class(); ?>>
<?php } else { ?>
<div id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>

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Wordpress Backup

  By nick • March 24, 2010 ,

For my backup of content on this page I have a two-fold ‘strategy’.

  1. Automatic Daily ‘snapshots’ of the pure content as stored in the database keeping the last 15 versions
  2. Automatic full backups every 2 two days including the content in the database + complete files for the WordPress installation

1. Daily snapshots

This one is the simple part. Install the plugin ‘WP-DBManager‘, which you can use to create periodic backups on the server, where you operate WordPress or have them sent via mail (http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/). This only does backups of the database content (mySQLdump).

2. Full Backups

I wanted to have full backups created every two days (yeah, neither too much content nor frequent changes on this page…). Full backup is database content + file system. I´m way too lazy to reinstall all the stuff with themes etc. Never tried though, if just replacing the files will work. Finding that out is sufficient, if it actually happens some day (hope not!).

The backups shall in the end land on the computer I use at home. From there I then do all the further backups.

2.1 Creating the backups

Directly on the server I use two crons, (1) for creating the database backup (2) for the files.

(1)  mysqldump -u<wordpressDatabaseUser> -p<WordpressDatabasePassword> <nameOfWordpressDB>  | gzip > <target_folder>\wordpress_mysql-$(date  +\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H.\%M.\%S).gz

This will create files with names like wordpress_files-2010-03-24-02.00.01.tar.gz.

Find a more complete description here: http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2009/12/21/automate-wordpress-database-and-files-backup/

(2)  tar cvzf <target_folder>/wordpress_files-$(date  +\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H.\%M.\%S).tar.gz <WordpressRootFolder>/*

This will compress the complete WordPress file structure and create the compressed file in the target folder.

2.2 Copying the backups to the home PC

I first tried with WebDAV, but W7 seems to have serious issues with WebDAV and basic authentication. Thus I stuck with the FTP (I´m still thinking of switching to FTPS, but I cowardly fear the certificate stuff 🙁 ).

(1) open FTP access to your server

This strongly depends on the server you use, no description here.

(2) getting the files through FTP

I used WinSCP, which you can also script. Download and documentation here: http://winscp.net/

The script is simple assuming that the source folder on your server is directly accessed, when you log on with the user (winscp_wordpressbackup.txt):

option batch off
option confirm off
option echo on
open ftp://<ftp_user>:<ftp_password>@ftp<yourserver>.com

synchronize local "<name of your local folder, where you want the backup to be stored"

close
exit

synchronize local will compare, which files are on the server but not on your local machine and then only download the missing files while keeping them on the server as well.

The script is used in a batch file, which itself I schedule regularly using the standard Windows means. The batch file is even more simple than the script:

"C:\Program Files\WinSCP\WinSCP.com" /console /script="<full_path>\winscp_wordpressbackup.txt"
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REST Q&A

  By nick • March 11, 2010

  • Wie funktioniert Adressierung ueber mehrere BAckend Systeme (id Konzept?)
  • Welche regeln haben wir in der Data Language fuer die response und post Formate
  • Wie sieht im Vergleich ein WS Call aus? Gibt es ein Beispiel wie das anlegen eines Sales Order mit Rest
    aussieht?(wie hilft Rest bei consumability)
  • Welche konzepte gibt es, damit Clients nicht durch Server Innovation semantisch/syntaktisch invalidiert werden
  • Richtig?: Rest erlaubt nur synchrone kommunikation
  • Erweiterungskonzept, zB Partner?

Tools

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Overview – REST – Representational_State_Transfer

  By nick • March 11, 2010 ,

Super artikel webservices mit REST inkl beispielen http://www.oio.de/public/xml/rest-webservices.htm

Building webservices with REST http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html

Dieser Podcast beschreibt die REST Prinzipien.
http://www.heise.de/developer/artikel/Episode-17-Einstieg-in-REST-921652.html

Dieser hier (Anti-)Patterns und Tools für REST;
http://www.heise.de/developer/artikel/Episode-18-Anti-Patterns-und-Tools-fuer-REST-924171.html

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