Solutions WordPress could not establish a secure connection to WordPress.org I’m using Vagrant to work on a WordPress site and noticed the following error throughout several admin pages that attempt to connect to WordPress.org: An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with WordPress.org or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try
Insights YAML and PHP: Examples of arrays and anchors I recently had to get my feet wet with YAML, so I’ll briefly explain how to get it up and running on your server, show some examples of how to represent multidimensional associative and indexed arrays, and lastly, how to utilize anchors, which is my favorite feature so far.
Solutions Unable to set permissions within shared folder using Vagrant and VirtualBox I recently started experimenting with Vagrant (v1.5.1), Puppet (v3.5.1) and VirtualBox (v4.3.10) to replace my MAMP environment. I used the config.vm.synced_folder method in Vagrant to share a folder of websites with the virtual machine. Since a few directories, like caching and
Solutions Recovering your VPS from the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability There are a lot of great resources out there with regard to the Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) vulnerability, but let’s look at what this means specifically for anyone who operates their own VPS. We’ll determine whether this bug directly applies to you, if you are affected, how to recover from
Insights How to update and deploy WordPress as a Git submodule WordPress 3.8.2, a security release, came out yesterday. Now, if you’re already on WordPress 3.8, your WordPress installation will most likely automatically update, but if you are using Git to manage WordPress as a submodule, and have auto-update disabled, you have to do that manually. That
Solutions Git error when switching branch after replacing directory with submodule I’m working on updating several WordPress sites. Part of each site’s update includes converting the WordPress core and all frequently used plugins to Git submodules. While many recommend staying away from submodules all together, I’ve been using them for a while now and never had any issues,
Insights Rewrite rule to bulk redirect domains using Apache’s RewriteMap A component of the server migration I’m currently working on is to move all of the existing virtual host files. Unfortunately, they’re not all consistently setup, which makes them difficult to overview, and from past experience, difficult to manage. There is also no easy way to tell which
Insights Increase space on fixed VirtualBox VDI disk containing Windows 7 on Mac I use VirtualBox on my Mac to have other operating systems at my disposal. One of my appliances contains a copy of Windows 7 with a fixed, 25GB disk. I’ve run out space and was looking for an easy way to increase it. I came across the modifyhd command,
Insights Managing and organizing Apache virtual host files I’m in the midst of building new servers, inventorying the existing ones, and creating a migration plan to move over anything that needs to make it over. This is the perfect time to look at the big picture and assess whether everything is implemented in the best way possible.
Solutions WordPress: Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates I was trying to upgrade WordPress on one of my servers, but kept receiving an SSL-related error: Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates. I verified the SSL certificate on the server and there are no issues with it as far as I can tell, but I’d
Solutions SourceTree / GitHub: Must specify two-factor authentication OTP code I recently activated two-factor authentication on GitHub, but that started causing an error in SourceTree: What that means is that you can no longer use your regular account password to login to GitHub from SourceTree, but have to create a token instead. You can do this on the application settings
Solutions mount.vboxsf mounting failed with protocol error I manage several virtual machines via VirtualBox, and one of the first things I do is share a folder between host and guest OS, but when I ran the command this time, I got an error: /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error Turns out, I forgot
Insights Git post-receive hook to deploy WordPress and plugins as submodules In a previous blog post I discussed how best to manage file and folder permissions when deploying with Git, but today I’ll show a specific example of what that post-receive hook might look like for a WordPress project that uses submodules. I have three servers that I can deploy
Insights Accessing Amazon S3 buckets via Transmit I will describe the steps for creating access keys, a S3 bucket, and setup Transmit to connect to your S3 bucket. In addition, I’ve collected a few final notes that may help you get up and running with whatever your end goal might be. Create Access Keys in AWS
Insights Bash shell prompt dissected: Display Git branch name and status in color I received a snippet of code from my good friend Jason today. It goes into your .bash_profile and what it does is add two pieces of information to your Bash shell prompt when you’re in a Git working directory. With it, you’ll be able to tell: 1.
Insights Control server access: Prompt for credentials (basic auth) on approved networks, allow access to itself, and deny everyone else To get a site feature from development to production, it goes through four servers: 1. Development 2. Quality Assurance (QA) 3. Staging 4. Production Except for the development server, which is localhost, there are times people, other than developers, need access to view a particular site on the QA or
Solutions Ajax in WordPress not working in IE8 and IE9 I recently ran into an issue where Ajax requests were not working in WordPress when using Internet Explorer 8 or 9, and while this may not be a common issue among WordPress users, you’ll most likely run into this problem if certain conditions are met on your site. 1.
Insights Prevent contact form spam in WordPress with Contact Form 7 and Akismet If you’re running WordPress and have a contact form on your website, there’s a good chance you’re using Contact Form 7. You can get away with using it as-is for a while, but as time goes on, spambots begin to find their way into your inbox. At
Solutions Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility: vpn.pkg is damaged and can’t be opened I recently had to download and install the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility client to connect to a VPN, however I was getting an error that seemed to indicate that the download was corrupted: After a bit of trial an error, it turns out that the installation was being blocked by
Insights Monitor database availability with Pingdom I’m testing out a new VPS with a couple sites on it, and after several hours of uptime, the mysqld service (database) was sacrificed in order to clear up RAM. As it turns out, I didn’t have a swap space for the VPS to offload inactive pages in
Solutions System running out of memory: create a swap file If you have a virtual private server (VPS) and are getting errors like “system running out of memory,” you may want to double check whether you’re using a swap volume or file. Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the
Insights Bash script to mirror directory and database of website between servers When you have a site that’s an on-going project, and you’re using a development, staging, and production server configuration, time and time again you’ll have a need to mirror the production site content with your other environments. Previously, this either meant to manually (FTP) or semi-manually (rsync)
Insights Prevent SSH connection from timing out in Terminal If you’re constantly connected to multiple servers via SSH and perform work on them throughout the day, dealing with timeouts can be cumbersome. Here’s how you can keep the connection alive. Create a config file in your home’s .ssh directory: $ vi ~/.ssh/config Add the following by
Insights Prevent WordPress from automatically purging trash from custom post type WordPress has a constant called EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS that it automatically sets to 30. What that means is that WordPress will automatically delete all posts, pages, custom post types, etc, that have been in the trash for 30 or more days. // wp-includes/default-constants.php function wp_functionality_constants( ) { // more stuff
Insights How to use PHP variables in jQuery in WordPress Often times you need access to server-side data in your JavaScript. Most people accomplish this in one of three ways: 1. Echo out JavaScript in PHP 2. Place data in HTML attributes for jQuery to grab 3. Make Ajax request to PHP I won’t go into the pros and
