Articles by Scott Hebert

1. Pelican: Don't Let Me Publish Without Committing

   Posted on November 02, 2015 in Programming

   Although I use Git all day long, I actually prefer to use Mercurial for my personal stuff. When I started working on this project to maintain slaptijack.com with Pelican rather than continuing to use Wordpress, one of the things that really interested me was the ability to keep Markdown …

2. Outdated Updates Have Been Removed

   Posted on October 28, 2015 in uncategorized

   There are two sections of this site that I stopped maintaining years ago: Security Updates and Tech Messages. None of the pages have ever been that popular and they were really only useful if you were following the site in near real-time. Since no one does that and most folks …

3. Redis: Better Session Storage for Magento

   Posted on October 28, 2015 in System Administration

   Out of the box, Magento has four methods available for storing session data: filesystem, database, memcached, and tmpfs. The default method is to store session information in the filesystem. I believe that storing sessions in Redis is actually superior to all of the aforementioned methods. Each of the four default …

4. Pelican: Insert Article Summaries into WordPress

   Posted on October 26, 2015 in Programming

   This is was my next project.

   Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

   • Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
   • It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

5. Using Pelican's article.summary

   Posted on October 23, 2015 in Programming

   I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

6. Getting Started With Pelican

   Posted on October 20, 2015 in Software

   I've been using WordPress on this site since 2007. After all this time, I've decided I want to try something new. So, I've decided to go in a completely different direction and start serving static content. There are three things driving my decision to change:

   • The existing site is really …

7. El Capitan Leads to More DNS Woes

   Posted on October 06, 2015 in System Administration

   For whatever reason, Apple really likes messing with how I use DNS.

   I've written many, many, many times about having to modify OS X's DNS functionality to append search domains when a hostname includes a dot. Every single time I upgrade, this change is broken.

   Previously, the workaround had been …

8. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

   Posted on September 21, 2015 in Programming

   Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

   Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
   

   This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

9. MBA Bookshelf

   Posted on August 23, 2015 in IT Management

   Below is the list of books I have needed for my MBA.

   • Principles of Corporate Finance - Brealey, Meyers, & Allen
   • Organizational Theory, Design, and Change - Jones
   • Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage - Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, & Wright
   • Business, Government, and Society: A Managerial Perspective - Steiner & Steiner
   • Managerial Accounting: Creating Value in …

10. nginx: Blocking Access to /xmlrpc.php

    Posted on July 31, 2015 in System Administration

    I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …