Brotli compression was introduced by Google, exactly 3 years ago. It is yet to come by default with the standard Nginx packages of OS vendors or the official Nginx repo. Google maintains its own repo for brotli support on Nginx web server. However, it’s been two years since we had the last commit. Fortunately, a Googler, named Eugene Kliuchnikov, continues to develop a fork of Google’s repo. There are even plan to merge both repos. Still, there isn’t an easy way to compile Nginx from source.
I am hiring!
I’ve been a freelancer since 2008. So, it’s been a decade. I am currently looking for a freelance system admin with keen interests in hosting WordPress and PHP sites. Even though, the hosting market, especially the WordPress hosting market, has some big names in it, there are still plenty of problems to solve.
If you have interests in open source technologies and if you have contributed to open source, that’d be awesome. But, it isn’t mandatory. If you know your stuff, or if you can learn stuff, that’s more than enough. At the same time, communication is a big part of our job.
Continue reading “I am hiring!”Local LEMP Box
I develop sites locally, then migrate the changes to the staging site or to the live site. I never make changes without testing them in my local server. I already have a repo to bootstrap a live server with Nginx, MySQL, PHP and a few more other goodies. However, there are lot of areas to improve to speed-up the development of local sites. For example, PhpMyAdmin runs on its own domain named https://pma.dev (it doesn’t exist on the internet, just a local domain). Since, I do not expose my local server to the internet, I wouldn’t want to enter the credentials whenever I type it in my browser. It saves time! So, here’s my next project… local LEMP server.
Note: This works only on Linux servers and desktops (such as Juno from Elementary OS). Particularly tested on Ubuntu 18.04 based distros. There are a number of alternatives available if you wish you to develop sites locally on a mac or on a Windows PC. Since, I host most of the sites on the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, it make sense to closely resemble the live environment.
Uptime Monitoring
WordPress is easy to use. Behind the scene, it is a complex piece of software, running on PHP and MySQL. Monitoring the uptime of WordPress sites may seem straightforward. But, in reality, it is easy to miss the downtime using conventional methods.
Let me provide you with an example. Let’s take this site… tinywp.in . I monitor this site using multiple uptime monitoring services. They keep watching the home page at https://www.tinywp.in and see if it shows any errors. They notify me in case of the following errors
Please don’t hire me!
Please do not hire me because the cost of living in the country where I live is way cheaper than where you live. Just because the cost of living is lower doesn’t mean you can hire my services at a fraction of rate charged by the tech people from your own country!
Of course, the cost of food and real estate are much cheaper here. The cost of food is rapidly increasing here due to globalization of food industry. However, as my life resolves around IT and products related to IT, the cost of tech products are always higher than whichever country you live in!
To illustrate with an example, iPhone X (64GB model) costs USD 999 in US. Here, the same model costs INR 87400 or approximately USD 1378 upon currency conversion. All hardware products are priced higher due to reasons only known to the retailers. Software products aren’t cheap here either, just because the cost of living is way cheaper!
Oops Moments in DevOps
A post on a new year is usually about resolutions! But, isn’t the best time to revisit the last year’s mistakes and resolve to never repeat it this year (and years to come)?! Since, my strong skills are with DevOps, I’d like to share some oops moments (you may call them blunders) that you’d never want to do it, if you are starting on DevOps or if you just want to understand where things go wrong in DevOps. In general, you go by the defaults, you’d be in trouble in the future. Whatever software you use, make sure you understand the default values and what each of them does! Here are the top three mistakes that I did… Continue reading “Oops Moments in DevOps”
Excluding iPad from wp_is_mobile!
wp_is_mobile function in WordPress considers iPad as mobile! This scenario creates issues on iPad, iPad Pro, or any relevant tablets. To be precise, iPads are shown a mobile version of a site rather than the desktop version! Searching the internet didn’t yield a clean way to overcome this situation. Heck, there are even plugins to detect mobile devices and to exclude iPads from being mobiles.
One-way backups!
An old article (of mine), but discusses the importance of having one-way backups (external link).
