WordPress

This article explains how to set up restic (with the resticprofile wrapper) for automated scheduled backups of your (dockerized) WordPress server. The backups are protected from ransomware through temporary immutability, which makes it much harder for attackers to delete your data.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve used a traditionally installed (i.e., not dockerized) LAMP stack for its server setup since 2014. Only recently did I switch to Docker containers. Why? Maintenance. Much facilitated maintenance. If you take a look at the articles I’ve written over the years describing how to upgrade to newer versions of Ubuntu or - god beware - PHP, you can’t help but realize what a godawful PITA it all is. Switching to Docker enforces (or at least strongly encourages) a strict separation of (public) code and (personal) configuration. With this new setup, upgrading from one PHP version to another involves nothing more than changing a version number in a text file.

This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS to 22.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s original installation and configuration.

Maintaining a WordPress site that goes back years or even decades (as in this case) can be a challenge. You want to ensure formatting is consistent, even for old posts, and shortcodes are kept in check. As always, automation is key. This post shows how to search and replace in WordPress posts with the help of regular expressions.

In addition to various commercial plugins, there is one free tool that helps with WordPress migrations to or from multisite installations. MU-Migration is a WP-CLI plugin that worked flawlessly when I wanted to convert helgeklein.com from a multisite into a single site installation. Here are the steps I took.

Surprisingly, there does not seem to be a plugin or some other “easy” way of searching your WordPress posts for certain keywords, shortcodes or HTML tags. However, if you have ever been through a theme migration, you know that standardizing on HTML tags and shortcodes makes the process a lot less painful. If you know what you are looking for, this solution to search your posts’ content might be just what you need.

This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS to 18.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation and configuration.

This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation and configuration.

Using SSL for the entire website should be the norm these days. If you have a decent server it does not significantly reduce page speed and it allegedly even helps your Google ranking. I covered enabling SSL and configuring it so that you get an A ranking in the Qualys test in another post. This article shows how to convert an existing WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS.

I have always found my blog’s comments a great source of feedback. In many cases, readers have contributed valuable additions to the article content or pointed out errors which I subsequently fixed. However, there is a dark side to enabling others to add content to your side: spam. Here is how I am (successfully) dealing with that threat.

Note: The installation described in this article worked very well for me. However, nine years after publishing this post I replaced this setup with a more modern dockerized installation that is easier to maintain. PHP upgrades, especially, are a lot simpler.

My website is hosted by Rochen, a company whose services I am very happy with. For reasons I understand they do not offer unlimited data transfer. My account, for example, comes with 50 GB per month. That is a lot and enough for most sites, including mine at this point in time. But I am selling software, and if a big news site writes about SetACL Studio the least of all things I want to happen is that Rochen suspends my account because the transfer limit has been reached.

I had a strange error on this Wordpress installation: The author page would not display, instead, I got a 404 (not found). This is the description of how I fixed it.

Until yesterday, SetACL’s web presence consisted of six static HTML pages. That was great for speed, but it sucked in almost every other aspect. And the design … better not speak about that. The old website was hosted on Sourceforge, on the subdomain setacl.sourceforge.net, to be exact. High time for a radical change. I wanted a good clean design, interactivity (commenting), easy maintenance and my own domain. And I wanted a place where I could assemble and store all the relevant content I publish on the web, namely blog articles and tweets. This is the story of the creation of that place.

Migrating a blog can be a very painful process, part of which stems from the fact that, if not done correctly, search engine valuation (aka PageRank) that took years to gain may be lost in days. Redirecting from the old blog to the new URL alleviates this problem at least, but not the way it is described on countless websites that recommend implementing JavaScript redirects search engines do not care about. Instead HTTP 301 redirects are needed which unfortunately required access to the .htaccess file on the web server hosting the old blog to set up. And you may have guessed already - Blogger.com does not grant that type of access.