I was recently hired to do a PCI compliance scan and complete the remedial work to bring it up to standard. This was on a CentOS5 box. The tool I was using to do the scanning was pretty good, but like all scanning tools plays “the numbers game.” This means it simply looks at the [...]
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PCI Compliance And Back Ports
December 29th, 2009External DNS at 1and1
June 10th, 2009If you have your DNS hosted in one place (say DNS Made Easy) but host your content on 1and1.com. 1and1 allows you to do this without transferring the domain to them. The problem is they appear to not set the DirectoryIndex directive for hosts using external DNS. This can be overcome with either creating or [...]
How to Start sshd On Plesk
June 9th, 2009I had a client machine reboot today and ssh wasn’t configured to come up on boot. This was a CentOS Plesk machine at my least favorite hosting provider, Media Temple. Secure shell isn’t mentioned in the services section in Plesk, and Media Temple doesn’t have a remote console feature. So in order to avoid submitting [...]
Link Log Matcher WordPress Plugin
May 12th, 2009Power Indexer
Power Indexer is a plugin that gets inbound links indexed by search engines within hours rather than weeks. Even if you have a lot of inbound links to your site, if the search engines don’t know about them, they’re worthless. Power Indexer is simple but effective at making your link building efforts count for [...]
Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin
May 8th, 2009Introduction
This plugin will cloak an affiliate link in a similar fashion to a product called GC Affiliate Cloaker. It essentially spits out some JavaScript that opens the cloaked link in an iframe. Cloaking in this case is not for SEO purposes – it is to shorten URLs so they look prettier and also to prevent [...]
Apache restarts with vlad
April 30th, 2009Often when deploying a new web application you need to restart the apache process. If you’re deploying the application with vlad the deployer as a non-root user (which you should be doing) and you need to restart apache, this can be a little tricky. Luckily there’s a Linux command called sudo which allows you to [...]
Updating WordPress XML Sitemaps Offline
April 24th, 2009I personally love Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress. I personally use it on any WordPress install I do. On larger blogs, or blogs where you’re using automated content generators (i.e. posting content in an automated way through XML-RPC) the default build mode will slow down your blog because it rebuilds the entire [...]
Clickbank Ad Feed WordPress Plugin
April 15th, 2009Introduction
Clickbank does not have an RSS feed, but they do have an XML version of their products called the Clickbank Marketplace. I wrote a simple backend for importing this XML file and producing RSS feeds, and then wrote a WordPress plugin that will show these feeds on your blog as a widget. Affiliate ID, number [...]
cPanel Upload Only FTP
April 2nd, 2009In some cases you want to set up an “upload only” FTP account, which allows a user to upload files, but not list directories, download or delete files. This is typically used when you want to give out the credentials for an account to multiple people so they can upload content (mp3s, videos, resumes, etc.) [...]
Writing A Web Analytics Engine From Scratch
April 2nd, 2009If you’re building a system that needs to track affiliate sales, you’ll need to integrate some form of analytics into your software. Your affiliates will want to see how many total visitors hit their link, total uniques, how they got there (search terms or referrer URL) and if they made a product purchase.
There are a [...]