Tag Archives for " website "

System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException “The given key was not present in the dictionary” with MySQL Connector/NET and utf8mb4 character set

An System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException “The given key was not present in the dictionary” can be the result of using a too old MySQL Connector/NET version in your ASP.NET web application. A KeyNotFoundException is thrown when an operation attempts to retrieve an element from a collection using a key that does not exist in that collection. An unsupported character set like utf8mb4 can be such a key, if your Connector/NET doesn’t support this character set. Luckily there is an easy workaround for this.

Start all stopped application pools that have Autostart set to true

Just a quicky: Start all stopped application pools in IIS that have the autostart property set to true. Easily with appcmd or the IISAppPool cmdlet that’s available in the IISAdministration PowerShell module. And here is how.

SSL in WordPress: how to move WordPress to HTTPS? The definitive guide

Having an SSL certificate in your WordPress is the de-facto standard nowadays, did you know that? Google ranks sites having HTTPS higher in their SERP. But in WordPress, how do you configure an SSL certificate and HTTPS URL? You’ll learn the important steps to move WordPress from http to https in this post.

AppCmd introduction and examples

The AppCmd command is your one-stop-shop for administering Windows Server IIS web servers. In combination with WinRM it’s your Swiss Army knife for your daily routine. This post introduces appcmd and provides you with a lot of helpful appcmd examples.

Minify WP-Super-Cache HTML cache files: WPSCMin a WP-Super-Cache plugin

The WordPress WP-Super-Cache cache plugin doesn’t minify HTML cache files, which I find a disadvantage. Knowing minify libraries, I went looking for an existing solution (why reinvent the wheel?), and found one: WPSCMin. Read on …

PHP 5.6 default_charset change may break HTML output

UTF-8 encoding breaks when upgrading PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

An important note for everyone who’s upgrading from PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5, to PHP 5.6: the PHP default_charset in php.ini changed from “empty” to UTF-8, making UTF-8 the default charset in PHP. This may break HTML output if you try to set a different charset in your HTML head. It may also break functions like htmlentities() and htmlspecialchars. For example:

HTTP to HTTPS redirect using IIS web.config

An HTTP to HTTPS redirect on IIS is often better left to the web server, with a simple httpRedirect redirection, than to a resource expensive URL Rewrite. This is easily done in a web.config IIS website configuration file. Where possible, use the IIS httpRedirect element for a HTTP to HTTPS redirection, and here is how:

Conditionally start Application Pools on remote IIS web servers

Start stopped application pools with AppCmd in a loop. In my routine, I occasionally have to start multiple website application pools when they are in a stopped state. On more than one web server. Being a lazy system administrator, I find it too much work to log on every server. Therefore I start those application pools in a loop. A condition for me to start application pools is that the application pool autostart parameter is set to true. This is because I set autostart to false when I disable hacked websites, and those application pools may not be started until all problems are resolved of course. To start application pools, I use the AppCmd command.

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Check website availability with PHP and cURL

Here you’ll find a PHP script to check if your website is up and online available. It uses PHP and cURL. This script comes in handy because website uptime and availability is important, and you want your website to be always online available. If your website is down, it’ll send you an email to notify you about downtime.

Send authenticated SMTP email over TLS from WordPress

How to configure TLS for SMTP email in WordPress. I was suprised WordPress is not able to send email using an SMTP server out-of-the-box. Not to mention using authenticated SMTP or TLS transport for security. A quick Google search showed me multiple plugins to handle this, but I wanted to create something myself. Here is how to override the wp-mail() function and send email using authenticated SMTP and StartTLS from WordPress.

8 Tips to improve Joomla performance

How to speed-up Joomla performance on Windows Server IIS: 8 important, but simple, tips to improve & speed up Joomla Add caching, gzip compression, set your sessions & optimize MySQL database functions… Provide your visitors with a blazing fast Joomla website!

How to hide the .php file extension with IIS URL Rewrite Module

How to hide the .php file extension with URL Rewrite on Windows Server IIS? Sometimes it’s important to hide the file extension of scripts you use. Security by obscurity might be that reason, if you don’t want others to know what script language you are using for your website. This example will hide the .php extension using the IIS URL Rewrite module, in a ready to use web.config & .htaccess example.

Minify JavaScript, CSS and compress images

Optimize PNG images and minify JavaScript and CSS files, the easy and fast way? With YUI Compressor and OptiPNG on the Windows-, Linux- and macOS command line of course! Compacting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can speeds up your website because of smaller and faster downloads, parsing, and execution time.

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Optimize images for the web in bulk

Optimizing and loss-less compressing images is one of those items that always pops up when analyzing your website with Google PageSpeed Insights. Images have to be loss-less compressed to save many bytes of data and thus bandwidth. This speeds up the download time of your website. But, how do we optimize images for the web? Or, what if I have hundreds of images that needs optimization? Let’s optimize and loss-less compress images in bulk, read on.

Add websites and application pools to IIS 7.5, 8.0 with PowerShell, in a for loop

How to use PowerShell to create websites and application pools in IIS… A client of the company I work for wanted to quickly add 60 sub-domains to his website. But, the sub-domains had to be created as self contained IIS websites, and running in their own application pools. Luckily, the client wanted 60 consecutive sub-domain names, e.g. “sub01.example.com”, “sub02.example.com”, …, … up till “sub60.example.com”. This made our task a bit easier, because we could easily script this in PowerShell

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