When you host multiple websites in IIS, and you need to monitor them, Zabbix is one of your options. In Zabbix, you can take advantage of Windows Servers performance counters using perf_counter and perf_counter_en. In this article, I’ll show you some important Windows performance counters to monitor your ASP.NET web application in Zabbix
Read More »ASP.NET web application monitoring in Zabbix, part 2
How to install and configure Hugo for static site development in WSL on Windows 10.
Do you find it too difficult to install Go or Hugo in Windows for your static site development? Have you tried Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2? Using a default Ubuntu 20.04, it is pretty easy to install Hugo, set up your development environment and configure Hugo to listen on your Ubuntu’s IP address instead of localhost / 127.0.0.1. This makes your Hugo development site accessible for browsers in Windows 10. Neat, right?
Read More »Hugo development environment in WSL 2 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.
Read More »How to fix System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException “The given key was not present in the dictionary” Exception with MySQL Connector/NET and utf8mb4 character set
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.
Read More »SSL in WordPress: how to move WordPress to HTTPS? The definitive guide 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.
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 …
Read More »Minify WP-Super-Cache HTML cache files: WPSCMin a WP-Super-Cache plugin 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:
In this post I provide you various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache. Use these examples to your advantage to secure the traffic between your visitors and your website.
Read More »Redirect HTTP to HTTPS Start all stopped application pools that have Autostart set to true
Start stopped application pools with AppCmd or PowerShell 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.
Read More »Conditionally start Application Pools on remote IIS web servers Perform a PHP cURL request to check if your website is up.
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.
Read More »Check website availability with PHP and cURL 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.
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!
Read More »8 Tips to improve Joomla performance Extensionless URLs in IIS
Sometimes it’s important to remove -or 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, or for static site hosts. This example will hide the .php extension using the IIS URL Rewrite module, in a ready to use web.config & .htaccess example.
Fire-and-forget JavaScript and CSS minification and PNG image optimization on the Linux-, Mac OS X and Windows command-line interface. Using OptiPNG and YUI Compressor
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.
Read More »Minify JavaScript, CSS and compress images 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.
Read More »Optimize images for the web in bulk