Tag: development | AJdG Solutions

Posted on December 26, 2018January 9, 2019 by Arnan — Leave a comment

Installing MySQL on macOS with root password reset

Following the recent macOS Mojave update I figured I should update MySQL 5.7.16 to 8.0.something, too. This didn’t work out because of the impossible security hash introduced with it. None of my tools are compatible with it apparently.

After some frustrations and loosing all my databases (Migration/Upgrading also didn’t work) I went back to 5.7. The latest version of MySQL 5.7 is 5.7.24. Easy enough, right? Wrong…
It took me a few hours to figure out. But here is my “first launch” setup guide.

After the installation is complete the MySQL manual sort of tells you you’re done and good luck. What it doesn’t mention however is that the temporary password you get is expired before you even use it. You get your password and as far as I can tell their Password Reset instruction is lacking completeness, too.

Posted on October 22, 2018January 9, 2019 by Arnan — Leave a comment

AdRotate Pro 4.16 – Improved Stats

This update improves a bunch of things in stats. Graphs draw now faster. Some numbers where shown incorrectly. This has been fixed.
More exciting is a new option for support.

Let me see

A common problem when solving problems is that the user (you) can’t explain very well what goes wrong and some are so bad to even get stuck at “it doesn’t work” (pretty much). This is frustrating for you, because in your perception my support sucks. And it’s frustrating for me, because I can’t see what’s wrong.

This has been made a little easier in AdRotate Pro 4.16 where the support form in your dashboard now has a checkbox to send me login details so I can take a look at your dashboard.

Posted on March 6, 2018January 9, 2019 by Arnan — 1 Comment

No more transactions in AdRotate Pro?

I’m at that point in development where an update is almost ready for release and am going over a few things to test and try to make sure everything works.

The upcoming update will have a whole bunch of improvements and some new features including better support for Borlabs Cache and the new Google Analytics tracker.

Then I came across the advertiser features, transactions and stuff like that. Which is what we’re talking about today.

Posted on June 12, 2017January 9, 2019 by Arnan

6 ways to a faster and safer WordPress

Having a WordPress website is often great, but it also makes you vulnerable for all kinds of attacks and mischief – Or maybe not vulnerable, but it invites many wrong doers to try and attack you. You’re an easy target. Let’s make it a bit less easy for them without using plugins!

Recently I’ve been plagued on another website by slowness, the occasional downtime and other annoying stuff. Paying more attention to usage stats and the error_log it turns out there was a bunch of stuff going on. A few of IP Addresses constantly tried something with wp-login.php and some other pages and files being loaded over and over again for no apparent reason.

Another issue was the RSS feed WordPress generates. Sure, it works fine. But if you get almost 10000+ requests on it per hour, that’ll slow things down, too. Sometimes.

So I did some research and have come up with a few things to try and prevent this kind of behavior. Of-course it’s no use blocking IP addresses but you can prevent access to things or if they access those things lessen the load on your server a great deal.

Posted on February 27, 2017January 9, 2019 by Arnan

A new plugin! No-Bot Registration!

Tired of fake accounts, spam accounts and other useless crap creating accounts on your WordPress website? Get No-Bot Registration and protect your sign up forms with a simple human friendly security question.

The questions can be as simple or as complex as you want, you can set multiple questions if you’d like, too.
What about manual account creations? They typically use a certain series of domain name. If you notice a trend of such registrations – Simply block the email address, domain name or even the entire top level domain (tld).

Posted on March 23, 2015January 9, 2019 by Arnan

The ultimate development environment for Mac OS X

Updated: December 26, 2018

I’ve pieced together what I think is the ultimate development setup. This tutorial is particularly useful if you’re working in different places and have to rely on public wifi or if you don’t have high speed internet available.

As you may have read I’ve moved to the Philippines. This means I no longer have a home address for a while. This also means that high speed internet becomes a luxury. To not being hindered in developing things like AdRotate and other plugins I needed a fast and reliable alternative for my online development server. So that even if internet is wonky, I can still do some work.