Apple won’t be keeping all of the services in macOS Server after the next few months. In the meantime, we have a big old guide to read. I have some overlapping articles I’ve been working on, but I’d say we’re in a similar headspace. The Apple macOS Server Services Migration Guide is available at https://developer.apple.com/support/macos-server/macOS-Server-Service-Migration-Guide.pdf and covers bind, vpnd, freeradius, manual netinstall with bootp and tftp, apache, wordpress, CalendarServer, and ftp. It’s pretty technical, but nothing too crazy in there!Overall, an easy read and I’m glad to see some content coming out to help admins!
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Migrating Data From The Apple Wiki Server
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment The Apple Wiki Server is sadly going away. I always liked this service. It was thoughtfully designed and looked much nicer than most of the other tools available out there. Sure, you couldn’t write articles offline, write in markdown, or do a lot of other things that I’ve learned to both love and hate from other solutions, but honestly it always felt the most Apple of services in macOS Server because it didn’t have every-single-checkbox. So, I’ll pour a little Jaëger on the ground in memory of the wiki server and…
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Using The WordPress API
WordPress has an app. That means there’s an API to normalize communication using a predictable programmatic interface. In this case, as with many others, that’s done using a standard REST interface to communicate. The easiest way to interact with any API is to just read some stuff from the server via curl. You can feed curl the URL to the API by using your URL followed by /wp-json – as follows, assuming a URL of https://www.krypted.com: curl https://krypted.com//wp-json To view header information: curl -s -D - https://krypted.com/ -o /dev/null In the below example we’ll ask for a list of posts by adding /wp/v2/posts to the URL: curl https://krypted.com//wp-json/wp/v2/posts You’ll see…
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Capturing Smaller Screenshots on a Retina Display in El Capitan
By default, screenshots are pretty big on a retina display on an El Capitan machine. Like about 4 times the size they should be. I haven’t found a defaults key I can use yet to reduce them, so I’ve been using this little screenshotting app called RetinaCapture, available at https://gumroad.com/l/retinacapture. Basically, when you’re running it, you just open it up and click on the Window button. There, you can select a window to screenshot. Once you’ve selected the window, you’ll be prompted to save it somewhere with a name. I don’t love having to use any 3rd party apps for my screenshotting workflow. Screens get resized for books and so I’m…
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Permalinks Finally Fixed!
When you enable permalinks in WordPress, you’re basically converting a link to an article you’ve written from something like https://krypted.com//page=2 to something like https://krypted.com//mac-os-x-server. Doing so makes Google like the page more (supposedly). After my site moved, the permalinks were broken, so I turned them off until I could find time to fix them. I never did. But thanks to the glory that is @sacrilicious the permalinks were magically fixed one day. So do permalinks matter to drive traffic to a site? Well, nothing else changed, same length of articles, same frequency, etc. But when permalinks were turned back on, the answer was in my Site Stats, courtesy of JetPack:…
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Get Your WordPress on with Ubuntu 10
Setting up and installing WordPress is pretty straight forward. That’s not to say it’s not going to take a little work to go from 0 to 60 on a base Linux installation. But I’ll lay the work out for you so as not to be that tricky. Everything we’ll be doing will require elevated privileges, so sudo in front of each command or sudo bash before you get going. First up, install Apache, as you’ll need a web server. I think the base apache2 config is pretty straight forward out-of-the-box: apt-get install apache2 During installation you will be asked to type y to continue. Do that and it will finish…
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WordPress and Spam Bots
There are a number of ways that you can protect your WordPress site from spam bots. The first is to only allow authenticated users to post comments. Doing so can still be a bit unwieldy, but this feature is built into WordPress and so pretty straight forward to use. Some, who deal with large amounts of spam bots then choose to completely disable the commenting feature outright (Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles), but comments can still be made on existing articles and commentary is one of the best features of WordPress for many. To stop comments on older articles, also disable commenting…
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Resetting a WordPress Password
Sometimes you can bite yourself a little when you experiment around with things. I installed a security plug-in and the next thing you know I couldn’t log into my own website. Ouch. Not a huge deal as it actually led to experimentation with the MySQL tables for WordPress, which oddly enough, I’ve typically just left well enough alone. But this I figured was gonna’ need to be updated eventually (although I relished the opportunity to get caught up on some stuff in the meantime). So first up, SSH into your box. Then fire up mysql: mysql -u root -p Turns out there’s a wp_users table in there. For my user…
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Integrating WordPress Comments with Facebook
In a constant search for achieving comment nirvana for the sites I manage, I was recently looking into integrating WordPress (and a couple of other CMS engines) with Facebook. The sites are setup to only allow authenticated users to comment and it just seemed like with all of the single-sign on technology out there that it just didn’t have to be so annoying. After installing the OpenID integration it seemed like there still had to be a better way to allow even more people to authentication. How about Facebook? Facebook has done a lot of work on making their API one of the best in the social networking world. The…
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Determining WordPress RSS URLs
RSS feeds are pretty darn useful for a lot of things. And WordPress makes them really, really easy. If you want to insert an rss feed somewhere then according to the type of feed you need, you can just use a pretty repeatable pattern to do so. Basically, following the site you would use /wp-rss.php for rss, /wp-rss2.php for rss2 or /wp-atom.php for Atom feeds. For example, to get a feed of this site in rss you could use the following: https://krypted.com//wp-rss.php Or rss2: https://krypted.com//wp-rss2.php Or rdf: https://krypted.com//wp-rdf.php Or Atom: https://krypted.com//wp-atom.php