self hosted

The previous post about Self-Hosted Password Managers was well received, and it brought up some interesting discussion on Twitter. A common takeaway was the importance of two-factor authentication (2FA for short). Two-factor authentication is a system whereby a login system verifies with a separate and unrelated login system. Log into system #1 and verify that you’re truly the correct user by verifying with a pre-configured integration with system #2. Et voila! [Read More]

Do you have a password you use everywhere? Be honest, we’re friends here. Good password security is critical, but few take it seriously. I understand why, life has become too complex to keep track of everything inside your head. Security / Convenience — Pick One! Consider the Github list of the top 100 most commonly used passwords, sorted by frequency. Here are the top 10: 123456 password 12345678 qwerty 123456789 12345 1234 111111 1234567 dragon “Dragon” appearing as #10 surprised me, but the rest are sadly predictable and fall into an obvious pattern — quick & easy keyboard entry. [Read More]

It’s easy enough to host your own blog. Once you have a website running and the visitors start arriving, you’ll be left with the question how can I track and analyze my traffic? The most popular choice is to use Google Analytics, and for good reason. Google makes it very easy to include analytic functionality. For the unfamiliar, analytics is a broad term that describes measuring user behavior across your webiste. [Read More]

Cloud has to be the most over-used and under-understood term of the last 10 years. The problem is that “cloud” can refer to many things, since at its core a cloud service is simply a remote service. I’ll use a slightly more expansive definition, at least for the purpose of this post. I’ll refer to a cloud as some service that allows you to securely share, store, and manage data and files between users. [Read More]

In Sending Email, we learned how to get email from our server and onto the Internet using Mailgun. Now we will learn how to receive and store email. Luckily I covered a lot of the technical aspects of email deliver in that post, so this one will be more straightforward. Why Bother? Porkbun provides free email forwarding for up to five users, so why not just use that? For low-volume personal uses this is a fine solution. [Read More]

In Project: Virtual Private Server, we leveraged our existing Linux skillset to build a VPS, install a WordPress stack on it, point our DNS appropriately, and establish an SSL certificate to secure traffic to and from our new website. Awesome! There’s one more thing you’ll need for any modern website — email. If you’re planning to interact with your users, you need a way to get messages to and from them. [Read More]