Monitoring Website Status Using PHP

Posted by admin on February 26th, 2012

Running a large number of sites comes with various challenges. The most difficult task I have when managing the dozen or so sites I run is making sure they are up and running.

I currently use a VPS server and luckily the VPS host I use has a very nice set of admin tools to help with monitoring server status. It has a watchdog to make sure the server is powered on. It also tracks CPU usage, disk I/O, and also incoming and outgoing traffic. The system will send alerts to my phone  if any of these go over a certain threshold that I set in the control panel.

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Using WordPress To Show Ads In The Post Loop

Posted by keith on January 28th, 2012

If you are familiar with WordPress and WordPress “loop” then you know just how powerful it can be when it comes to controlling what posts you want to show or not show.

When I first started designing websites I ran across many WordPress sites that showed ad banners after every other blog post and I thought what a  good way to maximize exposure to the ads you run on your site. Everyone is familiar with the normal ad positions; you’ve got the 300×250 top right sidebar, the 728×90 top of the page leaderboard, the 160×60 left sidebar,etc. No one ever really talks about what I feel is probably one of the best advertising spots you can have on a blog. It falls right in the reader’s field of vision when they read your blog posts.

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Hacked By Vulnerability In PhpMyAdmin WordPress Plugin

Posted by keith on January 21st, 2012

I consider myself to be very knowledgeable when it comes to security. I have worked in the security field for about 10 years but being hacked happens to the best of us.

My ordeal started early last week when I got awakened out of my sleep  to the sound of my phone texting me that my server was running out of memory. I usually get a text about 3 or 4 times a day but usually it means that the server’s traffic is spiking. But that night it went off about 45 times so I knew something was up.

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Detecting and Logging Real Visitors Versus Bot Hits Using PHP

Posted by keith on January 8th, 2012

For the past two years I have been developing a traffic trading script that I actually bought many years ago. At the time I needed something fast to setup a few sites where I would be trading traffic with other sites. The script needed a lot of new features so over time I have managed to integrate various changes to help with performance and also usability. The one thing I always had problems with was the script constantly logged traffic that was not human traffic.

One of the features that I added was tracking hits that had no referrer. The problem with that was this also allowed bot traffic to get logged as well.  Bots usually don’t have a referring site so the script was picking these up as valid hits and throwing off my no referrer stats.

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Shell Script To Monitor Memory Usage On Linux

Posted by keith on January 8th, 2012

When I first started running my websites on a VPS  server I was limited on funds so I started out with 1 node with about 512MB of RAM. I was trying to host about 15 sites at the time and needless to say 512MB of RAM is probably the bare minimum required to run even the smallest of sites with any amount of traffic. I was trying to run 15 so eventually I was running out of memory.

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Creating A WordPress Plugin For Posting To Tumblr

Posted by keith on January 1st, 2012

So recently I was given the task to create a plugin for WordPress that could automatically send blog posts to Tumblr. For those that don’t know what Tumblr is (as hard as that is to believe) its basically a micro blogging site much like Twitter. So as I was saying I had been given a task to make a plugin and luckily Tumblr has a nice API that can easily be integrated into a nice little plugin. If you are not familiar with writing plugins for WordPress I suggest you check out their documentation here. It does not have a fast learning curve but it helps if you have some knowledge of PHP and WordPress.

My first step was of course learning the Tumblr API. Tumblr now has two versions of their API; one is based on a very simple HTTP post method and the newer version uses OAuth.

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