Having a mailing list is a important aspect to operating a website that is often overlooked. Engaging your audience via email is great way to bring visitors back to your website for a new promotion or updated content. If you have recently looked into setting up a mailing list you’ll know they can be rather […]
The Best PayPal WordPress Plugin I Have Ever Used
Have you ever wanted to accept a payment with your web site but didn’t know how to get started? Accepting online payments via real-time credit card authorizations requires an online merchant account, a shopping cart, and payment processor like Authorize.net. And all the monthly fees from these services will substantially increase your overhead before you’ve […]
paypal, Wordpress, wpformsHow to Securely Erase Hard Drives
Recently I found a few old 2.5” laptop hard drives in storage and figured I would try sell them for a few bucks on Ebay but first I wanted to make sure my personal data on them was erased. As an experienced sys admin I am already in the habit of formatting an old PC […]
Secure Erase, Security, vmware, Windows 10Easy USB Drive Mirroring With Windows 10 Storage Spaces
Speaking from experience having a computer hard drive fail is not when you want to discover your backup software didn’t run overnight and you’ve lost some important data. Laptops or a space a saving All-in-One desktop like my Dell XPS 2720 typically only have one hard drive. Hard drive redundancy aka RAID (Redundant Array of […]
Upgrade PHP 7 on Windows Server with WebPI
I was recently working on a Windows Server which hosts a WordPress site that had been upgraded from version 4.x to version 5.3. While reviewing the WordPress Dashboard afterwards to ensure everything was working properly I noticed the warning below about PHP being out of date. It turns out starting with WordPress 5.1 a warning […]
FastCGI, PHP, WebPI, WordpressProtecting a WordPress Contact Form with reCAPTCHA
Having a contact form is one of the most important pages a web site can have. It enables you to receive communication for your audience or customers without having to provide a specific email address. Publishing an email address on your site while simple to implement and low-tech makes it easy for the email address […]
recaptcha, Wordpress, wpformsIIS 8.5 SNI – Fixing SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
As you probably know SSL certificates use the https protocol to encrypt communication between your web browser and the web server hosting the web site you’re visiting. You can always tell when your session has been encrypted because your browser will display a lock icon near the address of the site in the browser’s location […]
IIS, IIS 8.5, SSL, Windows Server 2012Resolving IIS WMSVC Underlying Connection Was Closed
IIS Manager Remote Administration is a handy tool for for a web server administrator when you have multiple servers to manage. This feature will save you the trouble of having to Remote Desktop into each server every time you need to touch IIS. With IIS Manager Remote Administration you can login to one server for […]
IIS, Windows Server 2008, Windows Sever 2012Securing SmarterMail in 10 Steps
You may not be familiar with SmarterMail from Smatertools.com but it is an enterprise class Windows based mail server. It has a powerful web based management GUI and the company regularly releases version updates containing bug fixes and new features. However, in my opinion one of the most compelling reasons to try SmarterMail is that […]
email security, Smartermail, SmartertoolsMX Guarddog – Unparalleled Free Spam Filtering
According to the IBM Threat Intelligence Index Spam email volume continues to rise every year as does the threat from sophisticated phishing emails or seemingly innocuous messages with malicious attachments. You may never have heard of MX Guarddog but they have been providing “best in class” email security solutions since 2006. In my opinion the […]
email security, spam filtering