I recently came across a situation with Drupal 8 that took me literal hours to figure out. I thought I would share it here, for anyone else who might have the same problem, as the solution at first seemed to have no relation to the problem at all. This works in Drupal 8.8.x, and will probably work in 9+ as well.
SSL certificates are basically required for all modern web sites. The problem is that (1) they cost money, and (2) you have to renew them every year or so. It gets to be a real pain, especially if you manage multiple sites.
There is an alternative-- create a (free) self-signed certificate, and give it an expiration of 99 years, but anyone who visits your site will see a huge warning message that it is unsafe.
The solution: Let's Encrypt.
Every year or so, I enjoy going through some of the top websites in the world, and finding out exactly what OS their server is running. Usually, it's always some flavor of Linux. It's been a few years, so it makes sense to give it a fresh look.
Data is provided from Alexa and Netcraft.
Let's begin with the top 10 websites in the world:
In my previous post, I described adding an SSD to boost the speed of my mid-2011 Mac mini. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only issue. It won't let me upgrade the Mac OS past version 10.12. Apple refuses to let me upgrade to the latest version (10.15 at the time of this writing) without buying a newer computer.
So, rather than go out and buy a new Mac to keep up, I installed Linux (plus Cinnamon to make it look like Windows) and now have a fast and fully up-to-date computer.
Like most of you out there, I have a handful of old computers sitting around, getting more and more out of date by the day. The worst of my collection, though, was my Mac mini from 2011. I originally bought it for iOS development, and it ran fine at the time.
But, Apple forces you to keep upgrading to the latest version of both the OS and XCode, and before long, the Mac mini was running horribly slow.
If you've used Xcode for iOS or Mac development, you know how handy the #pragma line can be. It makes it super-simple to group related functions or methods together in your outline. Well, for those wondering how to do something similar in Eclipse-- this blog post is here to help! It's a little hacky though.
As developers, sometimes it's necessary to create self-signed certificates on our servers, but it sure is annoying every time you visit the page and you have to click through Chrome's privacy warning screen.
Luckily, there is a simple way to let your copy of Chrome always trust your own SSL cert.
Please note: you'll want to view our previous blog post, on how to create a Self-Signed "SAN" Certificate, which is required for Chrome to auto-accept it.
As a developer, you often need to create a secure environment on a real server (not just localhost) while you test things out, prepare for demonstrations, etc. This blog post will go over how to create not just a self-signed certificate (which is free), but how to also configure it as a "SAN" or Subject Alternative Names certificate.
This so-called SAN certificate is important later, if we want to let our desktop Chrome automatically accept it and not show a privacy warning screen.
If you're used to using MySQL with PHP, you already know of the simple and easy to use functions like mysqli_query(), mysqli_fetch_object(), mysqli_affected_rows() and so forth. But, if you've ever gone to query from an Oracle database, you've no doubt noticed that Oracle's oci_* functions are much less pleasant.
So, I decided to create a set of functions similar to mysqli.
I'm thrilled and so proud to announce that my company, Liftoff Academics, been selected to exhibit at the world-famous EDUCAUSE annual conference! We were selected from applicants to their "Startup Alley" exhibitors program, which lets start up companies like us attend the biggest conference in Ed Tech.
