Web 
feeling super productive
Since August, I have been updating my digital life, which began with organizing my digital collection of books. I had never truly looked too indepth at Calibre before August 2025, but I am clearly blown away at its capabilities. I feel a bit awkward keeping the library on my desktop computer, but I have a script to periodically backup my home folde…
Additional insight into collaborative editors
I think I had it all wrong when I accused OnlyOffice of sending data to the Russian goverment. This architectural design is called WOPI and was created for web applications that want to integrate with Microsoft Office. That means the architecture was really designed for the CIA to intercept a target's documents saved to Office 365.Read more → Vibe coding is supposedly going to replace actual programmers. I can’t wait for it to go away. Robots have a terrible way of doing things, and they are not very good at writing code. That, however, has not kept me from regularly dabbling with ChatGPT and code generation. Programming is my hobby - not my livelihood. So when it comes to solvin… I have a few frustrations with Google Docs. It has gotten slow over the years. There is now a sudden push to migrate to Google Workspaces, which is something I do not want to do. There a few routes I can go in an endeavor to switch away from Google Docs. Dear Google, I want a functioning product that is fast. That means I do not want to participate in your “simulate slowness experiments.” I use your product because I think it is good. You do not have to annoy me about trying your new Google workspace. If I want to try it, I will try it. When I dismiss your notifications, it means I ha… I have delayed switching away from Wordpress on my personal blog to something different for quite some time. I liked the new idea of a flat-file static html concept, but Jekyll did not appeal to me. Then, Hugo appeared on the scene and appeared to take the rightful place as the cool kid on the block. Hugo has a simple concept and drew my interest f… I recently switched my home setup from nginx to traefik. I had to get used to the new configuration styles and weird doc style of traefik, but suffice to say, I am happy at the end results. Traefik ships with SNI, allowing me to snoop the connection and prevent unauthorized access to my file server. (One m… As a step further to my previous post, I have created a boilerplate for future WordPress projects. It can be accessed at https://github.com/andrewwippler/WordPress-Containerization-Boilerplate. To quickly start a WordPress environment, simp… WordPress is amazingly popular considering how antiquated the file structure and code appears to be. Even still, it is the easiest CMS that I have used and the community has created plugins to make the copy-folder-for-a-new-theme/plugin at least tolerable. A challenge comes when one wants to use the 1990's method of serving web applications in a mo… A repository is a place where files are stored, indexed, and available through a package manager to anyone who has the repository information. With There are several factors that go into securing a web application. Most are second nature to seasoned system administrators, but it is still too common to talk to someone who does not know how to properly secure a web application. Here is the common checklist I go through when I determine if a website is secured. I am a SysAdmin who likes to code. I would say I know a fair amount of web developing, but do not understand it like a web developer uunderstands it. I think the reverse is true as well - web developers know how to set up a LAMP/LAMP stack, but they do not understand it as well as SysAdmin might understand it. To be a successful SysAdmin, yo… A few years ago I was tasked at looking at solutions for digital, static wayfinding. While there are some cool solutions available now for free with minimum setup, none of these were available to me. We currently were locked in with a digital signage company that charged $7,000/year for generating 640x480 graphics with events that showed up in our … A stack is a group of software that creates a foundation to build upon. The LEMP stack is a web software stack which allows for delivering web applications. It is one of the most common of the web stacks to deliver a PHP application. LEMP uses a Linux kernel, Nginx for the webserver, MySQL or MariaDB for the database, and PHP for the scripting lang… In a fictitious world where I started my own company and developed a LEMP-stack chat application, this is how I would do it in 2016: I would use WebSockets as the protocol in which data is being sent to and from the server. WebSockets has built-in support by nginx (since version 1.3). For caching, I would use the As an IT worker, I have to re-learn my position every 3 years. This is due to the fact that Microsoft releases a new version (of their Server software, Exchange, office suite, etc.), or there has been a technology shift from one Linux specialty to another. To combat this change and to stay ahead of the technology bubble, I have to be self-mo… After I played with oVirt I needed to do several items: This… For quite some time I have heard that Hyper-V was a low player when it came to virtualization. It came with Windows and was the hypervisor of choice, but it had its limitations. In my environment, we had local storage and no clustering of hosts and consequently no high availability or fail over. This brought the first pain point - we need high avai… While Open Source software is free to download, use, and depending on the license, free to distribute, it is not free to creator. The Open Source creators have to pay for hosting, branding (domain, etc.), coding (in time), and distribution. While some are offloading the costs by hosting the project on Open Source aware distribution channels such as… I have completed the migration of my blog to Wordpress. The reasons for the change are very simple: Named virtual hosts are not enabled by default on an Amazon AMI. To enable them, edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and uncomment line 991: You can then begin adding your named virtual hosts in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory. Below is an example o…Only Office for personal use
Word processor to replace Google Docs
The problem
An open letter to Google
Goodbye Wordpress
From nginx to traefik (and solving X-Forwarded-For)
WordPress Containerization Boilerplate
Docker-izing WordPress for Kubernetes
Using Puppet to host a private RPM repository
rpm based systems, a repository is created with a tool called createrepo. Most of the time, publicly available repositories already offer the packages your server needs. When y…Website protection
Common problems with Web Developers configuring LAMP/LEMP
Wayfinding with RPi
Linux, nginx, MySQL 5.7, and PHP 7 (LEMP) on AWS with free SSL
High performant chat application
expires max; fu…To-do for 2016
Planning the Deployment of oVirt
Migrate the oVirt Engine to a new host
Switching from Hyper-V to oVirt
Paying for Open Source
Switching to Wordpress
Named Virtual Hosts on AWS EC2
NameVirtualHost *:80