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Blog Refinements

I have just spent the weekend upgrading my network infrastructure and finalizing some changes in the blog. Having learned a lot from reading other blogs and expecting this to be helpful for people visiting this site this is the list of the main changes.

• Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3: This have been a surprisingly smooth upgrade. I only had minor problems with UTF-8 conversion (I had to disable the line define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8') from the configuration file). It seems that with this new Wordpress version, categories are going to be deprecated in favor of Tag Clouds. I have yet to convert my post database to tags
• Feed Icons: I am using now what is supposed to be the standard for RSS icons
• Email subscription: Thanks to FeedBurner now you can subscribe to this blog via email. If you are not using a Feed Reader, please use this method instead of bookmarking
• W3C Validation: Now, the XHTML and CSS of this blog are fully validated by the W3C tests. I use a simple text editor to modify the HTML and CSS, so there were lots of errors. After a lot of minor changes (like eliminating warnings in C++), the blog passes all the tests becoming a more standard blog and, supposedly, more friendly to bots navigating through my rumblings
• Amazon book links: I do not like putting ad in my blog (and you probably won’t ever see any), but now book links pass though my Amazon account (I receive a small percentage if you buy using that link). It is a non-intrusive modification so I expect you don’t care about it
• Wordpress plugins updated: I have updated and added new Wordpress plugins. This is the list of plugins I am using:
  • Askimet to combat the spam. 95% of the comments I receive are spam
  • All in One SEO Pack. Meta information, that invisible information that only bots can read, is important. This plugin gives you control over the generated metadata
  • Counterize for tracking internal visitor stats
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith to get feed usage stats. FeedBurner have been bought by Google and now all the pro services are free
  • Subscribe To Comments. This is a very interesting plugin that is increasing the number of comments in the blog. It allows email subscription to posts where you contribute
  • Ultimate Google Analytics to collect info for the Google Service Analytics
  • WP-PostViews for getting visit stats for each post
  • WP-UserOnline. An online users counter

Comments are welcome, thanks for reading.

Fon Community

My host is joining the Fon Movement, a free WiFi community oriented towards sharing home internet connections to the world. Sharing your connection allows you to use any Fon node in the world for free.

There are already lots of nodes around the globe. You can check your neighborhood here.

What really impressed me is that they are selling is FON Social Router (La Fonera) for just 5 €/$. A 802.11g router with a linux 2.4.0 inside! I couldn’t resist such a bargain.

If you live in Spain, like me, Pc Actual is offering the router, 400 skypeout minutes, skype starter kit and a guide of Pc Tricks in this page.

And now, waiting for it…

10 Security Guidelines to protect your server box in Internet

I’m not an expert system administrator, but it is one of my hobbies. I describe here a checklist of things I have learned playing with my linux box (the one I use for my blog) in the last years. Although the guidelines are generic to any Operating System the examples given are specific for Gentoo Linux. I expect to help anyone configuring a secure server.

Click to read the full article

Running your own server (@home)

I wanted to start a topic (the first on Linux, I promise more on this) about the hardware machine where this blog is hosted: a machine installed in one corner of my living room. I bought the box to be the server for all my machines at home (personal computer, media center, videogame consoles, ip camera, fileserver…). Being network security one of my hobbies I am always playing with security tools. That is one of the reasons why I decided to host this blog in my home server: to play with a new toy.

In the past, whenever I installed a linux distribution (SUSE most of the times) I always finished mutating it to my own distribution due to the fact that these clasic distributions evolve too slow. This was frustrating and time consuming for me because I had to mantain lot of packages and some big changes (gcc, glibc) could break the system. When I was starting to build my own personal distribution (based on Linux From Scratch) I discovered Gentoo. Gentoo Linux is the perfect distribution to me. It is based on source (every package you install must be compiled) and it is continuously evolving like an organic system.

This is the current hardware configuration for my Linux Box:

• Shuttle Barebone ST62k
• Pentum IV Celeron 2.4Ghz 1Gb Ram
• Crystalfontz CFA-631 LCD Module

I have an internet connection with a dynamic IP. To be always accessible I’m using the services from DynDNS.

And that is enough for today, my next article on this topic will be about tips & tricks on security to avoid to be owned.

delicious!

I discovered del.icio.us months ago and now I can’t live without it. It allows you to store your bookmarks online, so you can access them from everywhere (work, home, travelling…)

Even you have a plugin for Firefox, so you can use del.icio.us as a traditional bookmark.

The idea is simple, but very powerful.

RSS revolution

Without a doubt RSS is making a revolution in internet. Previously to discovering this, I spent a precious time navigating through my daily tour of webpages. Now, in the same time I can get more information (or the same information than before in a few seconds )

Everybody seems to be contributing to this revolution. Being a feature of blogs in the past now you can get rss feed from a lot of popular pages. Even Microsoft is proposing its own extension. You know, it’s Microsoft.

If you are curious, these are my currents feeds.

Currently I’m using BlogLines. It is a web reader, so you can safely read your news at work, home, travelling… Other popular web readers are Feedster and Google Reader (in beta).

So, what are you waiting to start feeding from here?

FireFox 1.5 available

Firefox 1.5 is available now to download. Here you can read a detailed list of the things that have changed since the last release. I specially like the option to report a broken website.

Having been browsing for about an hour, I can say this version seems to be running faster and smoother than before.

If you don’t know it, google is firmly supporting firefox. Even they will pay you if you promote it.

People at www.spreadfirefox.com is preparing a big marketing campaign this time.