Category: Technology

Technology posts.

HTMLy simple comment system

If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
After moving to HTMLy, I missed a local commenting system. My needings are basic: I just need a very simple one, possibly based on flat files, not relying on external commenting systems. HTMLy only choices were Facebook and Diqus, none local. So I decided to write one for myself, ending in a slightly modified HTMLy 3.3.1 version.

Ovi HTMLy Theme

After (finally) choosing HTMLy as CMS and Occasio as theme, I started playing around with the layout to adapt it to my taste. Created a new Ovi theme from Occasio, and started modyfying it. Not much work, just some fix around with CSS to set round corners, changed the banner images position, added some trick to handle my previous content the way I liked.

Moving to HTMLy

Time to move away from my previous CMS. Joomla is getting more and more commercial, open source plugins start lacking (other than the "free" underpowered version of commercial ones) and I'm getting sick to update the template I was actually using (Purity III) to match the new Joomla version, to find out there are many little things to be fixed and changed.

JComments with GDPR compliance

Starting from 25 May 2018 websites with EU users have to be GDPR compliant. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) intention is to make users aware of what a website is asking them to share as personal data and the use the site is going to do with their data. Looks good, but for small no profit sites and blogs that's a real pain. Most of authors don't have any idea about how to implement compliance and what really GDPR is asking them. Cookies (those small pieces of information the site store

VMWare VSphere 5.x/6.x - Ghetto VCB and SMTP firewall rule

Recently I've been asked to setup some VMWare VSphere servers (free edition) implementing some kind of backup of the virtual machines on a secondary server. The choice for secondary server was Openfiler - compared to FreeNAS (I tested both) looked definitively more robust and stable. I configured all VMWare hosts had a secondary storage (NFS) mounted from Openfiler, to easily perform backups on the Openfiler storage. Setting up the backup scripts was quite easy - you just need to google around

Site update

After Joomla 2.5 being released (on January the 24th, 2012 - see article) I looked forward to update this site to the new release. It was stuck at 1.7, and I just liked to test and have a look at the new version. I though in a few days I had the site online using the new code, but I was terribly wrong. I jumped right into the plugin and extensions updates, not mentioning I modified the source code in some point to correct some small bug. So, after a first compulsive update of the code

Curl on PHP/Apache/Win7 (64bit)

I recently  updated my hardware at the office, and i switched from Win7 32bit to Win7 64bit. Almost everything worked fine in the new environment, other than a small/big problem with the curl library in my PHP/Apache installation. The configuration was fine - I was pretty sure I followed all the necessary steps to make it works: enable it in php.ini by removing the leading semicolon in "; php_curl.dll", copying libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll in windows/system32 directory (or somewhere else