Spent a while trying to sort out SSL certificates for my websites as fed up of chrome reporting ‘not secure’ beside the address bar. (basically changing http to https for the web address) I didn’t know that SSL certificates can cost 40 quid upwards a year.
I’m with Tsohost. I followed a very simple guide here for installing a free SSL certificate that is fine for small sites without any e-commerce like mine – the free certificate is called ‘Let’s encrypt’ and can be installed from your tsohost control panel with a few clicks.
You can also check your site’s status at whynopadlock.com which has a really neat feature in the results bit for ‘force https’ – click on the more info bit of this and it gives you the code to copy/paste into your htaccess file to force all traffic directed at http to https for your site

Great little plugin to search and replace all my http://gcs3.co.uk addresses to https://www.gcs3.co.uk and make the site padlock friendly!

Top tip #1 – don’t turn off DHCP server on your draytek router then reboot it. I couldn’t connect to it and ended up factory resetting it and starting from scratch. All because I have setup a mesh wifi network that runs off a different subnet and I thought having 2 devices controlling DHCP was bad. Also sharp learning curve in setting up double NAT rules on draytek router and tp-link deco mesh.

Top tip #2 – check your router config backups work. I found out the hard way after the draytek factory reset when my recently saved config failed to restore……

Just had a drive die in my microserver and wasn’t sure which one it was

This was helpful! Drivebay numbering

Found a way to clear the extraction path history in winrar that had screwed up a little after i changed some drive mappings

Run the registry editor (start | run program | regedit) and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ WinRAR \ DialogEditHistory \ ExtrPath. Clear all the entries in here.

worked a treat

Great little tool from Nirsoft for recovering your network credentials

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/network_password_recovery.html

Managed to balls up an update of a plugin and was locked out of my wordpress install. Quick fix here

Maintenance Fix

I had to import ~250 contacts from an old Nokia phone into gmail – rather than have to add each separate one individually i used the guide here to merge them into one large .vcf file

http://www.techfleece.com/2013/09/13/how-to-import-multiple-vcards-vcf-files-into-gmail-or-outlook/

Neat little walkthrough here about how to get firestarter (and Kodi) onto your FireTV stick

Firestarter

Posting to your WP blog by email is cool and handy. Using the standard post by email setup isn’t, with the chance of ANYTHING sent to the designated email being automatically posted. Not cool. Here is how I sorted it with gmail….

Create a gmail address you want to use exclusively for posting content on your blog

Set up the filter to only accept email from a designated email address (See here about how to do this) This is truly clever.

Setup the Postie plugin in WordPress

Mail protocol – IMAP-SSL

Use TLS – NO

Port 993

Mail Server – imap.gmail.com

MailuserID – theaddressyoucreated@gmail.com

Mail password – whateveryousetaspassword

Delete mail after posting – YES