Matthew Siemens

World Backup Day

Matthew Siemens — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:11:37 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, today March 31st is World Backup Day. In our increasingly digitized world, keeping your data safe and secure both professionally and personally becomes increasingly important!

Today I received an email from Host Gator with the following stats:

All hard drives will crash during their lifetime
More than 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen in their lifetime
A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds
Every year 46% of computer users lose their music, photos, and documents
50% of all hard drives will crash within 5 years
89.1% of PC users don’t perform regular backups
A recent study from Gartner, Inc., found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years.
70 percent of companies go out of business after a major data loss

If you are not regularly backing up your files please take the time to find and setup a backup solution. You can read a number of articles on how to backup your computer at WorldBackupDay.com.

Personally I use a mixture of Rsync and Rsnapshot to backup both my personal and business data. I love the amount of control I have over the backup process, and the fact that none of my data is stored in a proprietary format that locks me into one company or program.

If you aren’t backing up your website my consulting company MennoSites.ca can help you setup an automatic, easy to use solution.

Launch of New Gossen Insurance Website

Matthew Siemens — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:54:47 +0000

I just helped launch a new website for Gossen Insurance through my WordPress consulting business MennoSites.ca. You can read more about some of the new features of the site on our Menno Sites Blog.

Using Trickle to Control Bandwidth Use in Any Program

Matthew Siemens — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 02:05:14 +0000

There are a number of reasons why you would want to control how much bandwidth any given program is able to use. This can be done in a couple different ways, including options right with in the software, or through a software or hardware firewall. A great little program for managing bandwidth use is Trickle. Trickle runs completely in userspace, which means we don’t need to mess with a firewall, or even need root access.

If you’re on Ubuntu/Debian you should be able to install Trickle using

sudo apt-get install trickle

Now that you’ve got Trickle installed just use it before any network command to limit its bandwidth. Quite self-explanatory -u specifies upload and -d download.

trickle -u 25 -d 100 myCommand

The reason I first started using Trickle was so I could use Rsync and SCP to copy/backup files on my computer without negatively affecting the speed of my Internet connection. I have a fairly limited upload speed and this is an example of how I would limit the upload speed to 100 KB/s when backup up a folder with Rsync. Please note that when using Trickle with Rsync you have to use the -e option.

trickle -a -e "trickle -u 100 ssh" myFiles matthew@example.com:/home/matthew/backups/

It is even easier using Trickle with SCP where all you would need to do is use:

trickle -u 100 scp myFile.zip matthew@example.com:/home/matthew/backups/

Simplifying Managing Your SSH Connections by Using an SSH Config File

Matthew Siemens — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:27:21 +0000

I’ve been using Linux as my primary operating system for over five years, and spent a good deal of time with it before that time. It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve really begun to explore and enjoy working from the Linux/Unix command line. It’s greatly simplified my work flow when it comes to many tasks, and it seems I spend the majority of my time either in a command line or web browser now a days. Now that nearly 100% of the time when I’m working on a remote system, whether it is a server, Linux/Unix PC, or networking equipment, I’m usually connecting with SSH.

SSH is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used for everything from remote terminal access, to running entire graphical programs over a network. For me though remembering and having to type in all the IP Addresses, DNS Names, usernames and port numbers for all the SSH connections I use daily can be a real pain. That’s why setting up your own SSH config file can save huge amounts of time and effort in your day-to-day work.

This tutorial will be much easier to follow if you have a basic understanding of how to use SSH.
The steps in this tutorial were performed on Ubuntu 11.10. You may need to modify some steps depending on what system you are running.

GUI Version

1. Open Gedit (or your editor of your choice)
2. Click File->Save
Go to your home folder, and display hidden files by hitting CTRL+H on your keyboard.
Open the .ssh folder and save your new file as config

Command Line Version

1. First open up the terminal on your Linux/Unix based system.
2. Use vi (or any editor of your choice)

vi ~/.ssh/config

3. There are many options that you can set in a config file, but we will go over the settings that I usually use. Here’s an example:

Host myServer

HostName example.com
User root
Port 222

Host myDesktop

Hostname 192.168.1.100

This example shows two different SSH connections and their different options. The first is an example server that we want to connect to at example.com, with the username root, and where the SSH service is running on the non-standard port 222. The second is an example of a computer on your local network. As you can see we used a local IP address instead of a DNS name, also we didn’t bother setting a port number since it is running on the standard port 22. Also because in this example I’m assuming your connecting from another computer you own at the location there is no username set since I’m assuming you are using the same username on both computers you’re using for the connection.

4. Other options that I often use would be ServerAliveInterval, and ServerAliveCountMax.

Host myServer

HostName example.com
User root
Port 222
ServerAliveInterval 30
ServerAliveCountMax 120

Host myDesktop

Hostname 192.168.1.100
ServerAliveInterval 30
ServerAliveCountMax 120

This example would keep your SSH connection live for an hour by refreshing the connection every 30 seconds. This can be handy if you don’t want to be logged out every time you step away from your keyboard.

With your new SSH Config file instead of having to type in:

ssh -p 222 root@example.com

You can just use:

ssh myServer

Hope this little trick saves you as much time as it has saved me.

This post is cross posted from MennoSites.ca

Fix VIM in Ubuntu

Matthew Siemens — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:45:49 +0000

An issue that I’ve noticed over the last couple releases of Ubuntu is that the “tiny” version of VIM is installed by default. This for me has always been a big issue, as a number of the controls in the regular VIM don’t work in the “tiny” version. Luckily for us though, this is a very easy and quick fix.
Just install the vim-gtk package using apt-get.

sudo apt-get install vim-gtk

You’ll now have the full version of VIM, as well as the GUI version.

This post is cross posted from MennoSites.ca

Running RSYNC on a non-standard port

Matthew Siemens — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:18:36 +0000

When it comes to using and managing Linux/Unix based systems RSYNC has consistently proven itself a lifesaver for me. It is by far the easiest, safest, and most reliable way to copy, sync, and backup files. I’ve even started using it on Windows machines with Cygwin when I need a good way to transfer large amounts of data between drives. Now when using RSYNC to backup computers across networks I often come across situations where SSH is running on a non-standard port, something other than Port 22, and I need to figure out a way to let RSYNC know what port to run on.

Now when you’re just logging in with SSH it is as easy as using:

ssh -p 2222 matthew@192.168.1.10

instead of:

ssh matthew@192.168.1.10

and with SCP all you need to use is:

scp -P 2222 matthew@192.168.1.10:/remoteFiles /home/matthew/localFolder/

instead of:

scp matthew@192.168.1.10:/remoteFiles /home/matthew/localFolder/

When you are using RSYNC though things are a bit different. You need to use the -e parameter like this:

rsync -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" matthew@192.168.1.10:/remoteFiles /home/matthew/localFolder/

Just like that you can run RSYNC on whatever port you need to get the job done. If you’ve never heard of RSYNC or aren’t using it and do any type of work involving file transfers/backups I highly recommend you check it out!

This post is cross posted from MennoSites.ca

Use Custom Footer Across Multiple Genesis Themes in WordPress MultiSite

Matthew Siemens — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:39:34 +0000

I’ve recently helped launch a number of projects that use WordPress MultiSite heavily, including MennoSites.ca and OurTownSite.ca. This post outlines how to quickly and easily setup a simple WordPress plugin to let you add the same custom footer to every Genesis Theme in your WordPress MultiSite install.

I’ve used a number of Theme suppliers working with WordPress over the years. Lately I’ve begun using Themes based on the Genesis Framework almost exclusively. When I started working with Genesis I took a look around to see what was the best way to change the Theme footer and include my own content.
I found this code snippet on the StudioPress site that does exactly what I wanted.

I found this code snippet on the StudioPress site that does exactly what I wanted.

/** Customize the credits */
add_filter('genesis_footer_creds_text', 'custom_footer_creds_text');
function custom_footer_creds_text($creds) {
    $creds = 'Copyright © · My Custom Link · Built on the Genesis Framework';
    return $creds;
}

If you copy and paste this code into your Child Themes function file, you can quickly and easily modify the Themes footer.

I wanted to make a few changes to customize the footer for MennoSites.ca. I wanted to display a copyright notice for the current website, a link to the main MennoSites.ca site and a link to the WordPress Administration area for the current site. I used the PHP date function to display the current year for the copyright notice. Than I used the WordPress site_url() function and the WordPress variable $blog_title together create a link to with the name of the current site and its address for the copyright notice. After that I simply hard-coded a link to MennoSites. Finally I used the WordPress site_url() function one last time to create a link to the current sites WordPress Administration Section.
You can see the code snippet I’m using below.

/** Customize the credits */
add_filter('genesis_footer_creds_text', 'custom_footer_creds_text');
function custom_footer_creds_text($creds) {
    $blog_title = get_bloginfo();
    $creds = 'Copyright © '.date(Y).' · '.$blog_title.' · Part of the MennoSites.ca Network · Website Admin';
    return $creds;
}

This snippet is in use on MennoSites.ca and you can actually see it being used at the bottom of this page. Using date(Y),.site_url,$blog_title means that our copyright information is always up to date, and that this snippet will work on any WordPress Site using a Genesis Theme without any other modifications. The snippet will always display the correct links for whatever site it is added too.

On MennoSites.ca we have dozens of Genesis Themes available, instead of adding this snippet to the functions.php file of every theme I wanted to have one location where I could add this snippet and modify it in the future. Using the extensible power of WordPress I created a simple plugin to do exactly that.

To do the same thing, just create a file called easy-genesis-footer.php and open it with your favourite editor. Now add the following code to your file.

Now just add the code snippet from above so that your file looks like this.

'.$blog_title.' · Part of the MennoSites.ca Network · Website Admin';
    return $creds;
}
?>

Just remove the link to MennoSites.ca and replace it with a link to your own website. On your web host create a folder called mu-plugins inside wp-content if one doesn’t already exist and upload the file you created to it. This will force the plugin to be enabled across your WordPress MultiSite network, and will update and display your new footer automatically. Please only use this plugin if you are only using Genesis Themes on your MultiSite setup, or you might run into some issues.

I hope this information was helpful, I know it’s saved me from modifying dozens of functions.php files every time I want to make a change to the footer.

Upcoming Projects [OurTownSite.ca]

Matthew Siemens — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:29:59 +0000

Hi everyone,

I’m very excited about the next few months. A friend of mine Nathan Funk, and myself have been hard at work on what we hope will be a big hit with local municipal governments. OurTownSite.ca is a CMS based on wordpress with tons of premium themes, and plugins, that has been specially design to provide the best possible web hosting/management package for municipal governments. We did in-depth research before we began working on the project and noticed that there was a very noticeable difference in quality of municipal websites in the Saskatchewan area. There are some very nice websites, with plenty of current content and lots of nice features. Unfortunately there are also plenty of sites that are years out of date with their content, and layout. I had previously worked with the Town of Waldheim and the RM of Laird #404, on their websites and believed that the work I’d done for them could be greatly improved with a unified system that allowed us to build and implement plugins and features for not just one website but for an entire network all at the same time. This wills speed up development of new features as well as simplify maintenance and backup of these sites, with the added bonus of making it cheaper on a per site basis for the client. A few months later OurTownSite.ca is ready to go and we’ll begin marketing the product starting in January 2012. We’re very positive about the project and can’t wait to begin developing and adding even more great features and services to an already great product.