The ongoing conversation
A passing checksum tells you the backup file is the same file you created, but it doesn’t tell you the site can be restored from it. Take a fictional small-business website with a nightly database dump and a copy of its uploaded files. The dump finishes, the copy matches its checksum, and the dashboard turns […]
An urgent PHP security alert arrived on October 21, 2026. Working with Codex, I checked which of the sites I maintain were affected, then authorized the repairs for this website, Dayton Hash (DH4), its staging environment, and the Miami Valley Orienteering Club (MVOC). Those four website environments turned into five places to fix when I […]
A website rewrite can give its users a familiar screen and leave its next maintainer with an unfamiliar application. Someone still has to find the rule behind a wrong number, work out why a save failed, and make the next change without breaking the last one. That person belongs in the framework discussion. In the […]
When a server is nearly full, a directory called “old” starts to look helpful. It might contain something removable. Or it might contain the only copy of something we still need; the person who named it has left us an adjective, not a retention policy. In a shared-server cleanup last month, I set the preservation […]