"This website is being recorded for quality assurance purposes" See the live analytics data from this website Rybbit.io is a privacy respecting website analysis platform that is free and open source to anyone willing to run it on their platform. At the moment, self hosting it gives you almost everything that the $13 a month tier does with the exception of the email related items (price list can be found here). It's exceptionally easy to get up and running, with a very intuitive and insightful display of information regarding how real users are interacting with your website. Since implementing rybbit on this site last week, I've seen traffic from 53 unique users from 11 different countries. Details you don't want to miss As I said above,...

Deprecation warning, read before proceeding! Note: This article was written in 2021. Some steps — particularly around synapse_port_db and password management — may be outdated for newer versions of Synapse. If you're running an older version of Matrix, this guide is for you, otherwise check the official Synapse docsfor the most current guidance. While getting a Matrix chat server up and running is a relatively easy and well documented task, managing and maintaining the server is somewhat nebulous as far as existing documentation is concerned. For example, when my wife asked me to reset her password on our server, I quickly realized that I had no idea how to do such a thing. After some digging around on the net, it became apparent that...

In order for a user to connect to a remote SSH server, the user needs the following three bits of data: A valid username The correct password The port SSH is configured to use on the remote server As a server admin, if you are able to obfuscate any of these three items your server becomes infinitely more secure from brute-force style attacks. While this style of attacks are generally for dummies, you'd be surprised by how often they are successful. Side node: most of the time the attacking IP addresses are from the other side of the planet (which is kind of neat). As an example, here is one of many IP addresses that was constantly attempting connections to the machine running this website. If you're worried that your machine is being...

Now that my degree is techinically done (more on that here), I had the free time to catch up on my project backlog. After the last site refactor utilizing PHP, I realized that I was in way too deep for the scope of this site. This is supposed to be a small personal website to write notes to myself and others, not something that needs to be overly complicated. Similar to the previous rework, I set up some goalposts for myself to work towards: Easy to write and update blog posts Written from scratch (mostly) "Just works" Looks and feels modern Keep page size and bloat to a minimum Instead of using a language like PHP that dynamically renders a markdown page each time a new page is accessed on the site, I realized that it would be much...