All posts in Nick’s Ramblings

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Nov

Our Website Stack: CDN Middleware - CloudFlare!

Categories: Software

Good evening readers, the week is drawing to a close and we are pretty happy with everything that has happened since launch. That said, into the nitty gritty of the next episode in my techie babble about what makes the Demon Archives run behind the scenes.

Do any of you use Reddit? There is a saying on Reddit that happens when they link to somebodies website. That saying is that the site was “Reddited” which means burned into a fiery cinder and left sobbing in the corner by the sheer onslaught of traffic. You see servers can only handle so much traffic before they just up and die on you, they start rejecting and failing to load, then if it gets to bad the server can destabilize and requires a reboot… this is nasty and is actually a technique used to attack people’s websites called DDOS (distributed denial of service). There are lots of ways to mitigate the benign onslaught of traffic, caching, speedier pages, multiple servers, content distribution networks, minifying, etc. Read more

Nov

Our Website Stack: Server Hosting - FireHost!

Categories: Software

Comments: 3

Selecting a hosting provider is always a tough call. For the majority of users perhaps a simple shared hosting like Dreamhost, Godaddy etc is good enough for the 50 page views a month that they expect. However when your goal is to share a story with the world, you cannot wake up one day and find yourself limited by your host.

For the longest time I have used Dreamhost.com as my host since November of 2009. They hosted all of my small project sites, as well as most of my client sites from when I did freelance web development. Their administration platform and One-click installs are truly top of the line, and for the cost per month they are right on the spot. To this day all of my legacy clients are still hosted on Dreamhost Virtual Private Servers and they love the fact that they can scale their usage on the fly when they expect big peaks in traffic. I would always give a glowing review to Dreamhost and recommend it heartily to people who have small to medium projects they want to test out… you can feel it can’t you? The gigantic “But” looming on the horizon… Read on to get your fill of “However” and “But”.

Nov

Our WebSite Stack: Introduction

Categories: Software

Tags: code, server setup

Comments: No

Hello all, this is Nick again. You may have noticed I often post code related stuff on my particular blog. We are working towards a better feed solution so that those of you who just hate reading my drivel can take me out of your feed completely. Until then though, you’ll just have to ignore the stuff as soon as you see it was posted by me.

Today I want to begin the little series where I talk about what has gone into making this project the success it has been, from a technological standpoint. I work my day job at Neudesic a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold ISV Partner, (thats a big deal in the Microsoft World), so I do code all day long every day, yet it still remains a passion of mine. What I am really passionate about is making a beautiful solution. And for me part of making a beautiful solution is making a hardware and resource economical solution. That is especially key for me, because the position that “throwing enough hardware at a problem will make it go away”, although viable, has led to some really disgusting frameworks floating around the world, and nobody likes working with crap.

I started my coding experience in the Open Source world of Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP… the every familiar LAMP stack. Besides being completely free on licensing costs, this server setup also has the benefit of being widely available at cheap low cost, and thus low power hosting providers. This gives you a lot of practice eeking out the best possible performance on a website on the least $/month. Luckily today that $/months is less of an issue so we are able to get a great hosting provider as a partner, and a robust setup to keep this comic running smoothly. We’ve also broken out of the tried and true and are employing some really interesting services and software solutions to keep ourselves competitive.

That said, over the course of the next few weeks and posts, I’ll outline what I decided on, how we’ve set it up and configured, and other such nonsense. This may not interest a lot of our readers, but for those who do care, here you will have it. And if we can server to help in any way with your setup we’d love to try.

Now goodbye hypothetical reader, I’ll post the next bit about Server Selection in a few moments.

Nov

Huge Chase Bank iPhone App Privacy Violation

Categories: Nick's Ramblings

Tags: chase bank, privacy violatio

Comments: 5

example of chase alerts for a non linked account

Hello all, first off let me be clear that this is not a security violation, nor a bug, vulnerability etc. I have been very very happy with this app on my iPhone for some time now, and the ability to instantly deposit checks is a huge kicker. If you don’t already have it I would highly recommend it… EXCEPT for one really big stinking privacy violation that they haven’t done anything about since I reported it to them over a month ago.

It took me a good 4 hours of my day to talk to various low level call center peoples, (all very respectful just incapable of understanding what I was trying to say), but I eventually talked to two of their mobility senior representatives and walked them through the steps to easily reproduce this issue.

In general, the issues is that if you install the Chase App on your iPhone, then uninstall it, then re-install and link a totally different account. You still get all of the alerts for the previous account!!! Even if you never link the previous account again to the new installation of the app. The toast notifications build up, you can see how much money, in what account, and where they are moving/spending that money… that is a HUGE deal. You can tell it is buggy because if you do log into the app with your new account, and navigate to the alerts section within the app, at least there they have some sanity check and it won’t show you the alerts for the previous account.

Nov

Oh the Beauty of Backups

Categories: Software

Comments: No

So, backups… lets talk about backups. More importantly, why you should have regular automatic backups, and if you don’t already then two easy ways to get them.

Bringing it back into the scope of this website, over the weekend I was working on a pretty cool enhancement to the comic reading flow of the website. We are aiming to make it easy, intuitive, and accessible to read the comic. We want keyboard shortcuts, easy to find next/prev/first/last buttons, and awesome bookmarking etc. The goal is for you to never lose your place and hate us when you try and find where you left off. Of course the real goal is that you check back every day several times since you love us so much, and thus never lose your place… but just in case you got hit by a car and couldn’t bribe your nurse in your hospital bed to help you, well, just for you then we’ve made it so easy to read.