Reserved Words

TechEd - Introduction to Windows Azure websites

-
azure cloud microsoft teched technology websites

I confess I haven’t kept up with the latest on Windows Azure websites, so attending the AZR212 session – Introduction to Windows Azure websites was well worth it. Some interesting things I learnt about the whole Azure platform for websites: It’s not just for .NET, you can run PHP and MySQL based apps if you wanted to There’s an App gallery for things like WordPress There will be a free offering even after the service goes live (general availability) It’s really easy to get started – write some c…

Read more

Storing passwords in a database? You’re doing it wrong

-
music security websites

It’s amazing that in this day and age there are still systems that store passwords in databases in clear text. Passwords should never be stored in a database, you should always store the result of a one-way encryption process known as a Hash (with some Salt!). If you store your users passwords in clear text in a database then you’re just asking for trouble. It’s only a matter of time before a disgruntled employee gets access and keeps a copy, or it gets compromised through other poor security pr…

Read more

LastPass – a review

-
lastpass music security websites

For many years I was accumulating username / password combinations for a ridiculous amount of websites. Often I would use the same basic password, or a semi-strong password on these sites. I was building a user account security debt. Then I read about LastPass and knew my problems had been solved. LastPass is a website that allows you to store securely a series of username / password combinations for the websites that you are a member of. So what? Well it has this neat browser plug-in that will…

Read more

How to migrate WordPress blog to a new hosting provider

-
blogging hosting music websites wordpress

I self-host WordPress rather than use a wordpress.com domain, but recently the hosting provider I was using was giving me performance grief. I was getting PHP execution timeouts when people tried to view my blog which is pretty poor. So I bit the bullet and found a new provider. The process for migrating was pretty simple and straight forward, here’s what I did: Took out a new web hosting account with a different provider – this provided me with a new website that I could address via an IP addre…

Read more