Matt Zaske Online Blog

Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Creating a Finished Product

• February 14, 2022
• 9 minutes
• inspiration, tech, website

 In the last post I wrote about the process of creating the layout and the challenges through the content conversion and basic layout stages.

Moving an Old Website to Github Pages: Getting Started

• January 31, 2022
• 11 minutes
• inspiration, tech, website

Nearly 25 years ago I spun up a website featuring transcriptions of Monty Python material collected from college students in the 1980s. I don't remember how I came across the archive of these text files, but I still have the originals in part of my personal digital archive. Around the year 2000 I moved the website (and subsequently added more content) into a Wiki system (TWiki, to be exact).

Drupal Site Improvements and other Housekeeping

• January 17, 2022
• 8 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, tech, website

On the heels of (and riding the wave following) my recent migration of Drupal to a new server host, I decided it was well past time to finally address some things with my Drupal instance that were been bugging me for a long time.

Moving a Legacy Drupal Stack to a New Server Host

• January 03, 2022
• 10 minutes
• drupal, inspiration, php, security, sql, tech, website

One of my "end of 2021 break" projects was a planned "lift and shift" of my primary Drupal instance to a fresh, sparkly new web host stack. The stack on which it resided was reaching end of life and for a few other reasons it was time to make the change. In preparation, over the last year or so I've been de-coupling and untangling some of the baggage that had accumulated on the old server and its structure over time.

Reconciling Disparate Datasets

• December 06, 2021
• 8 minutes
• inspiration, php, tech

A few weeks ago I was asked to help update a centralized inventory dataset, which to us is definitely a "tertiary" system. Several hundred device records were associated with our part of the organization, and every time I opened the list I quickly "noped" out of doing anything with it. But the time came when I needed to actually do something with it lest I wind up on someone's naughty list.

DMARC: Time to Evaluate Reports

• November 22, 2021
• 6 minutes
• inspiration, security, tech

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about my first foray into implementing DMARC controls. Specific to domains through which email was not intended to be sent, it was the beginning of my DMARC adventure and expansion into some 35-ish domains.

This became its own series of posts with time:

Date Math is Gross

• November 08, 2021
• 3 minutes
• automation, mistakes, php, tech

This year, I'm working with/mentoring a paid intern on a device monitoring project for a portion of our fleet. These sort of projects are always fun and meaningful in that we identify a problem or opportunity to improve, and then solve said problem in a way we've not done before.

Implementing Certificate Authority Authorization

• October 25, 2021
• 4 minutes
• automation, certbot, inspiration, security, tech

During the foray into fixing up the Let's Encrypt root certificate expiration bits for my affected bot host, while using the helpful SSL Server Test tool, I discovered the "new" (not really new) Certificate Authority Aut

Keeping the Wireless On - Script the Reconnect

• October 11, 2021
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, powershell, tech

In our classroom fleet, almost all devices are wireless-only for their network access. This as a design is great for mobility and flexibility and the user experience but presents its own set of very unique challenges on the technical side. At various times and for a wide range of reasons, we encounter the situation where devices "lose" their wireless/Wi-Fi connection.

Breaking the Chain: An Edge Case of Let's Encrypt Root Certificate Expiration

• September 27, 2021
• 6 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

It's been written about and announced for some time—the forthcoming expiration of the DST Root CA X3 certificate. The good news for most folks is that it's not a big deal. And that, I thought, also included me. For the most part, this has panned out to be true.

A DMARC Follow-Up: Nine Months In

• September 13, 2021
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, security, tech

It's been a full nine months since I first wrote about implementing DMARC controls, and over six months since I last wrote about fiddling with DMARC settings, so it's time to provide another quick update.

Undo the Undo -- A Short Tale of a Git Mistake

• August 23, 2021
• 3 minutes
• mistakes, tech

I had one of those "Oh shit, Git!" moments this past weekend...

Mine was that I made a necessary change, and since it was pretty minor (really a typo fix of sorts) I just went ahead and did it in the main branch. NBD. Commit, push, and pull on the remote host, and all is good.

Whoops! Cleaning up Mistakes via API

• August 09, 2021
• 5 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, php, tech

Posting again after kind of a lengthy break. It's summertime, and for lots of disparate reasons I've queued up topics but haven't had the ambition or taken the time to write them all out. So today we get a tale of automation mistakes and the subsequent cleanup.

Reinstalling reCAPTCHA

• June 21, 2021
• 2 minutes
• automation, drupal, mistakes, security, tech, website

In the last post I wrote about finally cutting off the comments feature due to an abundance of spam.

For about two days, this was successful...

Comments No More

• June 07, 2021
• 2 minutes
• drupal, mistakes, tech, website

Well, the time has come...to shut down post comments. Presumably for good.

Cleaning Up Old Mistakes Part Deux: Leveraging Includes

• May 10, 2021
• 4 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

This post is the second of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part one discusses cleaning up Git repos based on permissions faux pas.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Using centralized/standard "includes" for path variables and eliminating passwords from committed code.

Cleaning Up Old Mistakes: Git Repos With Nested Accounts

• April 26, 2021
• 6 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, tech

This post is the first of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part Deux is also available.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Git repos used in production in which nested/disparate accounts run code.

A Twitter Bot for Dad Jokes

• April 12, 2021
• 5 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech

About a month ago, I discovered this gem of a tweet:

TIL fatherhood dot gov has a dad joke API pic.twitter.com/fZi4rRSQS8

My Personal Git Cheat Sheet

• March 29, 2021
• 3 minutes
• inspiration, tech

I've used a number of various Git cheatsheets over the years, usually duing a moment of "how do I do __ again?" and sometimes during a moment of panic like "Shit! Undo that commit!"

Recently, I (finally) "removed my training wheels" and uninstalled the UI client I had for Git, for two reasons:

Git-ting the hang of Hooks

• March 15, 2021
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, tech

Several months ago I made the decision to finally use Git to manage a more complex "legacy" web application project that I inherited over a decade ago and continue to maintain. Years ago when migrating the web application to a new hosting stack, I ported the development/test and production sites into their own Git repositories.

Signing Git Commits: Chasing the "Verified" Stamp

• March 01, 2021
• 6 minutes
• inspiration, tech

I've been working on projects lately that actually involve writing more code than I have in a while...and so I'm using Git/GitHub with greater frequency than I have in some time.

Implementing DMARC: Adjusting SPF Records

• February 15, 2021
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, security, tech

It's been a couple of months since I last wrote about implementing DMARC and what comes next (review and adjustment). So I figured this would be a good time to document a few changes I've made based on the reporting data received so far.

2020: An Energy Year in Review

• February 08, 2021
• 6 minutes
• finance, inspiration, lifestyle, personal

Now that I've had a chance to really look at the data from our 2020 electric use, in a modified format from what I've written about before, I thought I'd wrap up with an overview of our overall electric use during a most unusual year.

My First Twitter Bot: A Journey into Twitter's API

• February 01, 2021
• 7 minutes
• automation, bots, inspiration, php, tech

Sometime around Thanksgiving/November 2020, I formalized the idea that I would actually build a Twitter bot for the sake of novelty and as an experiment/learning exercise. One night at suppertime, we discussed what might be cool as a bot and those ideas are still on the list as possibilities for the future.

Exporting Legacy/Archival Emails with Google Apps

• January 18, 2021
• 4 minutes
• automation, inspiration, tech

At work, we've had a number of folks retire over the last 18 months, and a number of those folks are holders of some significant institutional knowledge and memories. Recently I had the opportunity to work with one of these individuals as they prepared to both hand off information to others, which led me to recall several conversations I've had with my Libraries/archives friends about preserving the "right" subsets of digital messages such as email.