Presentation for Triangle Drupal User's Group on March 17, 2010. Includes discussion of why version control is a good idea, how to deal with special Drupal issues (updating modules, core) and how to set up your file structure.
Presentation for Triangle Drupal User's Group on March 17, 2010. Includes discussion of why version control is a good idea, how to deal with special Drupal issues (updating modules, core) and how to set up your file structure.
With so many tools to help you with time management & team communication it’s hard to know which is the best fit for you and your team. I’ll share some of the tools that worked well and others that did not work so well.
Preparing For The Flood. How Do You Conduct Load Testing To Ready Your WordPr...WordCamp Sydney
So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.
Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.
What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…
When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.
The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.
But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.
Key Take-Away
============
This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.
Presented by Robert Li at WordCamp Sydney 2019
How to fix access “cannot open database” errortaylor8806
I have also cited in preceding editorial that when we contract with PC and where vital data is main anxiety, corruption occurs if we abandon minor issues with or without information. No system file is resistant to data damage.
More Aim, Less Blame: How to use postmortems to turn failures into something ...Daniel Kanchev
Mistakes and failure are inevitable. Instead of being afraid of them, we should use them as lessons that help identify weak points in our organisations and systems. One way to do this is by writing blameless postmortems. Daniel details exactly how postmortems can help organizations and teams focus on improvement, and how that boosts work morale, makes products better, and strengthens your relationship with customers.
February 2017 HUG: Slow, Stuck, or Runaway Apps? Learn How to Quickly Fix Pro...Yahoo Developer Network
Spark and SQL-on-Hadoop have made it easier than ever for enterprises to create or migrate apps to the big data stack. Thousands of apps are being generated every day in the form of ETL and modeling pipelines, business intelligence and data cubes, deep machine learning, graph analytics, and real-time data streaming. However, the task of reliably operationalizing these big data apps involves many painpoints. Developers may not have the experience in distributed systems to tune apps for efficiency and performance. Diagnosing failures or unpredictable performance of apps can be a laborious process that involves multiple people. Apps may get stuck or steal resources and cause mission-critical apps to miss SLAs.
This talk with introduce the audience to these problems and their common causes. We will also demonstrate how to find and fix these problems quickly, as well as prevent such problems from happening in the first place.
Speakers:
Dr. Shivnath Babu is a Co-founder and CTO of Unravel and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. With more than a decade of experience researching the ease of use and manageability of data-intensive systems, he leads the Starfish project at Duke, which pioneered the automation of Hadoop application tuning, problem diagnosis, and resource management. Shivnath has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications to his credit and has received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the HP Labs Innovation Award, and three IBM Faculty Awards.
Launching websites is hard, 60% of websites fail to launch on time.
The Pantheon Launch Team launches several large enterprise sites every week, and supports hundreds of self-serve customers daily. They have helped marketing teams launch hundreds of sites and they have seen it all.
Learn their secrets to success.
My Futuristic Vision of the Future of Cassandra's Future - NGCC 2015gdusbabek
These are the changes that would enable others to use Cassandra as a platform for building new distributed systems. Oh, and did I mention these changes would also make Cassandra more stable, testable and allow us to deliver features sooner?
YESSSSS. All that and more.
Observability for Emerging Infra (what got you here won't get you there)Charity Majors
Distributed systems, microservices, containers and schedulers, polyglot persistence .. modern infrastructure patterns are fluid and dynamic, chaotic and transient. So why are we still using LAMP-stack era tools to debug and monitor them? We'll cover some of the many shortcomings of traditional metrics and logs (and APM tools backed by metrics or logs), and show how complexity is their kryptonite. So how do we handle the coming complexity Armageddon? What are the implications for teams and roles and the way we build and ship software? Let's talk about the industry-wide shifts underway from metrics to events, from monitoring to observability, and from caring about the system as whole to the health of each and every request.
You don't deploy a single microservice. The journey to microservice architecture involves more than how code is written or applications are packaged. It's about creating an interconnected ecosystem that keeps things running. Infrastructure and tools have only grown in importance as microservices have emerged as a dominant architecture pattern. Deploying, scaling, and monitoring are more important for microservices than they ever were before. Attendees will leave this session knowing the basic infrastructure and tooling needs for microservices to be successful.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
With so many tools to help you with time management & team communication it’s hard to know which is the best fit for you and your team. I’ll share some of the tools that worked well and others that did not work so well.
Preparing For The Flood. How Do You Conduct Load Testing To Ready Your WordPr...WordCamp Sydney
So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.
Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.
What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…
When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.
The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.
But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.
Key Take-Away
============
This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.
Presented by Robert Li at WordCamp Sydney 2019
How to fix access “cannot open database” errortaylor8806
I have also cited in preceding editorial that when we contract with PC and where vital data is main anxiety, corruption occurs if we abandon minor issues with or without information. No system file is resistant to data damage.
More Aim, Less Blame: How to use postmortems to turn failures into something ...Daniel Kanchev
Mistakes and failure are inevitable. Instead of being afraid of them, we should use them as lessons that help identify weak points in our organisations and systems. One way to do this is by writing blameless postmortems. Daniel details exactly how postmortems can help organizations and teams focus on improvement, and how that boosts work morale, makes products better, and strengthens your relationship with customers.
February 2017 HUG: Slow, Stuck, or Runaway Apps? Learn How to Quickly Fix Pro...Yahoo Developer Network
Spark and SQL-on-Hadoop have made it easier than ever for enterprises to create or migrate apps to the big data stack. Thousands of apps are being generated every day in the form of ETL and modeling pipelines, business intelligence and data cubes, deep machine learning, graph analytics, and real-time data streaming. However, the task of reliably operationalizing these big data apps involves many painpoints. Developers may not have the experience in distributed systems to tune apps for efficiency and performance. Diagnosing failures or unpredictable performance of apps can be a laborious process that involves multiple people. Apps may get stuck or steal resources and cause mission-critical apps to miss SLAs.
This talk with introduce the audience to these problems and their common causes. We will also demonstrate how to find and fix these problems quickly, as well as prevent such problems from happening in the first place.
Speakers:
Dr. Shivnath Babu is a Co-founder and CTO of Unravel and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. With more than a decade of experience researching the ease of use and manageability of data-intensive systems, he leads the Starfish project at Duke, which pioneered the automation of Hadoop application tuning, problem diagnosis, and resource management. Shivnath has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications to his credit and has received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the HP Labs Innovation Award, and three IBM Faculty Awards.
Launching websites is hard, 60% of websites fail to launch on time.
The Pantheon Launch Team launches several large enterprise sites every week, and supports hundreds of self-serve customers daily. They have helped marketing teams launch hundreds of sites and they have seen it all.
Learn their secrets to success.
My Futuristic Vision of the Future of Cassandra's Future - NGCC 2015gdusbabek
These are the changes that would enable others to use Cassandra as a platform for building new distributed systems. Oh, and did I mention these changes would also make Cassandra more stable, testable and allow us to deliver features sooner?
YESSSSS. All that and more.
Observability for Emerging Infra (what got you here won't get you there)Charity Majors
Distributed systems, microservices, containers and schedulers, polyglot persistence .. modern infrastructure patterns are fluid and dynamic, chaotic and transient. So why are we still using LAMP-stack era tools to debug and monitor them? We'll cover some of the many shortcomings of traditional metrics and logs (and APM tools backed by metrics or logs), and show how complexity is their kryptonite. So how do we handle the coming complexity Armageddon? What are the implications for teams and roles and the way we build and ship software? Let's talk about the industry-wide shifts underway from metrics to events, from monitoring to observability, and from caring about the system as whole to the health of each and every request.
You don't deploy a single microservice. The journey to microservice architecture involves more than how code is written or applications are packaged. It's about creating an interconnected ecosystem that keeps things running. Infrastructure and tools have only grown in importance as microservices have emerged as a dominant architecture pattern. Deploying, scaling, and monitoring are more important for microservices than they ever were before. Attendees will leave this session knowing the basic infrastructure and tooling needs for microservices to be successful.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Essentials of Automations: Optimizing FME Workflows with ParametersSafe Software
Are you looking to streamline your workflows and boost your projects’ efficiency? Do you find yourself searching for ways to add flexibility and control over your FME workflows? If so, you’re in the right place.
Join us for an insightful dive into the world of FME parameters, a critical element in optimizing workflow efficiency. This webinar marks the beginning of our three-part “Essentials of Automation” series. This first webinar is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to utilize parameters effectively: enhancing the flexibility, maintainability, and user control of your FME projects.
Here’s what you’ll gain:
- Essentials of FME Parameters: Understand the pivotal role of parameters, including Reader/Writer, Transformer, User, and FME Flow categories. Discover how they are the key to unlocking automation and optimization within your workflows.
- Practical Applications in FME Form: Delve into key user parameter types including choice, connections, and file URLs. Allow users to control how a workflow runs, making your workflows more reusable. Learn to import values and deliver the best user experience for your workflows while enhancing accuracy.
- Optimization Strategies in FME Flow: Explore the creation and strategic deployment of parameters in FME Flow, including the use of deployment and geometry parameters, to maximize workflow efficiency.
- Pro Tips for Success: Gain insights on parameterizing connections and leveraging new features like Conditional Visibility for clarity and simplicity.
We’ll wrap up with a glimpse into future webinars, followed by a Q&A session to address your specific questions surrounding this topic.
Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your FME expertise and drive your projects to new heights of efficiency.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
The scenarios described today have been slightly changed to protect the innocent.
Let’s imagine that you are the IT manager for a small nonprofit. You woke up to a flood of text messages from Pingdom alerting you that your site is down and has been since about 2 am. Even worse, the organization’s annual conference kicks off in a few hours.
While it would be great to be able to call someone else to fix this, it is clearly your responsibility. Part of your job is making sure that the website stays up.
You have some tech experience. You’ve tried to log into the server and couldn’t. So, you restarted the server. The site came back up for a couple of minutes and then once again crashed. You tried restarting two more times with the same result – a couple of minutes of uptime and then a crash.
Restarting isn’t working. Your executive director will be coming online any minute. How can you troubleshoot the problem?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24480842@N03/3040615449/">pablo lizardo
The goal today is to step back and look for clues like a good detective. This is often incredibly hard to do when it feels like everything is falling apart. But for today, pretend that you are Sherlock Holmes or Olivia Benson.
In any crime show, they always start with the most obvious cause first. The first suspect almost always ends up being ruled out, but we still need to start with that person. I once worked for an organization where the website suddenly went down and no one knew why. It turned out that the server was in someone’s basement and their cat had sat on the off switch.
As you gather clues you will begin to deduce the root cause of the issue, by developing a working theory, or theories.
Is it down for everyone or just me? (Website example) The best case scenario is that your website is just down for you. For example, since you are at a conference, perhaps there is something off with the wireless network. A good way to check whether this is true is to visit downforeveryoneorjustme. On this site, you can enter a website to check if it is down. Sometimes a site can be down just for your local network or for your router.
Another, less positive option, is that your Internet service provider is down. Almost always, ISPs will have a website (off of their servers) that you can check to see if the site is down. Or, Twitter is also always a good option.
Another, less likely, option is that your Domain Host is down while your ISP is up. This has happened with Network Solutions and AT&T in the past few years. If this happens, you don’t have a lot of options. Your site will be accessible via IP but the actual domain will not be accessible.
Source: http://media.infospesial.net/image/p/2013/08/tips-jika-dns-google-down_a9729.jpg
Another unique possibility is that someone did something by accident. For example, we recently had a problem on a client site at work where the client accidentally managed to disable the Drupal panel powering the homepage, which led to a blank page.
Sometimes your databases will go down. Sometimes they will get accidentally deleted. You can easily check and see if the database is up via phpMiyAdmin or another tool.
Another easy to spot issue is that Apache, or Nginx or another web server powering your site, is just offline. I’ve experienced this a couple of times. A server will have been automatically restarted and for one reason or another, Apache will simply have never been turned on.
Another possibility is that your site is in the equivalent of maintenance mode. For example, in Drupal, you can take your site offline so that users can’t enter content. You need to remember to bring it back afterwards, which is sometimes easy to forget in the heat of the moment. When I was IT manager, we once had site visitors calling in because they couldn’t see anything. We could see everything fine because we were logged in. Little did we know that the site was in maintenance mode.
Provided a real problem exists. The next important thing to do is to try and reproduce.
Different browsers will behave in different ways. Okay, that was polite. The real thing is that a lot of the time IE will not display in standard ways. When you are checking for browsers, check IE from the version your site supports. Then, check the other browsers.
Is this issue only for Linux? Android? You need to identify what type of computer or phone the person is using. The next step is often to figure out how many people who visit your site use this type of device or operating system.
If this is a mobile issue, it’s good to identify quickly. As before, one of the first things you should do is check how many people are using this device. For example, we had a client where someone called in reporting a major problem with the donation form. It was for a very old version of Blackberry.
We’ve checked for obvious causes, now it’s time to check with all the tools that track information about your site.
There are a number of ways that a server can tell you it is unhappy. You do not necessarily have to be a systems administrator to read these tea leaves. You can just know when something is awry.
What your server is used for will determine how much memory and storage you need. Memory determines how fast you can retrieve information on your server. So, how fast Apache can return a page or how many applications (or for example websites) you can run on one server at the same time.
When memory is running out on your server, everything will slow down and applications like PHP powering your site may start to crash. Anyone who has every had a computer with subpar memory knows what it feels like when your machine runs out memory – it slows to a crawl.
Disk space or “storage” is the size of your hard drive. You want to avoid having your server fill to capacity without any warning. You can mitigate this with per-user storage limits. For example, everyone except for the super admin may be limited to 1 GB. When your server is full, maintenance services like database backups will often stop running. This is an early sign. Later on, your whole server may crash again and again, leading to hard drive corruption. This is something you want to avoid.
High CPU typically means that you have a service running at 100 percent processing capacity. Depending on how many cores your server has, this could be 100 percent of the processor power of your machine or less. For example, if you have a dual core machine, it will have 50 percent of processing capacity in use. High CPU use – over 50 percent – can point to a performance problem. For example, high httpd use can crash Apache.
CPU typically also corresponds to power use. More CPUs cost more money.
TODO: Verify above with Ben/Matt.
Another scenario is that your code is running fine until some time of security vulnerability is exposed. You need to make sure that everything is up to date on your server.
If you are using a CMS, you also need to make sure that your core code and contributed plugins and modules are up-to-date. The benefit and drawback of Open Source is that you have thousands of people using the same code as you. This is great because problems are found and fixed by people who don’t necessarily work for you. It can be problematic because hackers can find security holes and exploit them. To really take advantage of Open Source, you need to be frequently updating your code.
Google offers a number of great resources for debugging.
Anyone who has had Google Webmaster tools identify their site has hacked likely remembers the experience. You start getting emails from Google that indicate your site will be removed from their search engine and all of your visitors see the scary message “This site may be hacked”.
This site may be hacked: This warning means that Google detected some suspicious links or pages in your site that are not malware related in a way that would infect your users, but they still should not be there.
Visiting this site may harm your computer: You’ll see this message if Google believes that a site can download malicious software onto your computer
If you see a big increase or decrease in traffic, particularly to one page, it may indicate a problem. It could be that one page is inaccessible or that spammers are targeting one page in particular. We had a huge increase in traffic and a crashing site at a previous job and it was because there were links to “Justin Timberlake naked” everywhere that were hidden
In the Timberlake example, we could have also seen that there was a lot of incoming traffic for “Justin Timberlake naked” as opposed to sustainability, the focus of the site
Like a good detective, the next step is to talk to people if we haven’t solved the problem yet. Put on your detective hat and let’s get started.
First, we want to look at how anyone making changes to the site interacts with the website.
The key thing to know in advance is how administrators work with your site. Do they typically make lots of changes each day. What content are they editing?
Once we’ve gone over basic options. Next we want to know what each person on the team as done recently. Example: base64 encoding issue. We ran into a problem recently where someone was dragging and dropping images in Firefox, which was triggering a problem with the SpamSpan module
Once we’ve made sure that no one internal is the cause of the problem, it’s time to look outside at who is visiting your site and why
Source: https://www.digitalgov.gov/files/2014/03/Kidsgov-Usability-test-IMG_9987a-600-x-400.jpg
Since a typical site has thousands of visitors, interviewing each one may be challenging. Let’s try looking at the most popular pages as reported by Google Analytics first. Here in GA we can see that these are the most popular parts of the site. It looks like there’s a lot of incoming traffic to this page in particular. If we retrace our steps, it could be that Huffington Post has made this blog post their headline story. That explains the increase.
If we’ve eliminated everything else, it may be time to look at even more external factors. For example, I once had an Oscar predicting blog. Each Oscars, the site would eventually crash due to traffic, taking down every other site hosted on the same server.
You can do a reverse IP lookup to see what other websites may share your IP address.
You’ll remember that we started out today by looking at what to do when your site is down, people care, and the easy solutions like restarting your server aren’t working.
You need a way to diagnose and troubleshoot difficult website problems.
Today I hope we’ve shown you that you can look for clues to systematically avoid a website crisis. In particular, you can start out by looking for obvious causes, then check with the beat cops (tools like server red flags and google), and then talk to everyone connected to the event (people internally and externally)