I was refactoring some code for EZ Exporter, a data exporter app for Shopify, last week as our customer base has been growing pretty steadily these last few months. I figured it's time to do some optimization to make sure the app is ready for future growth.
One of the functionalities that we needed to optimize is how we handle manual downloads. Initially, I just made it very simple by returning the data as ...
With the recent Cloudflare hack ("CloudBleed"), I currently find myself resetting a bunch of passwords.
I tend to use very random passwords for most of my accounts, where each account uses a different random password. Thankfully, with tools like pwgen this is very quick and easy to do. Before using pwgen, I would normally go to a site like random.org to generate random passwords.
Using `pwgen` is very simple, just install it and type ...
Our Shopify app, EZ Exporter, provides an option for users to download reports on demand from the app's main page. Since it could take some time to generate the report in the background depending on the data, we needed a way to let the user know that the task is currently in progress so they don't reload the page or do something else thinking that nothing is happening. We also wanted to block ...
One of my apps, YouTube Audio Downloader, has been gaining quite a bit of traffic lately. It's a website that lets you convert YouTube videos to MP3/M4A audio. The conversion happens completely on my server and a download link is provided to the user when finished. The files need to be stored temporarily on my server so the users can download them.
Initially, I just had a daily cron job that runs at ...
I know what you're thinking, "Who in the world still uses FTP these days?". If you were born after year 2000, you may not even have heard of FTP before.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was a popular way to share files back in the AOL days. People will set up these FTP servers where you can upload and download files. I remember spending so much time in chat rooms during my teenage years asking ...
It's not easy to keep up with security updates and one of the most important updates to be aware of is the SSL security of your web server. Just in the past 2-3 years, there had been a bunch of very serious security vulnerabilities that were found in OpenSSL, such as Heartbleed, POODLE, and DROWN.
An easy way to check whether your web server is vulnerable is by using Qualys' SSL Server Test. Their ...
I just finished updating my ansible-django-stack project and added tasks to automatically issue a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and set up a cron job to auto-renew the certificate.
We're now using it for all our Shopify apps which are built in Django. Let's Encrypt certificates are only valid for 90 days, so if you have a bunch of web apps like we do and have more planned in the future, automating this ...