Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label web design

Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu
Post a Comment
Read more

One of the more underappreciated AWS service

The most under-appreciated AWS service is the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). This service provides SSL/TLS certificate for your custom domain as long as you subscribe to any ACM-integrated service like Elastic Cache or Cloudfront.  I had been using Wordpress to host my website https://aminsolutions.com for some time on a free web hosting provider. In order to provide SSL/TLS web encryption, I would have to buy a public certificate from an SSL provider and have that in front of my Wordpress content management web site. I found there were many limitations with that including installation of a public certificate on a free webhost subscription.  I would have had to start a paid web host subscription and in order to install a paid public certificate on a Wordpress website that wasn't getting a lot of hits. Regardless, it had to be secured via SSL web encryption so this is where AWS Cloudfront came in. Using AWS Cloudfront integrated with ACM, I can get a free public SSL web certificate
Post a Comment
Read more

Moving to a Different Hosting Provider

For close to a decade, our web hosting provider was with 110mb.com and byethost.com. This provider offered free hosting using MySQL and WordPress which was more than enough for our blog. However, a security flaw in one of the WordPress updates caused our site to be blacklisted on the internet and which resulted in getting our subscription revoked. We were provided a backup of the MySQL database and all the WordPress web server files, and then called it quits. Using blogger.com seemed to be a good fit but we couldn’t restore the blog contents easily. Hunting around the internet, we found 000webhost.com which offered the same services as byethost.com. Tried it out a few months ago and have now just recently restored all the blog contents from a few years ago. We are now under way to getting all the pages back the way they were so stay tuned and thanks for checking back in with us. Merry Christmas.
Post a Comment
Read more

Cleaning Code-Injection Malware on Thanksgiving Weekend

I just finished removing a code-injected malware that blacklisted a website with security providers like Google and Symantec, and it had to be on this Thanksgiving Long Weekend. Nothing makes me more sick that having to deal with this type of cleanup but it has to be done. Our whole household is already sick with cough and flu so this adds to the fun. I noticed the infection by constant emails from my service provider that my quota was getting exceeded. I know the site is popular but couldn’t be that popular. When I tried to get to the site using Google Chrome browser, I received a ominous red splash screen letting me know that there is malware on the site and that I should only continue if I understood the risks. Fortunately, I had the site registered with Google Webmaster Tools and was able to get a sample of the suspicious code injection. I also ran http://killmalware.com/, http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/aminsolutions.com, and http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ against the website to
Post a Comment
Read more

What To Do When Web Reputation Filters Block Your Websites

I was surprised to see the pop-up message below when querying some of my websites at Best buy. The Web Reputation Filters used there says that my websites hosted on 10.179.104.111 are controlled by group or individual known to be malicious. I was blocked from opening my website. This isn’t good and I thought about doing the following to mitigate this serious outage. 1) Contact my web hosting provider to explain that their Web servers are on a bad block of IP addresses and let them sort it out with Web Reputation Filters. 2) Ask my web provider to move me to more reputed web servers on different IP blocks. 3) Contact Best buy support and ask them to unblock the IP or domain used by my provider, or have them fix the WBRS rating assigned to my provider ‘s domain. 4) Make immediate WordPress backups of my websites and start shopping around for different and reputable web hosting providers. I haven’t decided yet but am leaning towards option 4. Your thoughts?
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Do My Google Blogger Sites Rank Lower Than ISP-hosted Sites in Alexa.com?

I asked the following on a guest post by Chuck Rylant on ProBlogger.net, expecting to get some concrete answers to low Alexa.com ranking for my other websites. Just like Chuck, I personally think it’s because of the SEO tools available on self-installed WordPress websites that may not be available on Google’s Blogger. I am re-posting it here because I didn’t get the answer I was looking for and am hoping someone can help me out. Here is the comment I made below, also linked here Guest Post by Chuck Rylant ————— 11/4/2011 at 1:26 am I am also not a professional blogger and average around 2-3 posts a month on my computer blog https://www.aminsolutions.com and post more frequently on my personal weblog blog https://www.chromiloamin.com. I also use Alexa to see my progress but am currently stuck at 5 million on Alexa for the computer blog and 23 million for the personal weblog. It’s been at 23 million for a long time and won’t budge. I thought post frequency would improve my ranking.
Post a Comment
Read more

Company Wordpress blog is down at 110mb

Our hosting provider at 110mb recently moved their servers to Newfoundland and Labrador and this has broken our website at http://www.aminsolutions.com. The outage started this Sunday April 25, 2010 and its is still unresolved. I believe the web servers are now active and working because I can see my files. However, our blog uses Wordpress which relies on 110mb's MySQL server, which apparently is the last piece that is down. I don't have any issues with 110mb as a hosting provider and I understand this to be a technical issue so I appreciate that it may take a few days. I just hope all my databases are still intact as I haven't run recent MySQL backups. If it takes longer than a week, I'll activate this blog as my primary site and point www.aminsolutions.com to it.
Post a Comment
Read more