Retire early with the F.I.R.E. method

January 12, 2021

I do not know many people who want to work until they are old, just to retire and not have the physical ability to do the things they have dreamt of doing. It is easier said than done though… There is currently a minimalist trend. Some have taken it to extremes of living in their

How to Secure Docker Containers with a Read-Only Filesystem

January 9, 2021

A compromised website sucks. A compromised website that an attacker can insert code into to manipulate your visitors is even worse! Out-of-the-box, Docker containers provide some security advantages over running directly on the host, however Docker provides additional features to increase security. There is a little known flag in Docker that will convert a container’s

Build Highly Performant WordPress Sites with Minio and WP Offload Media

January 3, 2021

WordPress is the leading content management system and it is often thought that WordPress cannot scale. That assertion is a bit misleading. It is true that out of the box WordPress does not scale well, however, WordPress has a flexible hooks system that provides developers with the ability to tap into and alter many of

How to Use the Maxmind Javascript API to Control Content by City, State, or Country

December 26, 2020

Controlling what a website visitor sees, based on their geo location, is a fairly common activity today. Most often, this happens on the server, before the content is generated for the visitor to see, but what if you do not have access to manipulate server side code and can only update the javascript that the

JWT User Authentication API with Lumen

December 26, 2020

Lumen is a great framework to build an API off of, but it does not come with user authentication or authorization. I needed to create a small API that allowed users to create an account and access the service with a JWT. Quality information on how to pull that off with Lumen is not very