Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

logrotate stuck? A true story about an improper documentation

Long Exposure Photograph Showing Start Rotation

Bad Documentation (if you ask me)

When you looks at the document of logrotate, the first page about the settings shows an example as follow:

/var/log/news/* {
    monthly
    rotate 2
    olddir /var/log/news/old
    missingok
    postrotate
        kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inn.pid`
    endscript
    nocompress
}

Making your think that it's okay to have an asterisk in this way, right? PLAINLY WRONG!

The logrotate utility actually has no heuristic to detect whether a file was already rotated or compressed so with an asterisk, it will discover all the files in a folder and ...

Wordpress Mail Subscribe List

Functional Subscribe Form

Today I installed a simple mailing list builder on my Becoming an Internet Affiliate website. So simple that it creates a widget on the sidebar and that's it. So it's not going to be super persuasive, but I like it that way for some of my websites.

The plugin is called Mail Subscribe List. It's a free plugin making it particularly attractive. And it keeps the names and emails in your database (no third parties involved.)

The plugin offers a Widget that you can install in your sidebar. Go to

Appearance » Widgets

and then select the Subscribe ...

This happens on all websites. It's not specific to Wordpress.

However, this is when hackers are trying to gain access to your website. They do two or three things. First they choose common user names such as "admin" or your .com name (i.e. I have https://stargazerrock.com/ and they used "stargazerrock" as the username!) I saw "administrator" as well.

One way to protect your administrator account immediately is to change your username to something that they are not likely to guess. Say your surname is "giraffe", you could use that. Or even better, ...

Today I tested one of my Stargazer Rock blog pages and got a WSoD... Not the first time, but last time I fixed the problem by loading and resaving a PNG and changing an SVG to a PNG. Not the type of things I really want to do while bloging.

So I search into it, there is a plugin I use, called "Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags" which attempts to load an image but only the first 32Kb. If that loads fine, then the author attempts to get the image dimensions and save that to the open graph meta data.

Somehow, some images will actually break that process because the ...

At times you have to prevent users from seeing files under a certain folder such as the /admin/ or /wp-admin/ folder.

The easiest way to at least avoid having Google index those pages is to add a Disallow line in your robots.txt file. For example:

Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /wp-admin

This is great and 99% of the time it does exactly what you want. Only once in a while a programmer does it wrong and places a file that should be searchable under such folders. For example, maybe someone placed a style.css file which is access by pages other than just pages under /admin. In that case, the ...

I have a customer that uses Wordpress with the U-Design theme. It's pretty cool, but it does not give you the possibility to change the RSS feed shown at the top-right corner and in 2017 the RSS feeds are kind of dead (so not useful to be shown prominently, really.)

My customer also has an ebay account so he put his ebay link in that RSS, which you can do, but without changing the image, it just looked all wrong. (i.e. no one would click on that link, trust me!)

So... I create a quick button, "FIND US ON ebay", and replaced that corner from that RSS peeling thing to an ebay ...

I have a website where I use Wordpress as the CMS. It's good enough for that website (frankly, unless you just want a blog, it's rather limited to my point of view, but I'm crazy... that being said with the pages functionality of today, it's not that bad.)

In 2017, they created a theme called Twentyseventeen, which looks good and has most of the functionality I need. However, there is a huge bug:

The front page has a smartphone menu at the bottom of the page which opens HIDDEN. That's just plainly wrong. Either you put the menu at the top or you make sure that the menu ...

Since I got my Android phone earlier this year, I got a huge problem with Google Calendar.

I use the calendar mainly on my Desktop. Big screen, easy to read and use. But on the Android, the format is Agenda to make it possible to use at all.

Somehow that has a really bad side effect: the display is now always forced to Agenda on my Desktop too. Really annoying!

Tere is actually a very easy fix! It took me months the discover it and it's actually very easy.

I have the Calendar link bookmarked so I can just click one button to get it open.

Update:

Today Google Calendar asked me ...

Today I was working on a spreadsheet where I added a time for a calendar type of sheet.

What I wanted to do is have a column where time increases without having to type each time manually.

So I needed to add 15 or 30 minutes to the first time.

Say my first time is 7am, it appears as 07:00:00 AM.

In the next row (B4), I wanted to do something like:

=B3+"15 minutes"

The fact is that LibreOffice saves time and date as a double number where 1.0 represents 1 day.

So to add just 15 minutes, you need to divide your number by the number of minutes in a day:

=B3+15/60/24

Or if ...

Today I got a little challenge trying to get a bar at the bottom of the SMS From Me public pages.

I was thinking to use CSS to animate size. Already here there is a trick to know about. You cannot use the height (or width) parameter. However, you can use the max-height (max-width) to make the transition work as expected.

So my CSS transition included the following important parameters:

.bottom-bar
{
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  position: fixed;
  bottom: 0;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  max-height: 0px; /* at the start, it is hidden */
  transition: max-height ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Bad Documentation (if you ask me)

Functional Subscribe Form

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