Morning Walk
My Alert Management Setup
At WHYY, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we activated our business continuity plan. For our team this means working from home. Certainly not a big deal for a team like ours – we pretty much spend all of our time online and in front of a screen.
Of course, within a day or two of working from home full time we had a couple of pretty serious site issues occur outside of business hours. Luckily I knew about them – and was able to react to them – almost as they occurred (though this doesn’t mean the problems were solved in that time!).
A colleague asked how I knew so quickly. Thought it might be useful to document that here.
For the website we have two monitors: an Uptime Robot monitor and a monitor via our New Relic account which we have access to through our hosting company. Additionally, our streaming media host provides a monitor that alerts us if our any of our streams are impaired. Whenever these monitors detect an issue they send an email to appropriate staff.
Now, I’m not one to check work email during off-hours but I DO want to know if I’m getting alerts from these monitors (or messages from a select group of colleagues – like our CEO!) The last piece of the puzzle then is to mark these senders as VIPs in iOS’s mail.app and to enable notifications for VIPs.
Now, I know – from personal experience! – when the site goes down at 3 a.m.
Weekly Reader: 3/28/20 COVID-19 Edition
Links of interest from the past week’s internet browsing.
What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus
One small family’s story about living with a coronavirus infection. I came to it so I could understand what to expect should someone in my family become symptomatic.
How the Pandemic Will End
How we got here. Where do we go next? How will the world have changed? A must read.
Remember You Will Be Buried
Tracing the American cemetery from the colonial age to the Gilded Age.
The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever
The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53. Calculating the death toll – 50 million people or 60 per cent of Europe’s entire population!
Sign of the times
Weekly Reader: 2/29/20
Links of interest from the past week’s internet browsing.
I could never understand my grandmother’s sadness – until I learned her tragic story
My French grandmother came to the US to escape the Nazis. What did a box of letters and photographs reveal about the sacrifice she made?
Weekly Reader: 2/22/19
Links of interest from the past week’s internet browsing.
Three Trees That Tell the Story of Ancient Cultures
An excerpt from The Story of Trees by Kevin Hobbs and David West
A bee from the age of dinosaurs
One hundred million years ago, a bee got trapped in tree resin. Over time, geological forces converted the resin to amber.
Modifying Functions in a WordPress Child Theme’s template-tags.php file
While customizing this site’s theme — a child of the Integer theme — I discovered that overwriting the /inc/template-tags.php file is not as simple as including a new file, with the appropriate code changes / additions / etc…, in the same manner that one is able to overwrite the the theme’s styles or layout.
The solution I used was to create a new function (based on the one I wanted to overwrite) and include it in the child’s functions.php file. I then went on to modify the template parts that called the original function with the new function’s name. Simple and effective.
Simple WordPress Themes
I’ve been thinking about relaunching my blog as a way to address my desire to record and share things of interest to me professionally and personally, to get up to speed on Gutenberg and other recent WordPress developments (the sites I maintain on a day to day basis all use the classic WP editor), and to get into the habit of writing on a more regular basis.
Visually I knew I wanted an extremely minimal theme. Searching for things like “simple” or “minimalist WordPress themes” turn up quite a few options — certainly more than I expected.
After installing and previewing quite a few themes I’ve settled on Integer. I like its typography and uncomplicated presentation. I’m using the free version – and have made a few minor adjustments to its out of the box features to suit my particular needs (I’m the only author here, no need to ID me on each post) – but there is a paid version with more options for customization. Overall I’m pleased with the results.
“Database Update Required” Loop in WordPress
Recently, while updating a site to WordPress version 5.2, I encountered the “Database Update Required” message. Click the button. DB updated. Things look good. But . . .
The update message reappeared when trying to access the backend —effectively locking me out.
Read moreCreating a Spam “Honeypot” in Engaging Networks
As part of a larger project around deploying a new corporate CRM, we recently moved, among many other things, our marketing and newsletter emails from Mailchimp to Engaging Networks.
One requirement was for the new email sign-up forms to integrate with our website. For a variety of reasons, but mainly speed and ease of integrattion, we chose to go with Engaging Networks’ “form posting” method whereby the form on the remote website posts its data to Engaging.
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