Considering the substantial heatwave in Melbourne that’s been blistering us all this week, we’ve had relatively few hardware failures in this time. However, this does not mean that it’s safe to assume everything will operate as per normal.
What’s your backup schedule?
eMarketeer Australia has a fully redundant syncing schedule between our Melbourne office, Sydney production server location, and our failover systems in the USA. Our schedule is fully automated in order of importance.
We’re lucky to have a flexible and reliable method of backing up our data, but not everyone has the infrastructure or knowledge to have a setup this ellaborate.
Never enough backups…
Backing up once per week? In this heat you ought to be backing up at least once per day. You should also make sure your backups are stored in two seperate locations, so that in the event of a fire, not all hope is lost.
Need help backing up your website?
Technical backups aren’t for everyone. If you need a hand backing up your data, give us a ring, and we’ll be more than happy to help!
We were recently tasked with recovering a third party website that had been badly attacked by malware and backdoors, so much so that even every single jpg image on the site had been infected with malicious blocks inside the exif data.
Perhaps an older version of Internet Explorer had an exploit where a payload could be delivered by maliciously crafted jpgs, but hardly a threat in todays age.
Besides the point, we had over 20,000 images to de-infect, and it wasn’t practical to open each image in an editor, strip the exif tags by hand, and resave it, so we wrote a little script for linux machines to take care of it.
On debian like machines, simply install exiftool.
exiftool can be installed via
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
Once you have exiftool installed, make a backup of your images, then change directory to your original image directory and execute:
cd public_html/assets/img
exiftool -all= *.jpg
rm *.jpg_original
And boom, exiftool will strip all malicious tags from your images.
If you need recursively fix the images
cd /path/to/public_html
find . -name "*.jpg" -exec exiftool -all= {} \;
You should always backup files before recursively altering them.
One of the (arguably) best new features of HTML5 has to be the placeholder attribute for elements designed to accept input.
In the old days, people were using a variety of javascript and css to accomplish similar results, but none were quite as fluent as the native placeholder attribute HTML5 brings to the table.
Being a web design and development company and facing the same dilemna every day, our solutions was to write our own HTML5 placeholder fallback script, utilising jQuery.
Introducing placeholder.js
Our small jQuery library for dealing with placeholder fallback is available from Github: https://github.com/emarketeer/Placeholder.js
Using placeholder.js for HTML5 placeholder fallback support
Simply put,
- Include placeholder.min.js at the foot of your page.
- For all inputs where a placeholder is required, add data-rel=”placeholder” to the element.
That’s it.
We’re happy to announce the latest release of PrettyPress, a revised wordpress composition and editing plugin.
Version 1.0.0 was released Jan 10, 2014, with 1.0.2 following shortly after with some bug fixes.
New features in Evasive Eel:
- Markdown composition tab: Compose your posts in markdown, with a live preview window that updates “as you type”
- New publish menu: Save or publish your posts and pages directly from the PrettyPress screen
Bug fixes
We hope you enjoy PrettyPress 1.0.x as much as we did making it.
Coming soon
- Optional layout settings
- Improved visual aspects
- Featured image live support, from within PrettyPress
- Custom field live support, from within PrettyPress
- Better cross-browser compatibility
Have a suggestion for PrettyPress?
Email us your ideas! info [at] evasivesoftware [dot] com
Have fun, don’t write too hard!
