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Being pitifully tech-illiterate despite living on the internet

Started by machotrouts, May 11, 2019, 01:47:34 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

hedgehog90

Quote from: Tactile Uncle on May 19, 2019, 06:24:32 PM
Sack it all off and use squarespace maybe?

Yeah, it's all gotten a bit out of control, this.
I blame Twed for mentioning Cloudflare.

New page regrets.

machotrouts

Got a horrible sinking feeling that, at some point, I'm going to have to learn what SSL is.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 05:25:08 PMNah, still the same. Try installing this wordpress addon:

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/

Okay I've done that. Is that it fixed now

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 05:25:08 PMYou can check the 'secure' status of your site here:
https://www.whynopadlock.com/results/cbb48322-38aa-453a-9d23-d8a54c6555d7



Is this the problem we're talking about at the moment? Should I try messing about with the source code? Just seems to me like that would be a really good idea that would go brilliantly.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 05:52:30 PMIf I understand correctly, Cloudflare is now doing all the heavy work in serving your site to visitors. Cloudflare is like an outer layer, my browser communicates with this outer layer when I go to machotrouts.com. Your dreamhost server is like an inner atrium, the only traffic the dreamhost server is receiving is from Cloudflare probing it for updates.

Or to use a proper anaology, Cloudflare is like the shop that serves customers, Dreamhost is like the stock room, forbidden to customers, only accessable by employees (Cloudflare).

Thank you for explaining this. Is WordPress, with my domain, in this analogy? Are they a secret second stock room where employees go to fuck? I'm so glad I'm using three different sites at once it's great.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 06:17:18 PMBefore you try the wordpress plugin...

Oh. Oh no

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 06:17:18 PMI'd recommend going to your Cloudflare settings -> Crypto -> SSL and select 'Full'

Done! That might not seem like it warrants an exclamation mark but I'm going to be honest with you, the first draft of this post was me asking how to find my Cloudflare settings. So I do feel like I've achieved something. I found them. They were on Cloudflare.

I'll go back and check that whynopadlock site again.



Oh! Has that done it?

hedgehog90

It's working!
Thank fuck for that.
Well done, in a space of 9 days you've gone from being pitifully tech-illiterate to somewhat tech-competant.

machotrouts

It's nice of you to put a narrative arc on me following your instructions until I eventually manage not to break anything. Wouldn't have even known about that last problem if you hadn't told me about it, let alone how to solve it, so thank you.

I'm putting together my new Grindr poll now so hopefully I'll be able to post that today without people all falling in a swamp and dying the moment they click the link. I don't know if I'm there yet though. When I type "machotrouts.com" into the address bar it still looks like this.



There's no big red line now though so maybe it's fine? When I type "https" the padlock thing appears. Is that good and normal, or do I want the padlock to be there all the time? What about... hackers? Am I going to get hacked. I'm actually asking that.


edit: hang on a minute, is this what I'm asking about? Do I need to do this?

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003505112-How-to-force-your-site-to-redirect-to-https-SSL-

Oh I don't understand a word of anything from "What configuration file do I need to create?" on. Should I make an effort here, or is this not important?

hedgehog90

Firstly I need to correct myself on something I said earlier...
Cloudflare does do a lot of the heavy lifting in serving your website for static content, (images, html, javascript etc.), but for dynamic content (running serverside scripts like PHP and querying the internal database) Dreamhost is still doing all that stuff when I access your site.
So my shop/stock room analogy is a load of bollocks I'm afraid.
I'm not sure how beneficial Cloudflare is to your site, but I'll assume the Wordpress software has been optimized enough that it's not running a load of unnecessary PHP and querying databases, so Cloudflare is lessening the load to some degree, but not totally.

I'm sure you're asking, what the fuck is PHP?
PHP is a server-side script rather than a client-side script.
What does any of that mean?
Well, javascript for instance is a client-side script. When I access a webpage on your site, it sends me some javascript for me to run and my computer runs it.
PHP on the other hand is script run by your server, but it produces some html or whatever and sends it to me.
So everytime I go to machotrouts.com/index.php (the real address of your landing page), Dreamhost doesn't just send me a file called index.php, it has to run it first, and then it sends me back the results of that script. EVERY TIME I load the page your server needs to run this script. It's some proper behind the scenes shit. It could be intensive, I can't easily tell because all that script is completely hidden to me.
As a customer I have no right knowing what goes on back there, you could be jizzing in the mayo or running an underground child sex ring for all I know.
This is dynamic content. It's done in secret. The true horror of it all is protected from public eyes.
I ask for pizza and you give me pizza and then I shove into my face and I'm happy. I am unqeustioning, I do not care what is in the pizza, only you know how the pizza is made...
*WINK WINK*
Understand?
Anyway, this dynamic content can't be served by Cloudflare.

To get around this (minor) issue of dynamic content serving (for your mostly static site), you could enable dynamic content caching in your Cloudflare settings.

Click here for instructions, specifically for Wordpress sites, written by someone who appears to know what they're talking about.

This means Cloudflare would do the heavy-lifting even with dynamic content requests. So, instead of making your Dreamhost server run index.php every time someone accesses the site, Cloudflare will just immediately produce a copy of one it made earlier, like a friendly, be-jumpered Neil Buchanan.
By default Cloudflare's dynamic content caching is not enabled, this is something we could enable (with caveats so it refreshes when you make a new post), but tbh, I feel like we're reaching a point now where I'm beginning to ask myself... what is point?
It's up to you, I've given you a link with instructions but I don't think it's all that necessary... and tbh, neither is Cloudflare. Twed just sort of mentioned it in passing, over his shoulder probably, and you did it because you enjoy doing things.
How much is Cloudflare setting you back btw?



END OF PART ONE



Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 10:09:00 AM
There's no big red line now though so maybe it's fine? When I type "https" the padlock thing appears. Is that good and normal, or do I want the padlock to be there all the time? What about... hackers? Am I going to get hacked. I'm actually asking that.

edit: hang on a minute, is this what I'm asking about? Do I need to do this?

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003505112-How-to-force-your-site-to-redirect-to-https-SSL-

Oh I don't understand a word of anything from "What configuration file do I need to create?" on. Should I make an effort here, or is this not important?

Currently you've got it configured so https is not forced. This means I can choose to load your site as http or https.
https is better, so let's force it on everyone. This means if i try http it'll get redirected to https.
There are 2 ways to do this, with either Wordpress or Cloudflare.

Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-make-your-site-https-only/

Wordpress: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-force-ssl/ (Another plugin. Simpler than your method but makes the same changes.)

I'd recommend doing it with Cloudflare settings, because they're the one that I communicate with first when I load machotrouts.com.
But you might as well install the plugin as well, if at some point you decide to ditch Cloudflare.

SSL certificates are temporary btw.
You've got one with Dreamhost and one with Cloudflare. I'll assume Cloudflare's annual one is auto-renewing, but I'm not sure about Dreamhost's.
Make sure that your LetsEncrypt certifcate with Dreamhost will auto-renew in 3 months before it expires, otherwise you'll have an invalid certificate and it'll say 'Not secure' next to the url, or maybe even a red padlock with a line through it. This could scare off potential fans of your... Grindr polls is it?

machotrouts

Thank you, this is all helpful. Jizz in the mayo. Yep. Got it

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMCurrently you've got it configured so https is not forced. This means I can choose to load your site as http or https.
https is better, so let's force it on everyone. This means if i try http it'll get redirected to https.
There are 2 ways to do this, with either Wordpress or Cloudflare.

Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-make-your-site-https-only/

"You'll find this option just above the HTTP Strict Transport Security setting" is an amazingly "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green"-ass direction, thanks Cloudflare. Took me 15 minutes to find the page with either of those things on.

While scrambling around Cloudflare, I saw a graph that said my site has had 88 unique visitors in the past month...? That's not right, is it? I haven't linked to it anywhere, and there can't be that many people who've read this thread and decided to have a rubberneck. Is that all robots, or the number of people on the DreamHost shared server or something?

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMI'd recommend doing it with Cloudflare settings, because they're the one that I communicate with first when I load machotrouts.com.
But you might as well install the plugin as well, if at some point you decide to ditch Cloudflare.

I have done both. They don't clash, right? Hopefully I'm now on double-https and the site is so secure it just electrocutes anyone who visits.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMSSL certificates are temporary btw.

Well that's the nature of existence.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMYou've got one with Dreamhost and one with Cloudflare. I'll assume Cloudflare's annual one is auto-renewing, but I'm not sure about Dreamhost's.
Make sure that your LetsEncrypt certifcate with Dreamhost will auto-renew in 3 months before it expires, otherwise you'll have an invalid certificate and it'll say 'Not secure' next to the url, or maybe even a red padlock with a line through it. This could scare off potential fans of your... Grindr polls is it?

If you can't trust Grindr pollster machotrouts who can you trust? I've checked and DreamHost says it will automatically renew, which is nice because I should be trusted to manually do as little as possible.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMClick here for instructions, specifically for Wordpress sites, written by someone who appears to know what they're talking about.

Haven't embarked on this yet. Does this make it so that more people can visit the site, or does it just make it faster? Are those related/the same, or completely separate issues?

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMIt's up to you, I've given you a link with instructions but I don't think it's all that necessary... and tbh, neither is Cloudflare. Twed just sort of mentioned it in passing, over his shoulder probably, and you did it because you enjoy doing things.

The problem to which Cloudflare was offered as a solution is the possibility of me being too popular. Too many people clicking on my site in a short space of time. Yes I am worried about that.

I did get a bit of concentrated attention on my Tumblr for a couple of past Grindr polls once the listicle media got their hands on them, and I just want there to be no chance that that's going to be an issue in the unlikely event it happens again. Like if Barack Obama's scrolling through Twitter and goes "LMAOOOOOO who polls grindr... gonna rt this legend cunt". I want to be prepared for when that happens.

I thought maybe I should upgrade my DreamHost plan from Super Basic Shared Server For Wretched Cunts or whatever I'm on – and I did not at all understand what those different plans were actually offering – but Twed suggested Cloudflare instead. I have no understanding at all of what a site needs to stay upright and I'm hoping this is the thing that does it. Cloudflare is a solution to that, right? It's a sort of hit absorber?

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 12:04:10 PMHow much is Cloudflare setting you back btw?

It's free. Which is another thing I meant to ask about. What is Cloudflare getting out of this? Presumably there's a catch. They're going to come for a kidney at some point? Fuck both my cats?

hedgehog90

Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 02:29:45 PM
While scrambling around Cloudflare, I saw a graph that said my site has had 88 unique visitors in the past month...? That's not right, is it? I haven't linked to it anywhere, and there can't be that many people who've read this thread and decided to have a rubberneck. Is that all robots, or the number of people on the DreamHost shared server or something?

The bots have been listening  to our conversation. They scanned CaB, saw my link, and now they scour your site regularly. That's how bots work. Also a few of those are probably from CaB people. Oh and it's probably also various nodes on the Cloudflare CDN communicating with your site. More on that below...

Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 02:29:45 PM
I have done both. They don't clash, right? Hopefully I'm now on double-https and the site is so secure it just electrocutes anyone who visits.

No clash, it's fine and it appears to be working.

Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 02:29:45 PM
The problem to which Cloudflare was offered as a solution is the possibility of me being too popular. Too many people clicking on my site in a short space of time. Yes I am worried about that.

I did get a bit of concentrated attention on my Tumblr for a couple of past Grindr polls once the listicle media got their hands on them, and I just want there to be no chance that that's going to be an issue in the unlikely event it happens again. Like if Barack Obama's scrolling through Twitter and goes "LMAOOOOOO who polls grindr... gonna rt this legend cunt". I want to be prepared for when that happens.

I thought maybe I should upgrade my DreamHost plan from Super Basic Shared Server For Wretched Cunts or whatever I'm on – and I did not at all understand what those different plans were actually offering – but Twed suggested Cloudflare instead. I have no understanding at all of what a site needs to stay upright and I'm hoping this is the thing that does it. Cloudflare is a solution to that, right? It's a sort of hit absorber?

It's free. Which is another thing I meant to ask about. What is Cloudflare getting out of this? Presumably there's a catch. They're going to come for a kidney at some point? Fuck both my cats?

Wow, didn't realise Cloudflare had a free tier. That's amazing.
Assuming their free service isn't dog shit, it should be faster to load your site for people across the world and should reduce strain on your Dreamhost server significantly.
Another huge benefit to using Cloudflare is it repeats your website across various servers across the globe.
WHAT DOES THAT ME-it reduces server response time for people situated far away from your Dreamhost server. Yes, this is a thing. For instance, the time it takes to send a signal and receive a response between a server in Australia and my PC in the UK is about 300ms. If I pinged your Dreamhost server (which is probably situated in Texas, USA), it would take just over 100ms to receive a response. And for all your Indian fans, they'd have a ping response time of somewhere between 200-250ms.
250ms doesn't sound like much, but your site is not just a single file, it's a whole bunch of individual files that I need to download before your site will display, some need to download first before others can load, before you know it, Aamir in Calcutta has to wait 3 whole seconds for your site to load, Aamir grows impatient, he goes looking elsewhere for his grindr polls and you've lost a potential customer.
But Cloudflare is not one server situated in one place, it's hundreds of servers all over the world, baby. Now your site has lightning quick response times for everyone, not just the hicks in Texas, because we're communicating directly with our nearest Cloudflare server. In my case I'm probably connecting with a data centre in or near that-there-London.

This is what the network looks like:

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/network/

And here's proof of how quick my response time is:



Avg 12ms response time.
Open a command prompt window and type 'ping machotrouts.com', you should see similar response times.
Try it yourself!



Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 02:29:45 PM
Haven't embarked on this yet. Does this make it so that more people can visit the site, or does it just make it faster? Are those related/the same, or completely separate issues?

That link again so it's not buried under all this waffle:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/228503147-Speed-Up-WordPress-and-Improve-Performance

It should increase speed and reduce server strain even more, so when Obama retweets you and all his horny metropolitan elite fanboys come cumming you can handle it. And now that I know you're paying nowt for Cloudflare, I'd say definitely give this a go.
Just do this bit if you can:



It might not be accessible to you as you're on the free tier and this might be a premium feature. Give it a go anyway.
The optimising images, HTTP/2 stuff, etc. I wouldn't bother with that.

Oh, and just in case you don't know cookies are like little save files on your PS1 memory card, except for websites. You share them with the server when your browser communicates with it.
I guess wordpress stores data pertaining to comments and posts on your site in cookies with names starting with wp-_____, wordpress-_______ and so on, Cloudflare uses these to occasionally check your site to see if they're any different from last time it checked, if so it'll empty the cache for that particular webpage/url.
When they're not different, it'll just continue serving the cached version from the CDN.
(CDN = Content delivery network, that map with all the dots on it I showed you earlier)

Twed

And the great thing is that the free service isn't on different hardware or anything, it's equally as fast as the paid service. You just have more feature limitations. So unless you need something specific, free is as good as paid.

hedgehog90


machotrouts

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 05:18:17 PM
Why are they offering that for free?

To fuck both my cats hedgehog90 I just told you.

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 04:57:00 PM
That link again so it's not buried under all this waffle:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/228503147-Speed-Up-WordPress-and-Improve-Performance

It should increase speed and reduce server strain even more, so when Obama retweets you and all his horny metropolitan elite fanboys come cumming you can handle it. And now that I know you're paying nowt for Cloudflare, I'd say definitely give this a go.
Just do this bit if you can:



It might not be accessible to you as you're on the free tier and this might be a premium feature. Give it a go anyway.



Ah. This is saying I can't do the thing that you're saying I should try, yeah? I tried to follow the instructions in case I was misunderstanding it but I can't (which, admittedly, is not proof in itself).

Fair enough really. I'll just upgrade to Business for $200 a month, it's fine. (Clarifying that that's a joke because I'm a reckless enough clicker that you might believe it.)

Thank you for the explanation of Cloudflare which I think I understand a bit better now. It's for Aamir the fucking Grindr pervert fuck. So am I okay without the, er. Bypass cookie on cache thing or whatever it's called. Is free mayo-jizzin' both-cats-fuckin' ol' Cloudflare good enough? Or should I upgrade my DreamHost plan after all? Is what I've got now, with the basic DreamHost and the free Cloudflare, just fine? Even if I get that Obama retweet? Absolutely dead set on the notion that Obama will retweet me at some point. Weird if he doesn't frankly.

Twed

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 05:18:17 PM
Why are they offering that for free?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/88659/how-can-cloudflare-offer-a-free-cdn-with-unlimited-bandwidth

#5 from the Cloudflare representative's reply seems like the most important one. They have to buy wodgeloads of bandwidth to get the economy of scale working, so they may as well let people use it, especially if it grows their business in other ways, and they could say "lol time to stop" if it stopped being profitable.

hedgehog90

Quote from: machotrouts on May 20, 2019, 05:50:57 PM
Thank you for the explanation of Cloudflare which I think I understand a bit better now. It's for Aamir the fucking Grindr pervert fuck. So am I okay without the, er. Bypass cookie on cache thing or whatever it's called. Is free mayo-jizzin' both-cats-fuckin' ol' Cloudflare good enough? Or should I upgrade my DreamHost plan after all? Is what I've got now, with the basic DreamHost and the free Cloudflare, just fine? Even if I get that Obama retweet? Absolutely dead set on the notion that Obama will retweet me at some point. Weird if he doesn't frankly.

Yeah, it should be fine without the dynamic content caching.

I think you're good to go now.

*smacks arse*

[machotrouts jubilantly gallops into the sunset, completely naked, accompanied by jaunty orchestral version of machotrouts' theme. Camera rises and slowly pulls back. Silhouetted by the setting sun, machotrouts jumps and strikes a pose. End on a freeze frame. Slow fade to black. machotrouts' favourite song plays during credits + blooper reel]

machotrouts

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 20, 2019, 07:08:18 PMmachotrouts jubilantly gallops into the sunset, completely naked, accompanied by jaunty orchestral version of machotrouts' theme.

I have a theme?! How do I have a theme. Where did you get that photo of me jumping into the sunset. I'm glad I have a theme. Thank you hedgehog90

I think I have a machotrouts.com I'm happy to link to now. machotrouts.com. I deleted some stuff that didn't need importing from Tumblr – asks from followers, selfies to get the attention of gays I was thirst-following etc – edited a few formatting quirks I've noticed, line breaks popping up in places they shouldn't and the like, and I've put the new poll up. There's a WordPress plugin that lets me do tables, Tumblr never let me do tables. I did all the maths very tired so don't check my numbers please. Bed

machotrouts

Delighted to report a new thing I don't understand: How do I put line breaks in alt text?

I've started going back and editing alt text into all the images in my old posts for accessibility purposes. "We simply cannot do without your Grindr polls any longer, machotrouts", have been screaming the world's blind, "for it appears such an integral part of sighted culture". Also probably means I'll come up on a Google search for "Luv2suckbigcok" and the like, so that's important.

But they ought to have line breaks, right? Like, between messages? I honestly don't know if line breaks are meaningful to screen readers. Maybe the visually impaired are just used to everything in the world being a run-on sentence? Regardless, I'd like the text to be readable when images fail to load whether your eyes are bollocksed or not.

Here's what I'm looking at.



Just pressing enter doesn't do anything, so I googled it. But I don't understand any of the answers. What am I looking at here, for example? Is it... code? Am I going to have to... code?

I tried "<br>", by the way. I know that one from making Sporcle quizzes. By "tried" I mean I literally just put it right there in that "Alternative Text" box I've just showed you but maybe it's supposed to go somewhere else. Anyway that didn't work.

If line breaks are impossible, impractical, or useless, then how should I format it instead?

Sebastian Cobb

If you're only able to enter the alt text through that form you might struggle as the solutions I've read involve setting image elements to monospace.

I would expect your cms to sanitise html character codes so you probably can't enter them to insert a carriage return and line feed.
line feed is &#10
carriage return &#13


Strictly speaking alt text was originally designed as something for screen readers to use for visually impaired people, so it wasn't necessary, and could potentially confuse the screen reader. But the 'modern web' is a nightmare for accessibility and my knowledge on the subject is way out of date; when I learned it you were still supposed to make pages that were navigable with javascript turned off, I've avoided front end development for years anyway.

Zetetic

I keep opening this thread, and I keep considering reporting it.

It's needlessly upsetting, and degrades us all.

JesusAndYourBush

Quote from: hedgehog90 on May 19, 2019, 01:04:18 AM

All wordpress sites look like that to me because Chrome broke something in one of their updates which made all wordpress sites freeze, so I had to block several domains in my hosts file (hosting various bits of javascript) to stop the page freezing.

Lot of people have been messaging me, asking for an update on my robot friend I mentioned earlier.

Sad to say, I got a call yesterday telling me that the inevitable had finally happened.
It seems that while trying to fast-forward the adverts in Predator II he'd toppled over, yanked his flex, and pulled his plug from the wall socket.

Of course we could reboot his hardware, but his software is all gone. After some serious soul searching, we felt it was kinder to install a much simpler operating system, one that was less able to feel social isolation and better able to vacuum my floor.

machotrouts

I've discovered WordPress has an option to edit posts like this!



So I can just put a normal line break in there with a normal enter key and that seems to work. Okay I'll do it all like this, here in the code, like I know what I'm looking at. Feels like this has real potential to go horribly wrong! Exciting!

Quote from: DistressedArea on May 25, 2019, 09:04:55 AM
Lot of people have been messaging me, asking for an update on my robot friend I mentioned earlier.

Sad to say, I got a call yesterday telling me that the inevitable had finally happened.
It seems that while trying to fast-forward the adverts in Predator II he'd toppled over, yanked his flex, and pulled his plug from the wall socket.

Of course we could reboot his hardware, but his software is all gone. After some serious soul searching, we felt it was kinder to install a much simpler operating system, one that was less able to feel social isolation and better able to vacuum my floor.

Couldn't have done it without you!