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I helped integrate a media addiction questionaire for parents and children.

„When children and adolescents use excessive media, parents often experience feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. This is usually accompanied by tendencies towards passivity and withdrawal, which lead to a weakening of the parental presence. Recapturing a strong parental presence can be helpful in breaking out of parental helplessness and working with the child to work out solutions for how to balance the media.“

Elterntest / Jugendliche (Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg)

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I will use this article to collect interesting tips and tricks about using the Linux cron. This is not so much about setting up a cron, but about little things I use or discovered!

What is a cron ?

The cron daemon is a long-running process that executes commands at specific dates and times. You can use this to schedule activities, either as one-time events or as recurring tasks.

What is the crontab?

For commands that need to be executed repeatedly (e.g., hourly, daily, or weekly), you can use the crontab command. The crontab command creates a crontab file containing commands and instructions for the cron daemon to execute.

Format is: MIN HOUR DOM MON DOW CMD
Minute field
Hour field
Day of month
Day of week
Command

Run every 5 minutes

Run yearly, monthly, weekly, daily or on reboot.
@yearly will run at 00:00 on Jan 1st for every year.
@monthly will run at 00:00 on 1st of every month.
@weekly will run at 00:00 on starting of every week.
@daily will run at 00:00 on every day.
@reboot  will run after the server has been rebooted


TIPS

1. Send cron output via email

2. Use a real cron for WordPress

A real cron does not rely on website activity and executes independently.

Do not forget to disable the virtual WordPress Cron in the wp-config.php!

3. Prevent Emails being sent, when cron executes > /dev/null 2>&1

4. Set Standard Variables

5. Output Redirection

TOOLS

  1. Crontab UI (NodeJS) – Easy way to edit your crontab visually. @Github
  2. Chronis ( >= PHP 7) – Chronis will help you define cron jobs using natural language / YAML and will generate the crontab files for you. @Github
  3. PHP Cron Expression Parser – Standard (V7) compliant crontab expression parser/validator with support for time zones. @Github
  4. PhpGt/Cron (PHP) – Define background jobs in standard crontab format and the Cron Runner will execute them when they are due. Jobs can be either normal scripts, or calls to static functions with automatic autoloading taken care of. @Github
  5. Cronicle (NodeJS) – A simple, distributed task scheduler and runner with a web based UI. @GitHub / Website

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Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps.

What they have to say

  • Go Beyond Static Websites. Get all the benefits of static websites with none of the limitations. Gatsby sites are fully functional React apps so you can create high-quality, dynamic web apps, from blogs to e-commerce sites to user dashboards.
  • Use a Modern Stack for Every Site. No matter where the data comes from, Gatsby sites are built using React and GraphQL. Build a uniform workflow for you and your team, regardless of whether the data is coming from the same backend.
  • Load Data From Anywhere. Gatsby pulls in data from any data source, whether it’s Markdown files, a headless CMS like Contentful or WordPress, or a REST or GraphQL API. Use source plugins to load your data, then develop using Gatsby’s uniform GraphQL interface.
  • Performance Is Baked In. Ace your performance audits by default. Gatsby automates code splitting, image optimization, inlining critical styles, lazy-loading, and prefetching resources, and more to ensure your site is fast — no manual tuning required.
  • Host at Scale for Pennies. Gatsby sites don’t require servers so you can host your entire site on a CDN for a fraction of the cost of a server-rendered site. Many Gatsby sites can be hosted entirely free on services like GitHub Pages and Netlify.

What I have to say …

While researching some popular static site generation tools, GatsbyJS comes up often. I have played with NuxtJS and Hugo in the past, but what I REALLY like about GatsbyJS is the plugin / modular system. You can build your website with plain-old React and CSS styles, but make your development more efficient by adding node_modules.

Also being able to import any data source with ease, using GraphQL, is amazing. And when it comes to content management, you can easily hook a headless WordPress or Drupal setup into the mix and consume their REST APIs :)

I am not switching my own website to GatsbyJS anytime soon, but its another tool in my toolbox for future project consideration !

There are many tutorials on Youtube about getting started, maybe something to consider for the next freetime testdrive ;) Enjoy …

GatsbyJS @ Github

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A runtime developer console, interactive debugger and REPL for PHP.

  • PsySH can be used as an interactive debugger, much like JavaScript’s debugger statement, saving you from endless var_dump() and die() iterations. Just drop this line in where you’d like to have a breakpoint: eval(\Psy\sh());
  • PsySH has tab completion for variable names, functions, classes, methods, properties, and even files! Just start typing, then hit [tab]. But you probably already guessed that.
  • Most PHP shells are terrible at namespaces. PsySH does just what you’d expect.
  • Have a question about a core PHP function? Try doc array_map. Want to read the documentation for an object property? Run doc $response->statusTexts.
  • The list command knows all about your code — and everyone else’s. Easily list and search all variables, constants, classes, interfaces, traits, functions, methods and properties.
  • Easily show the source code for any userland object, class, interface, trait, constant, method or property.
  • No worries, PsySH has your back. We caught it for you, and made it available via the wtf command.
  • Show, search, save and replay your shell history.
  • and much more :)

Integrations

Github
Website

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Manet is a REST API server which allows capturing screenshots of websites using various parameters.

The Node.js server can use SlimerJS or PhantomJS as headless browser engines.

I have build similar with CasperJS, but this is far better for those that want a simple straight solution.

@GitHub

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A nice set of CSS3 Animations that can be easily used to spice up your design.

The animations can be triggered through Javascript, jQuery and the timings can be tweaked through pure CSS. The package also provides gulp, so that you can tweak every aspect easily.

Demo
Github

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  1. SPRITEOWL is a Photoshop extension that takes over the boring part of working with sprite images and CSS.
    Retrieves x, y, width and height info of all sprite elements
    Exports retina ready PNG files and required media queries of your Photoshop sprite file
    Supports preprocessors LESS, SASS/SCSS & Stylus
    Spriteowl
  2. CSSOWL is a mixin library that works with Spriteowl.
    LESS, SASS/SCSS & Stylus support
    Open source
    Cssowl

Two tools that can enhance your workflow immensely. Enjoy!

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15. Mai 2019

ZombieLoad Attack

„After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them. While programs normally only see their own data, a malicious program can exploit the fill buffers to get hold of secrets currently processed by other running programs. These secrets can be user-level secrets, such as browser history, website content, user keys, and passwords, or system-level secrets, such as disk encryption keys.“ – zombieloadattack.com

There seems to be a new security related story every day. Read about the latest CPU related issues at CPU.fail.

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Since I started in 2002, all iterations of portalZINE have been pure english content websites. You can read about the why on my services page.

I had potential customers in Germany complain about that a lot over the past few years. But your own website often suffers, while your customers get all the attention. That is how it is and how it should be!

Creating Multi – Language websites has been part of my services & portfolio for years, with an extreme application setup handling 13 languages in 2014 for the soccer world cup.

Multi-Language setups have come a long way and it was time to showcase that on my own setup as well. Not only to calm those potential customers, but to testdrive new functionality and possibilities on my own setup. portalZINE has always been my testlab for stability and new feature sets.

Most of my static pages are available in English and German now, the blog itself will remain pure English.

Need help setting up a multi language website, get in touch!

Cheers
Alex

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Composercat is a comprehensive GUI for the Composer package manager, designed both for professionals and people taking their first steps with Composer.

A nice entry point for everyone that is afraid of the console. The GUI application is currently in beta and available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

„Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.“

Composercat
Composer

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