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How to Create New Windows 10 NTFS Drive partition from new empty ( Unallocated ) space with Windows Disk Management or diskpart command

Thursday, November 18th, 2021

As mentioned in previous article, I've been setting up a new PC that is a bit old a 11 years old Lenovo ThinkCentre model M90P with 8 GB of Memory, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz 3.19 GHz, Intel Q57 Express Chipset.

After the installation was successful on the new Desktop PC attached SSD, I was curious to see how Windows detects the 521 GB Solid State Drive Samsung Disk, as well as to assign all the SSD Disk space, so I don't have unused parts of the drive hanging around.

To get the exact type of SSD installed on the Lenovo ThinkCentre, it comes to a simple PowerShell command (note that the PowerShell command has to be executed as Administrator).

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk

Number FriendlyName SerialNumber MediaType CanPool OperationalStatus HealthStatus Usage Size
—— ———— ———— ——— ——- —————– ———— —– —-
0 SAMSUNG MZ7LN512HAJQ-00000 S3TVNX0MC04330 SSD True OK Healthy Auto-Select 476.94 GB

PS C:\Windows\system32>

During the Windows installation, I did installed Windows on a 110GB partition that was left behind from my attempt to copy another 120GB ssd drive as, I've described in my previous article.
Cause of that big part of the SAMSUNG MZ7LN512HAJQ-00000 SSD was left unpartitioned ( unallocated ) and respectively the space did not show in Windows, hence to work around this I was supposed to
create new Windows Drive and format it either in VFAT (FAT32) or NTFS. Through the years when I had to do such an operations I often either booted from some bootCD and did the desired partitioning or if
partitioning had to be done on a LivePC without reboot, I've used Windows Partitioning Software, such as:

The Industry Standard Partition Manager ( Acronis Disk Director )
EaseUS Partition Manager

Using a Good partition manager is a great thing if some complicated partitioning operations needs to be done, however for such a trivial stuff such as mine in that case – Creating a new NTFS filesystem from unallocated space is a bit of nonsense, thus this time I've decided to use the Windows Standard tool for Partitioinng

Disk Management

To run the tool you need to run Computer Management tool first either by just looking it up in the Search bar near Start menu (Windows 10 flag icon) or by invoking command line start window, by pressing together

Windows Button + R and runnining command:

C:\Users\Emilian> compmgmt.msc

From there on navigate to

Storage -> Disk Management

Go over box Unallocated (365.15 GB) and Press Right Mouse Button and select

-> New Simple Volume

Next steps are quite self explanatory, had to just follow the New Simple Volme Wizard steps

I Prefer to use NTFS because it is quicker and kinda of a standard since Windows 8+ onwards, besides that this computer will be used as a simple web browsing station and there is no plans the disk will ever have to be attached to a different OS like UNIX / LInux..However always keep in mind for compitability reasons VFAT Filesystem is usually not a bad idea.

As you can see the drive is prepared and now accessible from Windows Explorer under Drive F:\. If you wonder why the drive is not D:\, it seems to create the D:\ the unallocated space is supposed to be be on a separate Disk which waas not the case with this PC setup.

After installing the SSD drive and setting the proper partitions another good practice is to use Disk Defragmenter Win tool to optimize the Drives for speed. Another useful feature of disk degragmenter is you can use it to check what kind of hard drive you have installed e.g. SATA or SSD, as well as check if the installed SSD is NVME (Non-Volatile-Memory-Express), e.g. of a faster type.

To run Disk Degrafmenter do Win key + R

C:\Users\Emilian> dfrgui

Below is what dfrgui reports on the ThinkCentre after running Disk Optimize for each Drive – (Optimize All) option.

Just to show you what you can see with dfrgui, here is the dfrgui screenshot from another PC that has attached both SATA disk and NVME SSD Drive.

How to do partitioning from Windows console with diskpart command (useful for scripting)

If you're coming from Linux world and you're pretty used to fdisk / cfdisk etc. to do partitioning daily, then you'll be most happy to hear about existence of the diskpart command in Windows, which is a kinda of an equivalent tool.
The tool is perfect for domain administrators which need to do some dynamic partitioning operations on multiple computers at once.

To use diskpart you need Administrator command prompt, there is much you can do with diskpart, below is how to create another NTFS partition on a secondary

C:\Windows\System32> diskpart

DISKPART> list disk

DISKPART> select disk 2

To clean all the content (e.g. delete everything on hard drive) e.g. all files and directories

!!! BEWARE NOT TO DELETE BY MISTAKE YOUR DATA DON'T BLAME ME IF YOU JUST COPY PASTE IRRESPONSIBLY WITHOUT THINKING.
AFTER ALL IT IS YOUR COMPUTER !!!

DISKPART> clean

Next lets, create a partition, in below screenshot you can see how to use help and what are the supported partition types in Windows 10 as of year 2021.

DISKPART> create partition primary

To format new assigned primary partition as NTFS

DISKPART> format fs=ntfs

Once formatted to assign Drive letter that is the next available free one in order

DISKPART> assign

If instead of auto assigning a letter to new formatted partition, you would want to assign a specific Drive letter, lets say F:\> as it was in our case with the Graphical Windows Disk Management tool earlier in article.

DISKPART> assign letter=F

Using diskpart it is pretty easy to do much stuff from command line such as formatting a new attached empty unallocated drive, or formatting and setting a desired filesysteem of external attached Hard Drive. Note that the disk list arguments will list any externally attached Supported Storage and you can use disklist similarly to do quick format / repartition / wipe out data or whatever.

Further on just for fun I've run CPUID which is a great Windows freeware tool to report System Information, pretty much like the good old Everest such as exact CPU type, MainBoard, Graphics Card and Mainboard type of the certain hardware you have on running.

That's all folks Hope this article, helped you learn something new.

Cheers 😉

Tags: about, administrator, after, ALL, and, another, ANY, are, around, article, bit, brand, GB, Installation Program, Intel Q57 Express Chipset, OS, Pc, setting, Windows Disk Management, years
Posted in Various, Windows | No Comments »

17th of May Saint Martyr Nikolay Sofiiski (Nikolas of Sofia) – Bulgarian Martyr Confessor saint from the XV century

Friday, May 21st, 2021

Saint Confessor Nikolay Sofijski (Nikolay of Sofia) Short Biography

St. Nikolay (Nicolas) of Sofia has been born in Ioannina (city now in territory of Greece). He was a pious and with his honorable craft of shoemaking going through the stormy sea of life. When he arrived in Sofia (Serdica / Sredetz), one of the main cities of the Ottoman Empire of that time, a long remain of the glorious past when even the righteous emperor Constantine The great was considering to set as a capital of the Eastern empire either Constantinople today's Istanbul in Turkey or Sofia (Fortress of Serdika).

When Nikolay came to Sofia, he was immediately recognized by the Turkish authorities and rich people of the city and to have him part of their "nobel" turkish society and enrich the city ruleship, the Turkish tried to push Nikolay to accept Islam.
Once a time Turkish invited Nikolay, put a somniferous herb in his offered drink and once he fall asleep without his knowledge they have circumcised him according to Islamic tradition observance.
Once awaken Nikolay realised what has been done to him and fall in a deep regret and mourned over the abuse of his body which according the Christian faith is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Once he started appearing on the streets of Sofia, Turkish immediately invited him to attend the mosque considering him already a muslim due to the circumcision ritual commited on him.
He firmly rejected the offer publicly, considering himself a Christian as he never publicly resigned his Christian faith and never ever wanted to be muslim and never ever has attended another temple apart from the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church he belonged to.
Facing the rejection, the powerful of the day turks cannot believe their eyes as they already thought Nikolay accepted the fact he is already a muslim, not understanding that for a Christian the temporary flesh is nothing but a temporary hut and the Spiritual and Eternal Soul and The Spirit of God which enlightens it as well as the Eternal Kingdom of Heaven is everything. The turks thouhgt over it fleshly, thinking that having a sign of circumcision already puts a person belonging to his faith, not knowing that the the first desciples of Christ, the most holy apostles as belonging to the Jewish faith had their circumcision themselves, and this circumcision never ever hindered their faith in the Resurrected Messiah Jesus Christ.

Immediately facing the rejecting the Turks, arrested him as a traitor of their faith and put him into a harsh torments.

Combined icon with the living of saint Nikolay of Sofia

Putting him on trial In the local court, the judge announced his opinion that Nikolay doesn't hold a fault, neither against Islam neither against the claimants.
Nevertheless the crowd put Nikolay outside of Sofia (in a similar way the Jews resurrected Christ outside of the city of Jerusalem) in Sofia's near region called "Yuch Bunar", translated from Turkish as the ("The Tree Wells"), there they stoned to death on 17th of May year 1555 A.D., (the stoning a transgressor of the Islamic law, tradition is still followed by some countries even today, for example I heard similar cases do happen still in Saudi Arabia for sinners against islamic law).

Saint_Bulgarian_Christian_martyr_Nikolay-Sofiiski-year-1555AD-commemorated-17-th-of-May

Saint Nikolay icon in his traditional Bulgarian clothes wear (Nosia)
holding his shoemaking instrument

His holy body has been moved to the graveyear called (Търница) Térnitza and has been burned – and the dust has been scattered through the four directions of the world North, East, South, West following islamic tradition and in attempt to completely irradicate the memory of the saint in the relatives and the living Christians of that time. Even though due to the request of Matey Gramatik (Mathew the Gramatik – translated as Chronicler / Annalist), a boy managed to collect little burned part remains of the relics and a pious christian, secretly made a burial prayer for his Soul (Опело – called Opelo in the Slavonic Eastern Orthodox Church) according to the Christian tradition and buried him with honor.

saint_Nikolay-new-of-Sofia-sv_nikolay_novi

Soon after the martyrdom of saint Nikolay the New, the Metropolitan of Sredetz Iakov (Jacob), announced the canonization of st. Nikolay on a specially summoned for the consideration of saintship of St. Nikolay, a Local Church Metropolitan Council. Jacob received parts from holy relics (parts of the skull and the bones) of st. Nikolay, that has been secretly kept by a faithful Christians till then and placed the new received saint relics and placed them together in the ark (coffin) with the incorruptable holy relics of Saint King Stephan Milutin at that time located in Church of St. Archangel Michael, see my previous article pilgrimage to the incorruptable Holy relics of Saint Stephan Milutin in Cathedral Saint Nedelya, Sofia Bulgaria. Later parts of the holy relics has been housed in in a Wood maden Church.

The grave of saint Nikolay of Sofia is one of the few known graves of Bulgarian saints. Today, it is situated in the city center of Sofia capital city of Bulgaria in the district "Три кладенци" / "The Three Wells". Three hundred meters from there (in the tiny park like garden between the streets of "Pirotska" and "Opalchenska") lays a Beatiful Majestic Church, dedicated to the Holy Martyr st. Nikolay Sofijski. The Church of Saint Nicolas of Sofia is one of the biggest Cathedral Churches in Bulgaria (it is second by size in city of Sofia). The Temple has been rised following a project of architecture created by Anton Tornyov after the Liberation of Bulgarian following the Russian/Bulgarian-Turkish war on 3-rd of December 1900. Church saint Nikolay Sofijski has been consecrated by Metropolitan Partenij (Parthenius of Sofia was a senior Bulgarian clergyman and church figure, Metropolitan of Sofia from 1892 to 1918. Metropolitan Parthenius is an exceptional clergyman who has left a lasting mark in the history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.).

Church-of-Saint_Nikolay-Sofijski-Cyrkva_Sv_Nikolaj_Sofijski

Church of Saint Nikolay of Sofia in Sofia Bulgaria (corner of street "Opalchenska" and "Pirotska").

Church-of-saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-internal-view-Church-icons-and-architecture-decoration

Church Nikolay Sofijski view to Iconostasis Church interior

Saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-Church-dome-Christ

Church dome paintings of St. Nikolay Sofijski

Saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-Church-Iconostasis-icons

Iconostasis of the Church (notice the beatiful flower forms curved wood)

In the beginning of XXth century in 1870s on the exact place of the grave of the saint has been built a small chapel in his memoriam. It is situated in a small yard on today's Street of "Tzar Simeon / King Simeon" it is opened for pilgrim visitors everyday in the early afternoon every working day.
Chapel-with-grave-of-Saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-1
The Chapel entrance door

Chapel-with-grave-of-Saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-2

A Heavenly beauty roman like chapel

The Chapel on the grave of Saint Nikolas of Sofia, built on the place called "Terniza" (Tzar Simeon Street), where on 17-th of May, year 1555 A.D. where remains of the saint has been burned by turks – photo by Martin Mitov (C)

Chapel-with-grave-of-Saint-Nikolay-of-Sofia-3

The Grave of Saint Nikolay of Sofia (View to Alter dedicated to the matryr saint)

The holy relics of Saint Nikolay the new are now preserved in his Church and are brought for veneration by believers and pilgrims on each 16 and 17 of May and sometimes in a Church feasts of a higher importance.

Each 17-th of May in Sofia it is a tradition for clirics (clergy) to gather together with pilgrims and layman for a Lithia with the holy relics of saint Nikolay from the Church to the chapel, and for the following two days 18, 19th of May his holy relics are publicly displayed for veneration.

Sofia's mediaval historian and clergyman deacon Matey Gramatik (upmentioned), was a comtemporary of the saint and eyewitness of his martyrdom and death, soon after wrote his Church service and Biography (Saint Living). Today the original manuscript is preserved in the the Library of the church "St. Martyr Nikolai Novi Sofiyski" in Sofia.

Let by the holy prayers of Saint Nikolay Sofijski our homeland Bulgaria is given peace prosperity in The Hope, Faith and Love and every Good and firmness in the True faith given by Christ the Holy Eastern Orthodox faith. Let by his Holy prayers God gives peace and love to everyone in the world and grant, repentance for us the lost and spiritually poor and "fatherless" children of the 21st century.

Tags: after, against, and, another, Apostles, architecture, are, article, attempt, attend, beginning, between, biography, body, bones, bulgaria, Bulgarian, bulgarian orthodox church, called, Cannot
Posted in Christianity, Educational, Everyday Life | No Comments »

Christ is Risen – Truly He is Risen – Happy Easter !

Tuesday, May 4th, 2021

admin

One more year the Holy Fire has descended and we have been blessed to great Each other with the All Joyful Paschal Greeting !

Христос възкресе! Воистина възкресе! (Hristos vozkrese! Voistina vozkrese!)

Христос Воскресе – Воистину Воскресе! Христос възкресе! Воистина възкресе! (Hristos vozkrese! Voistina vozkrese!)
Христос васкрсе! Ваистину васкрсе! (Hristos vaskrse! Vaistinu vaskrse!)
Χριστὸς ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!Christ is Risen ! Truly He is Risen !

For complete list of Paschal Greeting as a referrence to get idea how other weird languages sound like and how it is used in the major Eastern Orthodox Churches all around the world check out my previous article Christ is Risen Eastern Orthodox Resurrection Paschal Greeting in Different Languages

Tags: admin, ALL, and, around, article, Blessed, check, Chi, Christ, Churches, complete, complete list, Easter, Eastern, eastern orthodox, eastern orthodox churches, eta, Fire, Great, Risen
Posted in Christianity | No Comments »

How to redirect / forward all postfix emails to one external email address?

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Lets say you're a sysadmin doing email migration of a Clustered SMTP and due to that you want to capture for a while all incoming email traffic and redirect it (forward it) towards another single mailbox, where you can review the mail traffic that is flowing for a few hours and analyze it more deeper. This aproach is useful if you have a small or middle sized mail servers and won't be so useful on a mail server that handels few hundreds of mails hourly. In below article I'll show you how.

How to redirect all postfix mail for a specific domain to single external email address?

There are different ways but if you don't want to just intercept the traffic and a create a copy of email traffic using the always_bcc integrated postfix option (as pointed in my previous article postfix copy every email to a central mailbox). You can do a copy of email flow via some custom written dispatcher script set to be run by the MTA on each mail arriva, or use maildrop filtering functionality below is very simple example with maildrop in case if you want to filter out and deliver to external email address only email targetted to specific domain.

If you use maildrop as local delivery agent to copy email targetted to specifidc domain to another defined email use rule like:

if ( /^From:.*domain\.com/:h ) {
cc "!someothermail@domain2.com"
}

To use maildrop to just forward email incoming from a specific sender towards local existing email address on the postfix to an external email address use something like:

if ( /^From: .*linus@mail.example.com.*/ )
{
        dotlock "forward.lock" {
          log "Forward mail"
          to "|/usr/sbin/sendmail linuxbox@collector.example.com"
        }
}

Then to make the filter active assuming the user has a physical unix mailbox, paste above to local user's $HOME/.mailfilter.

What to do if your mail delivered via your Email-Server.com are sent from a monitoring and alarming scripts that are sending towards many mailboxes that no longer exist after the migration?

To achive capturing all normal attempted to be sent traffic via the mail server, we can forward all served mails towards a single external mail address you can use the nice capability of postfix to understand PCRE perl compatible regular expressions. Regular expressions in postfix of course has its specific I recommend you take a look to the postfix regexp table documentation here, as well as check the Postfix Regex / Tester / Debugger online tool – useful to validate a regexp you want to implement.

How to use postfix regular expression to do a redirect of all sent emails via your postfix mail relayhost towards external mail servers?

In main.cf /etc/postfix/main.cf include this line near bottom or as a last line:

virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, regexp:/etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

One defines the virtual file which can be used to define any of your virtual domains you want to simulate as present on the local postfix, the regexp: does load the file which is read by postfix where you can type the regular expression applied to every incoming email via SMTP port 25 or encrypted MTA ports 385 / 995 etc.

So how to redirect all postfix mail to one external email address for later analysis?

Create file /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

/.+@.+/ external-forward-email@gmail.com

Next build the mapfile (this will generate /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp.db )

# postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

This also requires a virtual.db to exist. If it doesn't create an empty file called virtual and run again postmap postfix .db generator

# touch /etc/postfix/virtual && postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

Note in /etc/postfix/virtual you can add your postfix mail domains for which you want the MTA to accept mail as a local mail.

In case you need to view all postfix defined virtual domains configured to accept mail locally on the mail server.

$ postconf -n | grep virtual
virtual_alias_domains = mydomain.com myanotherdomain.com
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

The regexp /.+@.+/ external-forward-email@gmail.com applied will start forwarding mails immediately after you reload the MTA with:

# systemctl restart postfix

If you want to exclude target mail domains to not be captured by above regexp, in /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp place:

/.+@exclude-domain1.com/ @exclude-domain1.com
/.+@exclude-domain2.com/ @exclude-domain2.com

Time for a test. Send a test email

Next step is to Test it mail forwarding works as expected

# echo -e "Tseting body" | mail -s "testing subject" -r "testing@test.com" whatevertest-user@mail-recipient-domain.com

Tags: after, again, alias, ALL, amp, and, another, ANY, are, article, com, copy, email address, file, How to, MTA, postfix, redirect, traffic, use
Posted in Postfix, System Administration | No Comments »

Linux show largest sized packages / Which Deb, RPM Linux installed package use most disk space and How to Free Space for critical system updates

Sunday, January 12th, 2020

linux-show-largest-sized-packages-which-deb-rpm-linux-package-use-most-disk-space-to-free-space-for-critical-system-updates

A very common problem that happens on both Linux installed servers and Desktop Linux is a starting to fill / (root partition). This problem could happen due to several reasons just to point few of them out of my experience low disk space (ending free space) could be due to:

– Improper initial partitioning / bad space planning / or OS install made in a hurry (due to time constrains)
– Linux installed on old laptop machine with low Hard Disk Drive capacity (e.g. 80 Giga / 160 GB)
– Custom user partitioning on install time aiming for a small root partition originally and changing space requirements in time
– Due to increasing space taken by Linux updates / user stored files etc / distribution OS Level upgrades dist-upgrades.
– Improperly assigned install time partitions cause of lack of knowledge to understand how partitioning is managed.
– Due to install being made in a hurry
– Linux OS installed on a Cloud based VPN (e.g. running) in a Cloud Instance that is hosted in Amazon EC2, Linode, Digital Ocean, Hostgator etc.

So here is a real time situation that happened me many times, you're launching an apt-get upgrade / apt-get dist-upgrade or yum upgrade the packages are about to start downloading or downloaded and suddenly you get a message of not enough disk space to apply OS package updates …
That's nasty stuff mostly irritating and here there are few approaches to take.

a. perhaps easiest you can ofcourse extend the partition (with a free spaced other Primary or Extended partition) with something like:

parted (the disk partitioning manipulator for Linux), gparted (in case if Desktop with GUI / XOrg server running)

b. if not enough space on the Hard Disk Drive or SSD (Solid State Drive) and you have a budget to buy and free laptop / PC slot to place another physical HDD to clone it to a larger sized HDD and use some kind of partition clone tool, such as:

dd
clonezilla
rsync
Mondo GPL Rescue Disaster recovery
Fog – Free Open Source network computer cloning tool

or any of the other multiple clone tools available in Linux.

But what if you don't have the option for some reason to extend the paritiotn, how can you apply the Critical Security Errata Updates issued to patch security vulnerabilities reported by well known CVEs?
Well you can start with the obvious easy you can start removing unnecessery stuff from the system (if home is also stored on the / – root partiiton) to delete something from there, even delete the /usr/local/man pages if you don't plan to read it free some logs by archiving purging logs from /var/log/* …

But if this is not possible, a better approach is simply try to remove / purge any .deb / .rpm whatever distro package manager packages that are not necessery used and just hanging around, that is often the case especially on Linux installed on Notebooks for a personal home use, where with years you have installed a growing number of packages which you don't actively use but installed just to take a look, while hunting for Cool Linux games and you wanted to give a try to Battle of Wesnoth / FreeCIV / AlienArena / SuperTux Kart / TuxRacer etc. or some GUI heavy programs like Krita / Inskape / Audacity etc.

To select which package might be not needed and just takes space hence you need to to list all installed packages on the system ordered by their size this is different in Debian based Linuces e.g. – Debian GNU / Linux / Ubuntu / Mint etc. and RPM based ones Fedora / CentOS / OpenSuSE

1. List all RPM installed packages by Size on CentOS / SuSE

Finding how much space each of the installed rpm packages take on the HDD and displaying them in a sorted order is done with:

rpm -qa –queryformat '%10{size} – %-25{name} \t %{version}\n' | sort -n

From the command above, the '%10{size}' option aligns the size of the package to the right with a padding of 10 characters. The '%-25{name} aligns the name of the package to the left, padded to 25 characters. The '%{version} indicates the version and 'sort -n' flag sorts the packages according to size from the smallest to the largest in bytes.

2. List all installed RPM packages sorted by size on Fedora

Fedora has introduced the dnf package manager instead of yum, to get how much size individual rpm package occupies on system:

dnf info samba
Available Packages
Name : samba
Arch : x86_64
Epoch : 2
Version : 4.1.20
Release : 1.fc21
Size : 558 k
Repo : updates
Summary : Server and Client software to interoperate with Windows machines
URL : http://www.samba.org/
License : GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+
Description : Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs
: for Linux and Unix.

To get a list of all packages on system with their size

dnf info * | grep -i "Installed size" |sort -n

3. List all installed DEB packages on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint etc. with dpkg / aptitude / apt-get and wajig

The most simple way to get a list of largest packages is through dpkg

# dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n
brscan4
6 default-jre
6 libpython-all-dev
6 libtinfo-dev
6 python-all
6 python-all-dev
6 task-cinnamon-desktop
6 task-cyrillic
6 task-desktop
6 task-english
6 task-gnome-desktop
6 task-laptop
6 task-lxde-desktop
6 task-mate-desktop
6 task-print-server
6 task-ssh-server
6 task-xfce-desktop
8 mysql-client
8 printer-driver-all
…
…
207766   libwine
215625   google-chrome-stable
221908   libwine
249401   frogatto-data
260717   linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64
262512   linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64
264899   mame
270589   fonts-noto-extra
278903   skypeforlinux
480126   metasploit-framework

above cmd displays packages in size order, largest package last, but the output will include also size of packages, that used to exist,
have been removed but was not purged. Thus if you find a package that is shown as very large by size but further dpkg -l |grep -i package-name shows package as purged e.g. package state is not 'ii' but 'rc', the quickest work around is to purge all removed packages, that are still not purged and have some configuration remains and other chunks of data that just take space for nothing with:

# dpkg –list |grep "^rc" | cut -d " " -f 3 | xargs sudo dpkg –purge

Be cautious when you execute above command, because if for some reason you uninstalled a package with the idea to keep old configuration files only and in case if you decide to use it some time in future to reuse already custom made configs but do run above purge commands all such package saved kept configs will disappear.
For people who don't want to mess up with, uninstalled but present packages use this to filter out ready to be purged state packages.

# dpkg-query -Wf '${db:Status-Status} ${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sed -ne 's/^installed //p'|sort -n

aptitude – (high level ncurses interface like to package management) can also be easily used to list largest size packages eating up your hard drive in both interactive or cli mode, like so:

# aptitude search –sort '~installsize' –display-format '%p %I' '~i' | head
metasploit-framework 492 MB
skypeforlinux 286 MB
fonts-noto-extra 277 MB
mame 271 MB
linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64 269 MB
linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64 267 MB
frogatto-data 255 MB
libwine 227 MB
google-chrome-stable 221 MB
libwine:i386 213 MB

–sort is package sort order, and ~installsize specifies a package sort policy.
installsize means 'sort on (estimated) installed size', and the preceding ~ means sort descending (since default for all sort policies is ascending).
–display-format changes the <you guessed :->. The format string '%p %I' tells aptitude to output package name, then installed size.
'~i' tells aptitude to search only installed packages.

How much a certain .deb package removal will free up on the disk can be seen with apt-get as well to do so for the famous 3D acceleration Graphic Card (enabled) or not test game extremetuxracer:

# apt-get –assume-no –purge remove "texlive*" | grep "be freed" |
awk '{print $4, $5}'

Perhaps, the easiest to remember and more human readable output biggest packages occupied space on disk is to install and use a little proggie called wajig to do so

# apt install –yes wajig

Here is how to pick up 10 biggest size packages.

root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# wajig large|tail -n 10
fonts-noto-cjk-extra 204,486 installed
google-chrome-stable 215,625 installed
libwine 221,908 installed
frogatto-data 249,401 installed
linux-image-4.19.0-5-amd64 260,717 installed
linux-image-4.19.0-6-amd64 262,512 installed
mame 264,899 installed
fonts-noto-extra 270,589 installed
skypeforlinux 278,903 installed
metasploit-framework 480,126 installed

As above example lists a short package name and no description for those who want get more in depth knowledge on what exactly is the package bundle used for use:

# aptitude search –sort '~installsize' –display-format '%30p %I %r %60d' '~i' |head

%30p %I %r %60d display more information in your format string, or change field widths, enhanced format string

Meaning of parameters is:

%30p : package name in field width=30 char
%I : estimated install size
%r : 'reverse depends count': approximate number of other installed packages which depend upon this package
%60d : package's short description in field width=60 char

wajig is capable is a python written and idea is to easify Debian console package management (so you don't have to all time remember when and with which arguments to use apt-get / apt-cache etc.), below is list of commands it accepts.

root@jeremiah:/home/hipo## wajig commands
addcdrom Add a Debian CD/DVD to APT's list of available sources
addrepo Add a Launchpad PPA (Personal Package Archive) repository
aptlog Display APT log file
autoalts Mark the Alternative to be auto-set (using set priorities)
autoclean Remove no-longer-downloadable .deb files from the download cache
autodownload Do an update followed by a download of all updated packages
autoremove Remove unused dependency packages
build Get source packages, unpack them, and build binary packages from them.
builddeps Install build-dependencies for given packages
changelog Display Debian changelog of a package
clean Remove all deb files from the download cache
contents List the contents of a package file (.deb)
dailyupgrade Perform an update then a dist-upgrade
dependents Display packages which have some form of dependency on the given package
describe Display one-line descriptions for the given packages
describenew Display one-line descriptions of newly-available packages
distupgrade Comprehensive system upgrade
download Download one or more packages without installing them
editsources Edit list of Debian repository locations for packages
extract Extract the files from a package file to a directory
fixconfigure Fix an interrupted install
fixinstall Fix an install interrupted by broken dependencies
fixmissing Fix and install even though there are missing dependencies
force Install packages and ignore file overwrites and depends
hold Place packages on hold (so they will not be upgraded)
info List the information contained in a package file
init Initialise or reset wajig archive files
install Package installer
installsuggested Install a package and its Suggests dependencies
integrity Check the integrity of installed packages (through checksums)
large List size of all large (>10MB) installed packages
lastupdate Identify when an update was last performed
listall List one line descriptions for all packages
listalternatives List the objects that can have alternatives configured
listcache List the contents of the download cache
listcommands Display all wajig commands
listdaemons List the daemons that wajig can start, stop, restart, or reload
listfiles List the files that are supplied by the named package
listhold List packages that are on hold (i.e. those that won't be upgraded)
listinstalled List installed packages
listlog Display wajig log file
listnames List all known packages; optionally filter the list with a pattern
listpackages List the status, version, and description of installed packages
listscripts List the control scripts of the package of deb file
listsection List packages that belong to a specific section
listsections List all available sections
liststatus Same as list but only prints first two columns, not truncated
localupgrade Upgrade using only packages that are already downloaded
madison Runs the madison command of apt-cache
move Move packages in the download cache to a local Debian mirror
new Display newly-available packages
newdetail Display detailed descriptions of newly-available packages
news Display the NEWS file of a given package
nonfree List packages that don't meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines
orphans List libraries not required by any installed package
policy From preferences file show priorities/policy (available)
purge Remove one or more packages and their configuration files
purgeorphans Purge orphaned libraries (not required by installed packages)
purgeremoved Purge all packages marked as deinstall
rbuilddeps Display the packages which build-depend on the given package
readme Display the README file(s) of a given package
recdownload Download a package and all its dependencies
recommended Display packages installed as Recommends and have no dependents
reconfigure Reconfigure package
reinstall Reinstall the given packages
reload Reload system daemons (see LIST-DAEMONS for available daemons)
remove Remove packages (see also PURGE command)
removeorphans Remove orphaned libraries
repackage Generate a .deb file from an installed package
reportbug Report a bug in a package using Debian BTS (Bug Tracking System)
restart Restart system daemons (see LIST-DAEMONS for available daemons)
rpm2deb Convert an .rpm file to a Debian .deb file
rpminstall Install an .rpm package file
search Search for package names containing the given pattern
searchapt Find nearby Debian package repositories
show Provide a detailed description of package
sizes Display installed sizes of given packages
snapshot Generates a list of package=version for all installed packages
source Retrieve and unpack sources for the named packages
start Start system daemons (see LIST-DAEMONS for available daemons)
status Show the version and available versions of packages
statusmatch Show the version and available versions of matching packages
stop Stop system daemons (see LISTDAEMONS for available daemons)
tasksel Run the task selector to install groups of packages
todo Display the TODO file of a given package
toupgrade List versions of upgradable packages
tutorial Display wajig tutorial
unhold Remove listed packages from hold so they are again upgradeable
unofficial Search for an unofficial Debian package at apt-get.org
update Update the list of new and updated packages
updatealternatives Update default alternative for things like x-window-manager
updatepciids Updates the local list of PCI ids from the internet master list
updateusbids Updates the local list of USB ids from the internet master list
upgrade Conservative system upgrade
upgradesecurity Do a security upgrade
verify Check package's md5sum
versions List version and distribution of given packages
whichpackage Search for files matching a given pattern within packages

4. List installed packages order by size in Arch Linux

ArchLinux is using the funny named package manager – pacman (a nice prank for the good old arcade game).
What is distinctive of pacman uses libalpm (Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM) library) as a back-end to perform all the actions.

# pacman -Qi | awk '/^Name/{name=$3} /^Installed Size/{print $4$5, name}' | sort -hr | head -25
296.64MiB linux-firmware
144.20MiB python
105.43MiB gcc-libs
72.90MiB python2
66.91MiB linux
57.47MiB perl
45.49MiB glibc
35.33MiB icu
34.68MiB git
30.96MiB binutils
29.95MiB grub
18.96MiB systemd
13.94MiB glib2
13.79MiB coreutils
13.41MiB python2-boto
10.65MiB util-linux
9.50MiB gnupg
8.09MiB groff
8.05MiB gettext
7.99MiB texinfo
7.93MiB sqlite
7.15MiB bash
6.50MiB lvm2
6.43MiB openssl
6.33MiB db

There is another mean to list packages by size using a ArchLinux tool called pacgraph

# pacgraph -c | head -25

Autodetected Arch.
Loading package info
Total size: 1221MB
367MB linux
144MB pacgraph
98MB cloud-init
37MB grub
35MB icu
34MB git
31698kB binutils
19337kB pacman
11029kB man-db
8186kB texinfo
8073kB lvm2
7632kB nano
7131kB openssh
5735kB man-pages
3815kB xfsprogs
3110kB sudo
3022kB wget
2676kB tar
2626kB netctl
1924kB parted
1300kB procps-ng
1248kB diffutils

4. Debian Goodies

Most debian users perhaps never hear of debian-goodies package, but I thought it is worthy to mention it as sooner or later as a sysadmin or .deb based Desktop user it might help you somewhere.

Debian-goodies is sall toolbox-style utilities for Debian systems
These programs are designed to integrate with standard shell tools,
extending them to operate on the Debian packaging system.
.
dglob – Generate a list of package names which match a pattern
[dctrl-tools, apt*, apt-file*, perl*]
dgrep – Search all files in specified packages for a regex
[dctrl-tools, apt-file (both via dglob)]
.
These are also included, because they are useful and don't justify
their own packages:
.
check-enhancements
– find packages which enhance installed packages [apt,
dctrl-tools]
checkrestart
– Help to find and restart processes which are using old versions
of upgraded files (such as libraries) [python3, procps, lsof*]
debget – Fetch a .deb for a package in APT's database [apt]
debman – Easily view man pages from a binary .deb without extracting
[man, apt* (via debget)]
debmany – Select manpages of installed or uninstalled packages [man |
sensible-utils, whiptail | dialog | zenity, apt*, konqueror*,
libgnome2-bin*, xdg-utils*]
dhomepage – Open homepage of a package in a web browser [dctrl-tools,
sensible-utils*, www-browser* | x-www-browser*]
dman – Fetch manpages from online manpages.debian.org service [curl,
man, lsb-release*]
dpigs – Show which installed packages occupy the most space
[dctrl-tools]
find-dbgsym-packages
– Get list of dbgsym packages from core dump or PID [dctrl-tools,
elfutils, libfile-which-perl, libipc-system-simple-perl]
popbugs – Display a customized release-critical bug list based on
packages you use (using popularity-contest data) [python3,
popularity-contest]
which-pkg-broke
– find which package might have broken another [python3, apt]
which-pkg-broke-build
– find which package might have broken the build of another
[python3 (via which-pkg-broke), apt]

Even simpler by that is to use dpigs shell script part of the debian-goodies package which will automatically print out the largest packages.

dpigs command output is exactly the same as 'dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -nr | head', but is useful cause you don't have to remember that complex syntax.

5. Checking where your space is gone in a Spacesniffer like GUI manner with Baobab

In my prior article Must have software on a new installed Windows 2 of the of the precious tools to set are Spacesniffer and WinDirStat.
Windows users will be highly delighted to know that SpaceSniffer equivallent is already present on Linux – say hello baobab.
Baobab is simple but useful Graphic disk usage overview program for those who don't want to mess to much with the console / terminal to find out which might be the possible directory candidate for removal. It is very simplistic but it does well what it is aimed for, to install it on a Debian or .deb based OS.

# apt install –yes baobab

baobab-entry-screen-debian-gnu-linux-screenshot

baobab Linux Hard Disk Usage Analyzer for GNOME. – It can easily scan either the whole filesystem or a specific user-requested branch (Iocal or remote)

baobab-entry-screen-debian-gnu-linux-directories-taking-most-space-pie-screenshot

Baobab / (root) directory statistics Rings Chart pie

baobab – Treemap Chart for directory usage sorted by size on disk

!!! Note that before removing any files found as taking up too much space with baobab – make sure this files are not essential parts of a .deb package first, otherwise you might break up your system !!!

KDE (Plasma) QT library users could use Qdirstat instead of baobab

qdirstat-on-gnu-linur checking what is the disk space bottleneck qdirstat KDE

6. Use ncdu or duper perl script tool to generate directory disk usage in ASCII chart bar

ncdu and duper are basicly the same except one is using ncurses and is interactive in a very simplistic interface with midnight commander.

# apt install –yes ncdu
# ncdu /root

# apt-get install –yes durep
# durep -td 1 /usr
[ /usr 14.4G (0 files, 11 dirs) ]
6.6G [############# ] 45.54% lib/
5.5G [########### ] 38.23% share/
1.1G [## ] 7.94% bin/
552.0M [# ] 3.74% local/
269.2M [ ] 1.83% games/
210.4M [ ] 1.43% src/
88.9M [ ] 0.60% libexec/
51.3M [ ] 0.35% sbin/
41.2M [ ] 0.28% include/
8.3M [ ] 0.06% lib32/
193.8K [ ] 0.00% lib64/

Conclusion

In this article, I've shortly explained the few approach you can take to handle low disk space preventing you to update a regular security updates on Linux.
The easiest one is to clone your drive to a bigger (larger) sized SATA HDD or SDD Drive or using a free space left on a hard drive to exnted the current filling up the root partition.

Further, I looked through the common reasons for endind with a disk being low spaced and a quick work around to free disk space through listing and purging larges sized package, this is made differently in different Linux distributions, because different Linux has different package managers. As I'm primary using Debian, I explained thoroughfully on how this is achieved with apt-get / dpkg-query / dpkg / aptitude and the little known debian-goodies .deb package manager helper pack. For GUI Desktop users there is baobab / qdirstat. ASCII lovers could enjoy durep and ncdu.

That's all folks hope you enjoyed and learned something new. If you know of other cool tools or things this article is missing please share.

Tags: about, again, ALL, alternative, alternatives, amazon, amd64, and, another, ANY, approximate number, apt-get, aptitude, archive, archive files, are, around, article, Ascii, audacity, baobab, check linux package size, deb, durep, ncdu, qdirstat, rpm, supertuxkart, wajig
Posted in Linux, Linux on Laptops, Various | 1 Comment »

Windows 7 how to configure Separator delimiter Divider between Pinned and Running Opened programs on Taskbar Classic theme pane

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

I've started to work as a External Consultant for Equens Worldline, who lately merged with Atos – a French multinational information technology.

As the company is mostly into the financial business and as any company that is involved with OLTP Online transaction processing , an information systems that typically facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, e.g. in a mortal language takes care for a numerous companies Credit / Debit card online payments.

Of course the technologies used both on a Server / Data Center level and for Employee personal used are a bit old fashioned. In that relation, most of the computers, I've seen used by Worldline – Atos including my work PC notebook is still running a custom version of Windows 7.

Once I had the Computer ready with the OS from the HelpDesk colleague, then it was ready to install, unfortunately, I didn't have administrator account on the Lenovo L serie laptop so I couldn't install applications. To get around this I've used PortableApps – the world's most popular portable software solution allowing you to take your favorite software with you with no need for any Installation and on Win OS computers, where you have limited access.
PortableApps is fully open source and free platform, it works from any synced cloud folder (DropBox, Google Drive, Box, etc), from your local PC on an internal or external drive, or on any portable storage device (USB flash drive, memory card, portable hard drive, etc). Because the applicatons are installed without being really binded to the Win OS, once the PortableApps ported Application is installed it can be easily moved by simply copying between PCs.

portableapps_windows_list-of-installable-programs-screenshot
PortableApps.com is currently used by millions of users all over the world and is the Largest Portable full collection of open source and freeware software, compatible commercial software, and partners in hardware industry for Microsoft Windows.

As I do often with the Windows fresh installed Windows machines I have to work on, install the great set of tools prior described in must have software on any fresh installed Windows OS as this is essential if you're a sysadmin or Advanced user for the daily work with the WinBlows

OS Graphical Interface simplicity is a crucial thing to me, cause if I have to work with Windows and spendan 8 hours each day 5 days a week in front of the Computer Display with this Complex unnecessery coloring (that Windows 7 / Windows 10 default Theme introduced), together with the visual aids on the Window Minimize and Maximize, puts a useless additional eye strain and besides that "fries" the brain (as the brain has to process all this mambo-jambo "virtual" reality graphics turning all down and up and mixing up the gamma of unreal colors for nothing …

So far so good I've set the needed software from above list and continued further to Change my Windows start menu to look like Windows 2000. Start menu and Theme To be the Classic Theme.

After setting up the Windows Classic Theme (which by the way is unfortunately, no longer available in Windows 10), I love to set my Windows Background picture to be a Sold Black Color, I do this as Black color is the less exhausting for the eyes – as one views the desktop picture thousand times and this is extra unnecessery work for the brain.

However next, unpleasant thing faced is even though now my Windows Start and Windows borders looked old-fashioned in the Windows 2000 Server, "wooden" style, the order of my (Open) Running applicaitons on the start menu bar were not isolated but were mixing, with the rest of my Pinned Program Starter icons

! Notice the Windows Media player icon being in the middle between the Lync, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer line … !

I spend some time to rewind some memories on how I did make the pinned program to distinguish itself (separate) from the rest of the Opened Runnign Windows, and had in mind that I used some kind of separator added custom Toolbar, but the bad thing was I couldn't remember exactly how so I spend some good amount of time to Google around.

And found few articles on the topic proposing to add a new Custom empty launcher program of cmd.exe and change the icon of the empty launcher to a | graphical string
I've tried a lot of this approach but it didn't work and after some experimentations, finally I figured it out. The way to do it is to add a New Toolbar that is Pointing to a Directory with a list of Programs whose icons you want to have listed with icon launchers next to Start menu.

Here is step by step what I've done to achieve configuration of Hard Separator Delimiter between my Program Launchers and Running Applications.

1. Create a New Folder somewhere under your User Home directory, lets say:
C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms

2. Add a shortcut or copy the programs starters (icons) to the TaskBar Programs

3. Unlock the Windows 7 Taskbar
E.g. Click over on any of the empty space on the taskbar after Windows Start menu button and untick Lock the Taskbar

4. Remove any Pinned programs (you have placed there earlier)

windows-7-unpin-program-from-taskbar

5. Again On an empty place on the Taskbar press the last button Mouse (Rightest button) to open Taskbar properties menu and
Go to ToolBars menu and Choose (New Toolbar)

new-toolbar-screenshot-windows-os-7

6. As a location for the new toolbar place C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms

add-custom-Quick-Launch-Toolbar-Images-screenshot

The result should be that all the programs in the selected folder will appear in the Windows pane

8. Now go over the empty space of the Windows start menu bar
and untick Show Text / Show Title

9. Hold over the Taskbar Programs holder and drag and drop it constantly holding the left mouse button
and place it over the default separator Holder (for clarity marked in below screenshot as Marked over here).

10. Move the default separator that will appear on the left close to the list of shown applications
(shown in screenshot)

11. Open any of the applications (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, MobaXterm, Opera, RDP, VLC) the result should be a fine ordered icons. Hooray !!!

12. To make more space for the Opened Active (Running) Windows, a good hint is to stretch the start menu pane field – this is done by holding a right mouse button on the edge of the gray line, like shown in below screenshot.

Note that, you will need to remove any icons that are left over binded to the default separator (holder).

13. Finally on the Taskbar (empty space) menu with the Mouse, click again right mouse button and tick on the Lock the Taskbar

That's it now your Windows 7 start menu bar will look pretty much like Linux's GNOME 2.x and GNOME Mate, and if you're a a long years Linux Desktop user you will feel at home even on Windows 7.

To further tweak the Taskbar a very useful Program is Windows 7+ Taskbar Tweaker

"7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar which can't be tweaked via registry or taskbar properties. The tweaker is designed for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.

windows-7-taskbart-tweaker-combine-grouped-buttons

I install it mostly because one single feature Combined Grouped Buttons which makes similar Windows to group together. Just having a number of Windows of the same type floating around the Taskbar is really irritating and becomes really confusing once multiple windows.

For example if you have opened 10 Windows of Explorer they will be group under the same window title pointer.

To make the Windows even more bizarre and feel more like a Linux powered Box go on and install MobaXterm as a substitute for Linux's gnome-terminal as well as the rest of things such as CygWin / GNUWin32 / GVim etc.

Also some good start up list of software I do install on new Windows Desktop PCs is described in my previous article Some standard software programs to install on Windows to make your Windows feel more like a Linux / Unix Desktop host

This time I did not needed that but on other locations another Windows useful hint I use every now and then is to set some custom programs (Lets say a PortableApps program) to Automatically run – described earlier in my earlier article how to add startup Windows 7 / 8 program run on startup.

P.S. I've tried to setup the same Classic Theme and Start menu button with the same order on Windows 10 OS, but even though a similar interface could be achieved, I've had problems with setting up the proper Running application Ordering, due to a different behavior of the Delimiter / Separators in Windows 10.

For me this Custom Windows interface and Window ordering works pretty well it saves me a lot of the eye strain and brain overcalculation for nothing.

After all, Lets not forget that God is in the Simplicity ! 🙂

Tags: access, Account, administrator, administrator account, after, again, aids, ALL, amount, and, another, ANY, application, applications, are, around, article, available, background, being
Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Windows | 1 Comment »

Helpful Hints For Starting A Small WordPress Website or Ecomerce Business

Wednesday, August 14th, 2019

Wordpress is the web application collection of PHP program behind thirty four percent (43%) of the internet’s websites, and fifteen percent (50%) of the top one hundred websites in the world, so if you’re considering it for your website then you’re perhaps thinking in the right direction. Small start-up projects a community website or even a small personal owned blog or mid to even large business presentation site can benefit greatly from setting up their Web Platrform or Ecommerce shops on a WordPress website platform (that of itself depends just on a small number of technologies such as a Linux server with a Web Server installed on it to serve PHP as well as some kind of Linux host installed Database backend engine such as MYSQL / PostgreSQL etc. …

But if you really want to create a successful ecommerce website on WordPress, that can seem a little intimidating at first as the general complexity to start up with WordPress looks very scary in the beginning. However in this article I’ll point to fewhelpful hints should get you off on the right foot, and make your entry into the world of Wodpress / WP Ecommerce a little easier and less scary.

This article is to be less technical than expected and in that will contrast slightly with many of the articles on this blog, the target audience is more of Web Marketing Manager or a Start-up Search Engine Optimization person at a small personal project or employed in the big bad corporate world.This is no something new that is going to be outlined in this article but a general rules that are known for the professional SEO Gurus but is most likely to be helpful for the starting persons.

If you happen to be one of these you should know you have to follow a set of well known rules on the website structure text, descriptions, text, orientation, ordering of menus and data etc. in order to have the WordPress based website running at full speed attracting more visitors to your site.

Photos

Importance of Photos on a Webiste
Although the text for your website is very important – more on that later – when a user first opens up your website in their browser, their eyes are going to be caught by the images that you have laid out on your website. Not using images is a big mistake, since it bores users’ eyes and makes your website seem amateur and basic, but using low quality images or irrelevant images can also harm your chances of appearing authentic to a user (yes here on this blog there are some of this low quality pictures but this is due to fact this website is more of information blog and not ecommerce. Thus at best case always make sure that you find the best, high-quality images for your website – make sure that you have the correct rights to use the images as well (as copyright infrignmenets) could cause you even a law suits ending in hundred or thousand dollar fines or even if this doesn't happen any publicity of such would reduce your website indexing rating. The images placed should always be relevant to your website. If you find a breath-taking sunset or tech-gadget picture, that’s great, but maybe not for your healthy food ecommerce store, but for your personal ranting or describing a personal experience.

Product Photos

Assuming that sooner or later even if you have a community website you will want to monerize it to bring back to yourself in material form at least part of the many years effort to bring the site to the web rank gained.
Leading on from that point, you’re going to be selling or advertise items – that’s the whole point of ecommerce. But users often find ads / online shopping frustrating due to not being able to properly see and understand what they’re buying before they make their purchase. This can lead to ‘buyer’s remorse’, and, consequently, refunds galore, which is not what you want. Make sure that images of your products are always available and of a high quality – investing in a fairly high quality camera might be a good idea – and consider many pictures for different angles or even rotating images so that the user can decide for themself which angle they want to look at.

Engaging Descriptions

“I can guarantee that you can’t remember the last five product descriptions you read – not even word-for-word, but the general ideas and vocabulary used will have been tossed into your short-term memory and forgotten in an instant. This is where your website can shine, and become better than ninety percent of those lingering on the internet,” Matthew Kelly, a project manager at WriteMyX and NextCoursework, suggests, “since putting effort into writing your product descriptions and making them lively and engaging will make your website memorable, and your subscribers will turn helpfully soon loyal customers will be more likely to come back time and time again and become repeat business, as well as mention you to their friends (social mounth to mouth marketing) and that way working as free advertising for you and making your website incredibly effective.”

Mobile-Friendly

Which device is most used to check email Laptop / PC or Mobile statistics as of year 2019

These days with the bloom of Mobile Devices that are currently overrunning the user of normal Desktop PCs, Laptops and Tablets and this trend is likely to stay and even increase, “If your website isn’t mobile-friendly in this day and age, then you won’t get anywhere with it.” Anne Baker, a marketer at BritStudent and Australia2Write, states. “Most people use their phones when they access websites, especially when they go shopping on the internet.

Statistics on user stay (secs / mins) stay on a website from Desktop PC and Mobile devices

On WordPress, this means finding a more recent theme – an older theme, maybe four-five years old, will probably not support mobile, and you just can’t afford to lose out on the mobile market.” In short, find yourself a mobile-friendly theme or install the right WordPress Pluguin that will enable you to have a Mobile Friendly theme in case if blog is accessed from a Mobile Dev or many of your customers will become frustrated with the badly formatted ‘mobile’ version of your website that they end up using, which might be for instance meant for a much larger screen. It can also ruin the atmosphere (experience) created at the accessed user site and have negative impact on your audience opion of your site or business. This is even more the case if your website or webapp is targetting to be modern and keeping with the times – or especially if it deals with IT and electronics (where the competition is huge)!

Registration

Registration Ecommerce website

Registration form (Sign Up) on a website and the overall business cycle idea behind web product or business is of critical importance as this is the point that will guarantee intimidation with the customer, failing to have the person be engaged will quickly make your website rank lower and your producs less wanted. The general rule here is to make your registration be an easy (to orientate for the user) and be present on a very visible place on the site.

Registration steps should be as less as possible as this might piss off the user and repel him out of the site before the registration is completed. Showing oportunity to register with a Pop-Up window (while the user clicks on a place showing interest for the produce might be useful in some cases but generally might also push the user back so if you decide to implement it do it with a lot of care (beware of too much aggressive marketing on our site).

An example

The registration process should be as intimidating as possible to leave joy in the user that might later return and log in to your site or ecommerce platform, e.g. be interested to stay for a longer time. The marketing tactic aiming to make the user stay for a longer time on the website (dragging his attention / interest to stuff) is nothing new by the way as it is well known marketing rule integrated in every supermarket you buy groceries, where all is made to keep you in the shop for as longer as possible. Research has shown that spending longer time within the supermarket makes the user buy more.

Returning customers can be intimidated with membership or a free gift (be it even virtual picture gift – free email whatever) or information store place could be given or if products are sold, registration will be obligatory to make them use their payment method or delivery address on next login to easify the buy out process. But if registration is convoluted and forced (e.g. user is somehow forced to become meber) then many customers will turn away and find another website for their shopping needs. Using a method like Quora’s ‘login to see more’ in that case might be a good idea even though for me this is also a very irritating and irritating – this method however should never be used if you run a ecommerce selling platform, on ecommerce site gatekeeping will only frustrate customers. Login is good to be implmeneted as a popup option (and not taking too much of the screen). Sign up and Login should be simplistic and self-explanatory – always not required but optioned and user should get the understanding of the advantage to be a member of the website if possible before the sign up procedure. Then, customers are more likely to sign up and won’t feel like they’ve been pushed into the decision – or pushed away, as the case may be.

Katrina Hatchett works as a lifestyle blogger at both Academic Brits and Assignment Help, due to a love of literature and writing, which she has had since youth. Throughout her career, she has become involved with many projects, such as writing for the PhD Kingdom blog.

Tags: access, Advantage, again, age, ALL, and, another, ANY, application, are, article, Database, linux?, little, personal, right, small, target audience, websites, Wordpress
Posted in Educational, Everyday Life, Marketing, Wordpress | No Comments »

Block Web server over loading Bad Crawler Bots and Search Engine Spiders with .htaccess rules

Monday, September 18th, 2017

In last post, I've talked about the problem of Search Index Crawler Robots aggressively crawling websites and how to stop them (the article is here) explaning how to raise delays between Bot URL requests to website and how to completely probhit some bots from crawling with robots.txt.

As explained in article the consequence of too many badly written or agressive behaviour Spider is the "server stoning" and therefore degraded Web Server performance as a cause or even a short time Denial of Service Attack, depending on how well was the initial Server Scaling done.

The bots we want to filter are not to be confused with the legitimate bots, that drives real traffic to your website, just for information

The 10 Most Popular WebCrawlers Bots as of time of writting are:

1. GoogleBot (The Google Crawler bots, funnily bots become less active on Saturday and Sundays :))

2. BingBot (Bing.com Crawler bots)

3. SlurpBot (also famous as Yahoo! Slurp)

4. DuckDuckBot (The dutch search engine duckduckgo.com crawler bots)

5. Baiduspider (The Chineese most famous search engine used as a substitute of Google in China)

6. YandexBot (Russian Yandex Search engine crawler bots used in Russia as a substitute for Google )

7. Sogou Spider (leading Chineese Search Engine launched in 2004)

8. Exabot (A French Search Engine, launched in 2000, crawler for ExaLead Search Engine)

9. FaceBot (Facebook External hit, this crawler is crawling a certain webpage only once the user shares or paste link with video, music, blog whatever in chat to another user)

10. Alexa Crawler (la_archiver is a web crawler for Amazon's Alexa Internet Rankings, Alexa is a great site to evaluate the approximate page popularity on the internet, Alexa SiteInfo page has historically been the Swift Army knife for anyone wanting to quickly evaluate a webpage approx. ranking while compared to other pages)

Above legitimate bots are known to follow most if not all of W3C – World Wide Web Consorium (W3.Org) standards and therefore, they respect the content commands for allowance or restrictions on a single site as given from robots.txt but unfortunately many of the so called Bad-Bots or Mirroring scripts that are burning your Web Server CPU and Memory mentioned in previous article are either not following /robots.txt prescriptions completely or partially.

Hence with the robots.txt unrespective bots, the case the only way to get rid of most of the webspiders that are just loading your bandwidth and server hardware is to filter / block them is by using Apache's mod_rewrite through

.htaccess

file

Create if not existing in the DocumentRoot of your website .htaccess file with whatever text editor, or create it your windows / mac os desktop and transfer via FTP / SecureFTP to server.

I prefer to do it directly on server with vim (text editor)

vim /var/www/sites/your-domain.com/.htaccess

RewriteEngine On

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Black Hole” bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Titan bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebStripper" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^NetMechanic" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^CherryPicker" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EmailCollector" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EmailSiphon" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebBandit" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EmailWolf" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^ExtractorPro" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^CopyRightCheck" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Crescent" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Wget" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^SiteSnagger" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^ProWebWalker" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^CheeseBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Teleport" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^TeleportPro" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^MIIxpc" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Telesoft" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Website Quester" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebZip" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^moget/2.1" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebZip/4.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebSauger" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebCopier" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^NetAnts" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mister PiX" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebAuto" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^TheNomad" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WWW-Collector-E" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^RMA" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^libWeb/clsHTTP" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^asterias" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^httplib" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^turingos" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^spanner" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^InfoNaviRobot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Harvest/1.5" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Bullseye/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; BullsEye; Windows 95)" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Crescent Internet ToolPak HTTP OLE Control v.1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^CherryPickerSE/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^CherryPicker /1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebBandit/3.50" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^NICErsPRO" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Microsoft URL Control – 5.01.4511" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^DittoSpyder" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Foobot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebmasterWorldForumBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^SpankBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BotALot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^lwp-trivial/1.34" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^lwp-trivial" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Wget/1.6" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BunnySlippers" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Microsoft URL Control – 6.00.8169" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^URLy Warning" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Wget/1.5.3" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^LinkWalker" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^cosmos" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^moget" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^hloader" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^humanlinks" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^LinkextractorPro" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Offline Explorer" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Mata Hari" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^LexiBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Web Image Collector" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^The Intraformant" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^True_Robot/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^True_Robot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BlowFish/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^JennyBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^MIIxpc/4.2" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BuiltBotTough" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^ProPowerBot/2.14" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^BackDoorBot/1.0" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^toCrawl/UrlDispatcher" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^WebEnhancer" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^TightTwatBot" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^suzuran" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^VCI WebViewer VCI WebViewer Win32" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^VCI" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Szukacz/1.4" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^QueryN Metasearch" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Openfind data gathere" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Openfind" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Xenu’s Link Sleuth 1.1c" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Xenu’s" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Zeus" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^RepoMonkey Bait & Tackle/v1.01" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^RepoMonkey" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Zeus 32297 Webster Pro V2.9 Win32" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Webster Pro" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^EroCrawler" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^LinkScan/8.1a Unix" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Keyword Density/0.9" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Kenjin Spider" bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "^Cegbfeieh" bad_bot

<Limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>

Above rules are Bad bots prohibition rules have RewriteEngine On directive included however for many websites this directive is enabled directly into VirtualHost section for domain/s, if that is your case you might also remove RewriteEngine on from .htaccess and still the prohibition rules of bad bots should continue to work
Above rules are also perfectly suitable wordpress based websites / blogs in case you need to filter out obstructive spiders even though the rules would work on any website domain with mod_rewrite enabled.

Once you have implemented above rules, you will not need to restart Apache, as .htaccess will be read dynamically by each client request to Webserver

2. Testing .htaccess Bad Bots Filtering Works as Expected

In order to test the new Bad Bot filtering configuration is working properly, you have a manual and more complicated way with lynx (text browser), assuming you have shell access to a Linux / BSD / *Nix computer, or you have your own *NIX server / desktop computer running

Here is how:

lynx -useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MegaIndex.ru/2.0; +http://megaindex.com/crawler)" -head -dump http://www.your-website-filtering-bad-bots.com/

Note that lynx will provide a warning such as:

Warning: User-Agent string does not contain "Lynx" or "L_y_n_x"!

Just ignore it and press enter to continue.

Two other use cases with lynx, that I historically used heavily is to pretent with Lynx, you're GoogleBot in order to see how does Google actually see your website?

Pretend with Lynx You're GoogleBot

lynx -useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" -head -dump http://www.your-domain.com/

How to Pretend with Lynx Browser You are GoogleBot-Mobile

lynx -useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" -head -dump http://www.your-domain.com/

Or for the lazy ones that doesn't have Linux / *Nix at disposal you can use WannaBrowser website

Wannabrowser – is a web based browser emulator which gives you the ability to change the User-Agent on each website req1uest, so just set your UserAgent to any bot browser that we just filtered for example set User-Agent to CheeseBot

The .htaccess rule earier added once detecting your browser client is coming in with the prohibit browser agent will immediately filter out and you'll be unable to access the website with a message like:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

Just as I've talked a lot about Index Bots, I think it is worthy to also mention three great websites that can give you a lot of Up to Date information on exact Spiders returned user-agent, common known Bot traits as well as a a current updated list with the Bad Bots etc.

Bot and Browser Resources information user-agents, bad-bots and odd Crawlers and Bots specifics

1. botreports.com
2. user-agents.org
3. useragentapi.com

An updated list with robots user-agents (crawler-user-agents) is also available in github here regularly updated by Caia Almeido

There are also a third party plugin (modules) available for Website Platforms like WordPress / Joomla / Typo3 etc.

Besides the listed on these websites as well as the known Bad and Good Bots, there are perhaps a hundred of others that might end up crawling your webdsite that might or might not need to be filtered, therefore before proceeding with any filtering steps, it is generally a good idea to monitor your HTTPD access.log / error.log, as if you happen to somehow mistakenly filter the wrong bot this might be a reason for Website Indexing Problems.

Hope this article give you some valueable information. Enjoy ! 🙂

Tags: article, blogs, browser, case, cause, client, com, common, content, CPU, desktop computer, filter bad spider search index bots htaccess, Hope, how to filter bad robots that doesnt help your website index, make, need, order, stop bad spammer and email harvesting bots from collecting content from your website .htaccess, substitute, text, time, Warning, webpage, website, website domain, Windows, working, www
Posted in Computer Security, Linux, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Remove URL from comments in WordPress Blogs and Websites to mitigate comment spam URLs in pages

Friday, February 20th, 2015

If you're running a WordPress blog or Website where you have enabled comments for a page and your article or page is well indexing in Google (receives a lot of visit / reads ) daily, your site posts (comments) section is surely to quickly fill in with a lot of "Thank you" and non-sense Spam comments containing an ugly link to an external SPAM or Phishing website.

Such URL links with non-sense message is a favourite way for SPAMmers to raise their website incoming (other website) "InLinks" and through that increase current Search Engine position.

We all know a lot of comments SPAM is generally handled well by Akismet but unfortunately still many of such spam comments fail to be identified as Spam because spam Bots (text-generator algorithms) becomes more and more sophisticated with time, also you can never stop paid a real-persons Marketers to spam you with a smart crafted messages to increase their site's SEO ).
In all those cases Akismet WP (Anti-Spam) plugin – which btw is among the first "must have" WP extensions to install on a new blog / website will be not enough ..

To fight with worsening SEO because of spam URLs and to keep your site's SEO better (having a lot of links pointing to reported spam sites will reduce your overall SEO Index Rate) many WordPress based bloggers, choose to not use default WordPress Comments capabilities – e.g. use exnternal commenting systems such as Disqus – (Web Community of Communities), IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, Vicomi …

However as Disqus and other 3rd party commenting systems are proprietary software (you don't have access to comments data as comments are kept on proprietary platform and shown from there), I don't personally recommend (or use) those ones, yes Disqus, Google+, Facebook and other comment external sources can have a positive impact on your SEO but that's temporary event and on the long run I think it is more advantageous to have comments with yourself.
A small note for people using Disqos and Facebook as comment platforms – (just imagine if Disqos or Facebook bankrupts in future, where your comments will be? 🙂 )

So assuming that you're a novice blogger and I succeeded convincing you to stick to standard (embedded) WordPress Comment System once your site becomes famous you will start getting severe amount of comment spam. There is plenty of articles already written on how to remove URL comment form spam in WordPress but many of the guides online are old or obsolete so in this article I will do a short evaluation on few things I tried to remove comment spam and how I finally managed to disable URL link spam to appear on site.

1. Hide Comment Author Link (Hide-wp-comment-author-link)

This plugin is the best one I found and I started using it since yesterday, I warmly recommend this plugin because its very easy, Download, Unzip, Activate and there you're anything typed in URL field will no longer appear in Posts (note that the URL field will stay so if you want to keep track on person's input URL you can get still see it in Wp-Admin). I'm using default WordPress WRC (Kubrick), but I guess in most newer wordpress plugins is supposed to work. If you test it on another theme please drop a comment to inform whether works for you. Hide Comment Author Link works on current latest Wordpress 4.1 websites.

A similar plugin to hide-wp-author-link that works and you can use is Hide-n-Disable-comment-url-field, I tested this one but for some reason I couldn't make it work.

Whatever I type in Website field in above form, this is wiped out of comment once submitted 🙂

2. Disable hide Comment URL (disable-hide-comment-url)

I've seen reports disable-hide-comment-url works on WordPress 3.9.1, but it didn't worked for me, also the plugin is old and seems no longer maintaned (its last update was 3.5 years ago), if it works for you please please drop in comment your WP version, on WP 4.1 it is not working.

3. WordPress Anti-Spam plugin

WordPress Anti-Spam plugin is a very useful addition plugin to install next to Akismet. The plugin is great if you don't want to remove commenter URL to show in the post but want to cut a lot of the annoying Spam Robots crawling ur site.

Anti-spam plugin blocks spam in comments automatically, invisibly for users and for admins.

no captcha, because spam is not users' problem
no moderation queues, because spam is not administrators' problem
no options, because it is great to forget about spam completely

Plugin is easy to use: just install it and it just works.

Anti bot works fine on WP 4.1

4. Stop Spam Comments

Stop Spam Comments is:

Dead simple: no setup required, just activate it and enjoy your spam-free website.
Lightweight: no additional database queries, it doesn't add script files or other assets in your theme. This means your website performance will not be affected and your server will thank you.
Invisible by design: no captchas, no tricky questions or any other user interaction required at all.

Stop Spam Comments works fine on WP 4.1.

I've mentioned few of the plugins which can help you solve the problem, but as there are a lot of anti-spam URL plugins available for WP its up to you to test and see what fits you best. If you know or use some other method to protect yourself from Comment Url Spam to share it please.

Import thing to note is it usually a bad idea to mix up different anti-spam plugins so don't enable both Stop Spam Comments and WordPress Anti Spam plugin.

5. Comment Form Remove Url field Manually

This (Liberian) South) African blog describes a way how to remove URL field URL manually

In short to Remove Url Comment Field manually either edit function.php (if you have Shell SSH access) or if not do it via Wp-Admin web interface:

WordPress admin page –> Appearance –> Editor

Paste at the end of file following PHP code:

add_filter('comment_form_default_fields', 'remove_url');
function remove_url($fields)
{
if(isset($fields[‘url’]))
unset($fields[‘url’]);
return $fields;
}

Now to make changes effect, Restart Apache / Nginx Webserver and clean any cache if you're using a plugin like W3 Total Cache plugin etc.

Other good posts describing some manual and embedded WordPress ways to reduce / stop comment spam is here and here, however as it comes to my blog, none of the described manual (code hack) ways I found worked on WordPress v. 4.1.
Thus I personally stuck to using Hide and Disable Comment URL plugin to get rid of comment website URL.

Tags: article, bloggers, btw, data, interface, lot, page, php, platform, problem, running, Search Engine, SEO, spam, Spam Robots, Stop Spam Comments, theme, URLs, use, website, Wordpress Comments, wordpress plugins, wp
Posted in Curious Facts, Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 2 Comments »

Joomla 1.5 fix news css problem partial text (article text not completely showing in Joomla – Category Blog Layout problem)

Monday, October 20th, 2014

joomla-fix-weird-news-blog-article-text-incompletely-shown-category-blog-website-layout-problem

I’m still administrating some old archaic Joomla website built on top of Joomla 1.5. Recently there were some security issues with the website so I first tried using jupgrade (Upgrade Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5) plugin to try to resolve the issues. As there were issues with the upgrade, because of used template was not available for Joomla 2.5, I decided to continue using Joomla 1.5 and applied the Joomla 1.5 Security Patch. I also had to disable a couple of unused joomla components and the contact form in order to prevent spammers of randomly spamming through the joomla … the Joomla Security Scanner was mostly useful in order to fix the Joomla security holes ..

So far so good this Joomla solved security but just recently I was asked to add a new article the Joomla News section – (the news section is configure to serve as a mini site blog as there are only few articles added every few months). For my surprise all of a sudden the new joomla article text started displaying text and pictures partially. The weirdly looking newly added news looked very much like some kind of template or css problem. I tried debugging the html code but unfortunately my knowledge in CSS is not so much, so as a next step I tried to temper some settings from Joomla Administrator in hope that this would resolve the text which was appearing from article used to be cut even though the text I’ve placed in artcle seemed correctly formatted. I finally pissed off trying to solve the news section layout problem so looked online too see if anyone else didn’t stick out to same error and I stumbled on Joomla’s forum explaining the Category Blog Layout Problem

The solution to the Joomla incomplete text showing in article is – To go to Joomla administrator menus:

1. Menus -> Main Menu -> (Click on Menu Item(s) – Edit Menu Item(s)) button
2. Click on News (section)
In Parameters section (on the botton right) of screen you will see #Leading set to some low number for example it will be something like 8 or 9. The whole issue in my case was that I was trying to add more than 8 articles and I had a Leading set to 8 and in order to add more articles and keep proper leading I had to raise it to more. To prevent recent leading errors, I’ve raised the Leading to 100 like shown in below screenshot
joomla-blog-layout-basic-parameters-screenshot-fix-joomla-news-cut-text-problem-screenshot

After raising to some high number click Apply and you’re done your problem is solved 🙂
For those curious what the above settings from screenshot mean:

# Leading Articles -> This refers to the number of articles that are to be shown to the full width
# Intro Articles -> This refers to the number of articles that are not to be shown to full width
# Columns -> This refers to the number of columns in which the articles will be shown that are identified as #Intro. If #Intro is zero this setting has no effect
# Links -> Number of articles that are to be shown as links. The number of articles should exceed #leading + #Intro

N.B. Solving this issue took me quite a long time and it caused me a lot of attempts to resolve it. I tried creating the article from scratch, making copy from an old article etc. I even messed few of the news articles one time so badly that I had to recreate them from scratch, before doing any changes to obsolete joomlas always make database and file content backup otherwise you will end up like me in situation loosing 10 hours of your time ..

The bitter experiences once again with Joomla convinced me when I have time I have to migrate this Joomla CMS to WordPress. My so far experience with Joomla prooved to me just for one time the time and nerves spend to learn joomla and built a multi-lingual website with it as well as to administer it with joomla obscure and hard to cryptic interfaces and multiple security issues., makes this CMS completely unworthy to study or use, its hardness to upgrade from release to release, besides its much slow and its less plugins if compared to WordPress makes wordpress much better (and easier to build use platform than Joomla).
So if you happen to be in doubt where to use Joomla or a WordPress to build a new company / community website or a blog my humbe advise is – choose WordPress!

Tags: article, Category Blog Layout Problem, Click, long time, number, order, Parameters, platform, resolve, screenshot, security issues, text, Upgrade Joomla
Posted in Everyday Life, Joomla, Various, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »

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Remove URL from comments in WordPress Blogs and Websites to mitigate comment spam URLs in pages

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