By Greg Nowak. Updated 26 July 2026.
Form spam is not merely an irritating website problem. It is an intake-quality problem that wastes sales time, distorts campaign reporting, triggers unnecessary automations, and fills the CRM with records nobody trusts.
That changes how the problem should be handled. The useful question is not “Which CAPTCHA plugin should we install?” It is “What must be true before this submission becomes a lead, ticket, account, order, or marketing contact?”
By Greg Nowak. Updated 25 July 2026.
If your website generates leads, processes payments, publishes time-sensitive content or supports internal operations, a PHP upgrade is not routine server housekeeping. It is a change to the runtime underneath your CMS, extensions, custom code, scheduled jobs and deployment tools.
The business objective is therefore not simply to install the newest PHP release. It is to choose a supported destination that fits the CMS, identify blockers before production and protect the workflows that make the site valuable.
By Greg Nowak. Updated 2026-07-19.
AI crawler control is not a single switch. A business may want its expertise cited in search tools, refuse model-training crawlers, reduce unnecessary server load, and keep private material private. Those goals require different controls.
I use YouTube subtitles in two different ways: to follow difficult audio and to understand videos in languages I do not speak well. They are not perfect, but they are often good enough to turn an unusable video into something useful.
Subtitles help when the speaker talks quickly, the recording is noisy, the accent is unfamiliar, or you are watching without sound. For language learning they are also useful because you can connect the spoken words with text on screen. For creators, captions can improve accessibility and make videos easier to reuse in other countries.
By Greg Nowak. Updated 11 August 2026.
HTTP/3 gets the headlines, but most production stacks still contain a mixture of HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1. A browser may connect to a CDN using HTTP/2 while the CDN, load balancer, reverse proxy, and application use different protocols between them.
find /[FOLDER_NAME]/* -mtime +[OLDER_THAN_DAYS] -exec rm -rf {} \;
Example deletes all files and folders in tmp folder that are older than 180 days: find /tmp/* -mtime +180 -exec rm -rf {} \;
By Greg Nowak. Updated August 9, 2026.
Cloudflare’s dashboard is perfectly adequate for an occasional DNS edit. The API earns its place when DNS becomes part of a launch checklist, migration, client onboarding process, or agency handover.
The business case is not automation for its own sake. It is having a change that can be inspected before traffic moves, repeated without relying on memory, and understood by the next person responsible for the domain. A short, well-documented shell script is often enough.
When you need to sign a PDF document, it's quite easy to do in Libreoffice Draw for instance. You can just insert an image of your signature and print to PDF afterwards. Sometimes LibreOffice will not do a great job with opening some types of PDF documents. In these cases you can try to use "Lumin PDF" which can be accessed directly from Google Drive when you open a PDF document. You will be asked to accept the Lumin PDF connection to your Google account. You will need to accept the conditions and you are ready to go.
Replace cartridge: Open access to printer, press stop 5 seconds and repeat. You don't need to replace the cartridge, you can clean it carefully with some soft tissue.
Youtube: How to remove the print head
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-07-29.
A WordPress site behaves correctly on staging but differently in production. An editor has disappeared, an update is blocked, or a debugging feature refuses to switch on. Before changing plugins or permissions, check whether a PHP constant is controlling the behaviour.
Check if file or directory exists, multiple ways: https://linuxize.com/post/bash-check-if-file-exists/
You can see a lot of good information for debugging and fixing errors on your Ubuntu server with journalctl and dmesg
journalctl --since "1 days ago"
journalctl --since "10 hours ago"
journalctl --since "12 hours ago" -p 3 -x --utc --no-pager
dmesg | less
dmesg -H --time-format iso| less
Resources:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50098/linux-network-troublesho…
By Greg Nowak. Updated 10 August 2026.
WP-Cron is perfectly adequate until the business starts depending on it. A brochure site probably will not suffer if an internal cleanup runs late. An online store, membership platform, publication, or integration-heavy website is different: delayed renewals, imports, scheduled posts, and notifications quickly become operational problems.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-07-15.
A green port-443 check does not prove that a customer can use your website. The server may return the wrong virtual host, an expired certificate, a broken redirect or a generic error page while the monitor still reports success.
Useful HTTPS monitoring starts with a business question: can a real user reach the correct page or endpoint, receive the expected content and do so within an acceptable time? Nagios can answer that question, but only when each check has an explicit purpose.
By Greg Nowak. Updated 11 August 2026.
When a website, mail service or API still points to its old address after a DNS change, flushing the cache is a sensible troubleshooting step. It is not, however, a universal fix. The stale answer may be held by Ubuntu, a VPN, a company resolver, a container, a browser or the application itself.
The reliable approach is to identify which resolver is answering, clear only the relevant cache and then test the service from the environment where the problem occurred.
sudo systemctl stop apport
sudo systemctl stop whoopsie
sudo systemctl disable apport
sudo systemctl disable whoopsie
sudo aptitude purge apport whoopsie
Source: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1245078/woopsie-upload-all-process-cons…
A nice little guide: https://tecadmin.net/run-shell-script-as-systemd-service/
Possible fix:
Delete the cache: ~/.config/skypeforlinux/Cache/
Skype start command: nice -n 19 rm -r ~/.config/skypeforlinux/Cache/* ; nice -n 19 /usr/bin/skypeforlinux %U skypeforlinux --disable-accelerated-video-decode=true
Skype start command vanilla: /usr/bin/skypeforlinux %U
