• Cloudwatch – I spent some time working with aws metrics in cloudwatch – pulled via scripts using the “aws cloudwatch” command line tool. This is a pretty powerful way to monitor and track all kinds of metrics on elbs, ec2, rds, and other AWS entities.
• API – more api work with Dell openManage. API’s are pretty standard now with most web based tools. Mostly, I’m pulling data, and pushing it to another database, or triggering emails, based on various logic / business rules.
• Coronavirus – my state (PA) is basically under quarantine. Clients (even out of state) have mandated “work from home” for most employees and consultants / contractors. Most of my clients will be able to financially weather this, depending how long it goes. It’s a good lessen in diversifying your consulting clients (or income sources). While this type event is “once in a lifetime”, there are smaller events that hit specific industries more often.

Several clients this week had SSL related website issues. SSL stands for “Secure Socket Layer” and is what secures websites (when you see https:// or the “lock” icon on websites you visit).

Originally running websites over SSL was reserved for ecommerce or sensitive transactions. Normally, web traffic was sent in plaintext, and SSL provides end-to-end encryption of data. Since many people use public WIFI networks these days, many websites have gone to SSL for all traffic. In fact, Google now gives search preference to sites that are running over SSL, and most browsers / plugins give scary warnings if you try browsing a site that is not running with encryption.

Anyway, when converting your website to SSL, there are usually just a few issues to be concerned about. You’ll need to track down any hardcoded references to “http:” in your pages, and change them to https:, or make them relative. Second, you’ll need to add a way to “force” users to load the site using https, usually done with a global redirect to the https version of the site. Overall, it’s not that big a change, however, there is an added yearly cost (around $150) to have the certificate that allows the encryption to work.

LDAP – This week I had an interesting challenge – integrate LDAP (Active Directory, actually) authentication into an existing application (perl based). The main page was actually static html, which linked out to four perl cgi based utilities.

The goal was to add authentication to the company’s internal Active Directory, but only to members of specific groups.

Due to the ease of php’s ldap integration, I replaced the static html page with a php based script to handle the login and menu options. In the Perl code, I added some code to check the sessions against the authenticated users, and grant / deny access.

CodeIgniter – I also had the chance to do a small application in CodeIgniter, my favorite php framework. I also used a CRUD library called “GroceryCRUD”, which makes building the admin side of things pretty fast and foolproof.

Recently I started working on a rather large project using Expression Engine by Ellis Labs.  This is a CMS development system built on CodeIgniter, a php mvc framework.  At first impression, EE is very easy to use for creating data relationships (using channels and channel fields).  This facilitates building somewhat complex websites, managed through the admin interface.  It also has a robust user permission system, which makes it easy to grant access to various users.

Where EE requires a bit of a learning curve, is on the “front end” templating system.  Those looking for an easy way to throw in php code and get to work, will encounter some frustration.  Start by studying the “parsing order” of the templates, to understand how things work.  The good news is that you can add php in there to handle complex tasks, but it takes some understanding of how Expression Engine handles the template tags first.  After some study and experimenting, you can start getting things done.

EE relies heavily on modules and plugins, many of which cost money.  Overall, these can be savers and even added to the cost of Expression Engine itself, still worth the money.  However, I do wish a bit more was built into EE out of the box – sometimes it seems like relatively simple features require an add on.

One drawback to EE is the overhead required.  Even relatively simple tasks take 20+ mysql queries to build.  EE has a nice Profiler built in to see what queries are being executed.  You can cache templates to help with this overhead, but sometimes it’s laughable to see a simple task executing so many queries.

Overall, EE is a nice platform, and user friendly.  I’m sure I’ve just scratched the surface of it’s power and flexibility.  It does, however, feel almost like learning a new programming language.

It’s not the end of the week, but I’ve missed a few weeks now, so I thought I’d catch up.  Here’s what I’ve been doing:

CodeIgniter – A new client has a custom CMS written using CodeIgniter.  This is a fairly popular php framework that several of my clients use.  It’s pretty nice to use – follows the normal MVC architecture.

Sunshop – I did some custom work to tweak the way Sunshop makes its SEO friendly URL’s.

In addition, the normal php and perl work rounded out my schedule.