Small Golden Sceptre

Technology, Rambling and Dragons

Posts Tagged Privacy

MediaWiki: Creating a Private Wiki

Sep 21

Posted by dhenke in Compugeekery | 2 Comments

MediaWiki is the software behind Wikipedia, but you can use it to create your own special-purpose sites. I’ve used it at work to build an internal company knowledge base, and I’m using it at home to make a Wiki for the fictional world of a roleplaying game I’m in.

It’s a pretty polished software package, but out of the box it tends to assume that you are creating something like Wikipedia that is visible to (and editable by) the whole wide world. If that’s not what you want, it requires some tuning, which I’ll describe in detail after the jump.

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Why the Password-Protected Posts?

Mar 4

Posted by dhenke in Administrivia | No Comments

Things change, and change is bad.

One bad change you may have noticed is that a handful of the posts here are now password-protected. This isn’t something I’m especially happy about, since these posts are about things I think are cool, and which I want to share with everyone. But someone smart (and with a significant stake in the matter) made the case that these posts also leaked information which could put me and others at risk.

I’ve tried to adopt the most measured response that still fixes the problem: hide only the posts I have to, and put those behind a wall rather than destroy them entirely. While I hope this is the last time I’ll have to do this retroactively, we don’t always get what we want or expect.

If you see a password-protected article, and have reason to believe I know and trust you, then you can always send email and ask for the password. Unless that trust is already established, though, you’re wasting your time — if it were something I could show to just anybody, I’d already be doing that.

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Backups on the Home Front

Sep 18

Posted by dhenke in Compugeekery | No Comments

In computing, you have exactly two options: 1) Have current, working, tested backups or 2) don’t care if your data is there tomorrow. There is no third option. Pretending that there is leads only to substantial cussing.

Unfortunately, people mostly either know this already, or won’t be convinced of it until they learn from the school of bitter experience. So, this isn’t a post to try to convince you to take backups; it’s a post about how I do it, presented in the hopes that it’ll make doing so easier and safer. (As with many of my computer-related posts, the actual implementation is somewhat specific to UNIX-like systems, though many of the general principles apply universally.)

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Barbarians at the gate: Excluding Bing via robots.txt

Sep 12

Posted by dhenke in Compugeekery | No Comments

This isn’t about the variety of cherry. If you haven’t heard of Bing.com, it’s Microsoft’s recent attempt at a search engine. (If you’re curious, Google it.)

If you are not particularly pleased with the idea of a company like Microsoft making money from your creative work, then my strong suggestion is to create a robots.txt file in the root of your web-space, with contents not unlike:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disllaow:

The robots.txt is a voluntary standard which allows web page authors to exclude search engines from part or all of their sites. There’s a helpful website that has details about why you might want to do this, and how to go about it.

Of course, there have been some allegations that Bing isn’t honoring the robots.txt standard. But announcing that they’re unwelcome is a fine symbolic act, even should they fail to honor your wishes.

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