The Caveena Solutions Blog

Using parallax in web design isn’t new; you can easily find plugins, third-party libraries and no shortage of examples on the interwebz. I was searching for a pure CSS solution only to recall it had already been done with background-attachment and that I used this technique on a client project a few years ago! Silly forgetful me…

Let’s play a game: what is wrong with this picture?

If you’re like me and only skimmed it, you would probably have not noticed anything off. In fact, what I did notice was cPanel warning me that the (redacted) domain in question was reaching the limit of the allowed space. OK cool, I added it to my Todo app and went on with my life.

Dark Mode is all the rage now. And with All Hallows’ Eve 2021 (aka Halloween) creeping up, it’s the best time to release a Dark Mode scheme for our website.

While doing routine troubleshooting I noticed an error appearing multiple times in the server log (a truncated version is replicated below).

WordPress database error Unknown column 'actioned_text' in 'field list' for query SELECT ... FROM wc_admin_note_actions WHERE ...

Messages in the server log are not necessarily problematic but when the same one is logged multiple times that’s probably a sign to start investigating.

A few days ago a long-term client received a suspicious email which threatened to remove their inactive email accounts. Naturally the first thing they did was notify us. We immediately smelled a rat and asked them to forward the email to us for further investigation.

While doing some testing on a client’s website backup — and I hope you are making backups of your website — we encountered an issue where restoring the database to our development server kept failing. This obviously wasn’t a good sign; if we can’t restore a client’s website then their backups are effectively worthless.

I consider myself a craftsman in that I dedicate myself to my work. I’m probably a few steps short of a perfectionist (though that term has been applied to me in the past) and while I may not know best any newfangled idea or technique must convince me of its value before I’ll give it a second look. I pride myself in creating the best work I am capable of.

But reality does not always give me the luxury of doing so. While a craftsman would prefer having ample time and resources to work on their projects, the real world cannot always accommodate this. In most cases it’s “now or preferably yesterday!”

So I doubt I was the only one who got hit by this issue. Basically everything was fine in cPanel land until one day I was randomly getting logged out of cPanel (sometimes immediately after I’d logged in, other times after a few minutes). When I did manage to log in the cPanel interface appeared broken with missing images and occasionally missing stylesheets. In some cases I’d be blocked from even loading the login page. It wasn’t an isolated incident either as this problem cropped up on different hosting services.

Understandably frustrating when you rely on cPanel to configure your hosting.

Although there is no bulletproof way to stop people downloading images on your website I still get this request every now and again. If you really want to protect your images don’t upload them at all but if you must you can “protect” them by including a watermark in the center or uploading a low resolution copy. A popular, if somewhat notorious, method is to disable right-clicks on the website but I do not encourage this because it confounds what the user expects of the browser. It also does not prevent people from digging the image out from their browser cache.

But while I was in the shower this morning I had a silly, if naughty, idea to “protect” an image with nothing but HTML and CSS. Here’s the codepen:

So we noticed that the backup procedure on one of our client’s websites wasn’t completing properly. It’s a good thing we’ve got a backup for our backup.