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Forcing SSL on a subdomain

April 9th, 2006 by Jim

It is common to create a subdomain named secure.domain.com, and then purchase (or self-sign) a SSL certificate to go with it. The intention is that visitors will see the word “secure” and feel better knowing that a secure communication channel is being used. Not everyone knows what the acronym SSL means, after all.

Simply having an appropriate host name does nothing to enforce the concept, though. The subdomain intended for SSL connections should not be accessed any other way, and likewise all other subdomains should disallow SSL connections.

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Web Developers: Is it gray or grey?

November 2nd, 2005 by Jim

I am constantly forgetting the correct spelling of “gray” when it comes to using named web colors. Hopefully this post will help me to never get it wrong again. 🙂

I have listed the seven (7) named web colors that have the word gray or grey within their spelling. Only lightgrey is spelled with an e, while the other six (6) are spelled with an a. The list also shows you how well your browser will handle the misspelled color names.

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How-to: “svn update --dry-run”

October 12th, 2005 by Jim

My company uses Subversion to manage several websites. When using a version control system to manage live websites, it is absolutely critical to first verify that an update to the code will not conflict with local modifications. Code conflicts will effectively break a website, leading to downtime and unnecessary embarassment.

What we need is a --dry-run flag for Subversion’s update command, but at the time of this writing, Subversion does not offer any such flag. Instead, we invent a clever workaround using the merge command, which does offer the --dry-run flag.

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