Blog

  • Weekly Roundup 02/05/14

    This is the first of a weekly series of posts to share what your friendly dxwers have been reading and sharing this week.

  • Rendering nothing on 404 in a Ruby on Rails api

    I’m working on a Json api for fetching reviews from security.dxw.com/, using the rails-api gem. When a plugin hasn’t been reviewed, the api (naturally) returns a 404, but what should the body contain?

  • Introducing Ian

    Hi everyone, First a quick introduction. I’m Ian and I’ve just joined dxw as the new Account Manager. I have a varied background mostly in creative geekery and training. Highlights include, seven years at Apple in both sales and training roles as well as two years technical consultancy and support for an arts charity.  Recently…

  • Quick Tip – disable WordPress login during development

    When you’re developing a WordPress site locally it can be tedious to keep logging in with a fake username and password – particularly if you’re testing things out from the perspective of multiple user types (e.g. Admin and Subscriber) or using an existing database. Fortunately there’s a quick hack which makes lets you skip WordPress’…

  • Ruby-on-rails: deleting all data from a table

    During development, you might find yourself needing to delete everything from a specific database table to refresh your data. You could drop the whole database and bring it back up again with rake:db:drop, rake:db:setup, but that’s slow and indiscriminate. Instead, boot up a console and call delete_all on your model: I’ve been using this quite…

  • Major vulnerability found in OpenSSL: “Heartbleed”, and what you should do about it

    A major vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160) has been found in OpenSSL, which is the software that many people use to make secure, encrypted connections to websites. A security problem has been found that allows an attacker to read a small portion of the memory of the computer using OpenSSL. This could enable an attacker to see things…