Brian's thoughts put into words
Most website owners like to think about security in terms of preventing attacks. We install updates, choose strong passwords, enable extra protection and hope that nothing ever goes wrong. But the reality is that if your website is online, there is always a possibility, some would say probability, that something unexpected will happen.
Your website may be hacked. A server may fail. An update may break something important. The question is not whether these things can happen, but whether you are prepared when they do.
There comes a point in every project, business, community group or open source team where the biggest obstacle isn't a lack of ideas or a shortage of effort.
It's the leader.
The person at the top is often the one slowing everything down. Not because they aren't capable, but because they're trying to do too much.
Many people think leadership is about making the big decisions, setting the direction and inspiring others. Those things matter, but they're only part of the picture.
Real leadership is about delegation.
It's easy to complain about bad customer service. It's much rarer to publicly thank people when they get it right.
A parcel arrives late, a restaurant gets your order wrong, or a support agent gives you a copy-and-paste answer that doesn't address your question. Those are the experiences we remember, the ones we tell our friends about, and sometimes the ones we share online.
What we don't do nearly often enough is talk about the people who get it right.
"Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time' is like saying 'I don't want to.'"
Whether Lao Tzu actually said those words is almost beside the point. The quote survives because it forces us to confront something we'd rather avoid.
"I don't have time."
Laragon makes local development on Windows incredibly simple, automatically creating local domains like myproject.test with HTTPS already configured. But sometimes you need your local site to pretend that it is a real production domain.
This article explains how to make Laragon locally respond to a real domain name, including creating a trusted SSL certificate, without making any changes to the live website.
Write Joomla content wherever inspiration strikes. Grafida is a free desktop app that lets you create and edit articles offline, work with multiple Joomla sites, manage images with ease, and publish everything with just a few clicks when you're ready.
For the last five or six years I have spent a week every summer in Athens with Nicholas Dionysopoulos. It isn't a conference, there is no agenda, and if anyone were watching us from a nearby balcony they would probably conclude that we were doing very little at all.
We spend hours talking about Joomla, eating far too much excellent food and, every now and then, sharing a beer or two. It has become something of a tradition, and one that I look forward to more and more each year.
I have a confession to make.
For as long as I can remember, I've been hiding things on websites. Not malware. Not tracking pixels. Not cryptocurrency miners. Little surprises.
Some people call them Easter eggs, but if you've ever sat through one of my presentations over the last fifteen years, you'll know I've always preferred hidden secrets. It just sounds more intriguing.
A while ago I wrote about why I use Laragon as my Windows development environment in my article, Laragon – The High Performance AMP Server for Windows.
Laragon does almost everything I want from a local development environment. It's fast, lightweight, easy to configure and, unlike some alternatives, it doesn't seem determined to consume every available system resource just because it can.
There was just one thing missing.
Congratulations, you discovered a hidden secret!