How to Build a Free Website Monitor with GitHub Actions

Website monitoring (or uptime monitoring) is essential for any commercial website or service and there are plenty of commercial vendors that provide these services. With the recent rollout of GitHub Actions, I’ve put together a simple lightweight website monitor you can implement for free, perfect for side projects and personal websites. In addition to this WordPress blog I’m using it to watch my parked domains and Tweetfave project, making sure they are alive and well.

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WordPress Powered by GitHub and Docker

About 5 years ago I migrated this blog to WordPress. Overall, it’s been working well but my manual method for keeping WordPress (and plugins/themes) updated has been less than ideal. I just implemented a new system with GitHub and Docker that will hopefully make that upgrade path smoother, help me keep things updated, and avoid security issues from out of date code.

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Traffic Resuming After WordPress Hack

Early in March this site was hit with a WordPress hack that was present for about 10 days until I discovered and fixed it. After the fix I was frequently checking Google Webmaster Tools to make sure search results returned. After about one week, my traffic (from Google at least) had pretty much recovered to the pre-hack levels: And here is the corresponding timeline from Google Analytics, showing traffic slowly returning to normal:

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Recovering from a WordPress Hack

Last night I had the unpleasant discovery that this site’s WordPress had been “hacked”, with every post redirecting to an uploaded “this site has been hacked” variety of HTML file. I looked back and realized it happened on March 1st and mad at myself for not noticing sooner. Fortunately it was pretty easy to clean up by zapping the database and restoring from a good backup (thankfully I have daily backups running). The harder part is going to be recovering in Google’s view. Search queries as shown in Google Webmaster Tools dropped like crazy right away: And here’s the corresponding…

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Migration from MovableType Complete

I successfully migrated this website from MovableType 4.35 to WordPress 3.8.1. These are my notes from the migration in case they are helpful for anyone else. The good news is this is pretty straightforward, and there are plenty of notes out there (just search the internet for “WordPress MovableType import”). The tricky parts are the custom or special areas of your MovableType installation, and mine was no exception. First, why switch to WordPress? I wanted something more current with a stronger platform of plugins and themes. I’ve been happy with MovableType and stuck through it over many versions and changes.…

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