The first programming model without side effects. Ask your doctor if functional programming is right for you.

Remember GeoCities? I miss that place.

In case you haven’t heard, Let’s Encrypt now supports wildcard certificates as a feature of the new ACME v2 protocol. However, current client support is still somewhat limited, as the Let’s Encrypt CA requires domain validation via DNS-01 challenge. To further complicate things, DNS-01 requires programmatic access to your nameservers. But let’s assume you are already using Route53 and you’re looking for the simplest way to begin issuing wildcard certificates for your hosted zones.

It’s super-common in front-end development to load a lot of content dynamically via AJAX. It’s tempting to rely on jQuery selectors to initialize these elements. We’ve all seen it: a huge chunk of code with twenty anonymous functions, each one a callback to a jQuery .each() method. We like jQuery selector callbacks because they’re convenient–no code is executed unless a match is found. It’s a built-in if-statement! But querying the DOM is an expensive operation which can slow down the loading of your site and drive away users.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I wanted to install Node.js in a (gs) shared hosting environment so that I could compile and save small changes to my LESS-based stylesheets via SSH without having to maintain a local working copy. That’s right. I said it. I change files in a live environment sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with that! Anyone who opines to the contrary in the comments below will be swiftly dealt with.

I’m spoiled, guys and gals. I can’t work without [my dotfiles](https://github.com/njbair/dotfiles). Watching me work in a vanilla bash shell is excruciating, like watching someone walk with those drunk-driving goggles–fumbling and stumbling through an environment completely devoid of the shortcuts and settings upon which I’ve come to rely so heavily. Even for something as simple as listing and switching directories: njbair@n16 ~ $ ll -bash: ll: command not found njbair@n16 ~ $ ls -l lrwxrwxrwx 1 njbair njbair 10 Sep 20 05:38 data -> .

If you’re working with Joomla using an HTML5 template and you try and validate your site using the [W3C Markup Validation Service](http://validator.w3.org), you may find yourself hit with the following validation error: *Line 7, Column 44*: **Bad value title for attribute name on element meta: Keyword title is not registered.** Syntax of metadata name: A metadata name listed in the HTML specification or listed in the WHATWG wiki. You can register metadata names on the WHATWG wiki yourself.

Ubuntu Server packages are generally pretty well-configured right out of the box–usually requiring little or no configuration for simple operation. It’s one of the reasons why, despite my preference toward Arch Linux for the desktop, I’ve long advocated Ubuntu as a great starting point for a LAMP development server. Yet, on occasion, a package ships with a configuration that needs some work in order to be useful. Xdebug is such a package.

Using a VM as a web development test server is a great way to optimize workstation resources. My test VM is an Ubuntu installation with a standard Apache/MySQL/PHP stack. I use VirtualBox shared folders to grant the VM access to my development directory. For some time I have been wrestling with an irritating bug that crops up when using shared folders with Apache: when a new file is created, and sometimes when existing files are modified, Apache fails to recognize the change.