Time is a fluid concept these days, but approximately 25 years or one week ago, I wrote about SSH and what is it good for. The bottom line is that SSH itself is very simple, and there’s not a lot of exciting dramatization that can be produced around its actual use unless you’re really into weird incantations like “ss -pant | grep ‘ESTAB’”. And let’s face it, no one is. You do have to enjoy the fact that we can shove the word “pant” into a perfectly valid Unix command though.

However, there is something directly related to SSH that we should talk about, primarily because it will give me an excuse to write exactly 255 posts about it, and that is the topic of SSH keys.

When you think of a key, you probably think of something that unlocks something else, and that’s exactly what SSH keys are used for. Although SSH keys …

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There’s an adage about how the Cloud is just someone else’s computer, which is just a humorous way of pointing out some of the inherent insecurities of using the Cloud for all your data storage.

But it also expresses the fact that whenever we need to work on files located on a server, we’re just using someone else’s computer from a distance, and we need a reliable, secure method of doing so. SSH is a protocol for securely accessing remote systems, and it’s integral to the functioning of the internet.

SSH – What Is It Even?

SSH stands for “Secure Shell”. The shell part of it means it is a command line interface. When you connect via SSH, you’re harkening back to the days when everyone typed commands into their computers instead of clicking on buttons with a mouse. For many tasks in administering or configuring computers, the command line is still indispensable. It also lends …

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I haven’t talked more about regular expressions like I promised I would, but I’ll partially rectify that today by writing about a regular expression I created last night for my Blog Post Publish shortcut. This one applies specifically to how I name my blog post files for WTF Weekly.

Since WTF Weekly post titles are just dated blurbs like WTF Weekly for Oct 12th, 2020, I decided to name the post markdown files as consecutive numbers, starting at 1. I also make the post slug match this number so that the URLs are very simple, such as https://wtfweekly.me/41/ in the case of the one for Oct 12th, 2020.

Originally when I wrote my Blog Post Publish shortcut, I was entering slugs and file names manually as user input. This was partly because I do this already for this site, because instead of numbering posts, I give the files and slugs names related to the topic. The …

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