Author Archives: Ceecee Newman

Block Countries by IP on Debian Trixie with nftables and xtables-addons

Debian Trixie uses nftables as its default firewall. If you’re used to iptables, the commands still work — but they go through an iptables-nft compatibility shim that translates them to nftables rules under the hood. For country-based IP blocking, the … Continue reading

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How to Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve been putting off setting up Google Analytics because you’re still on the old “Universal Analytics” (UA) — it’s time to act. UA is officially dead: Standard UA properties stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023 UA 360 (premium) … Continue reading

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Using PHP with Mustache: Practical Examples and Gotchas

If you want clean templates in PHP without pulling in a full framework, Mustache is a great fit. It keeps logic out of views, which forces you to prepare data in PHP first and makes templates easier to scan later. … Continue reading

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Scribe for Laravel: API Docs That Stay Fresh, and a Calm Way to Upgrade Them

Most Laravel teams reach a point where their API documentation is either out of date, written somewhere it shouldn’t be (Confluence, anyone?), or just doesn’t exist. Scribe is the package that quietly fixes this — it reads your routes, controllers, … Continue reading

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BOLA in a Laravel Livewire app: when client-side state is the only thing standing between users and admin actions

A penetration test landed an interesting finding on a Livewire-powered admin panel I work on. The summary on the report read: Broken Object-Level Authorization (BOLA). A standard user can change a tenant-wide “who can access these assets” setting by replaying … Continue reading

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Laravel Sail: a developer’s cheat sheet 🐳

Laravel ships with Sail — a thin command-line wrapper around docker compose that gives you the whole Laravel toolchain (PHP, MySQL, Redis, Mailpit, Node) in containers, without you needing to install any of them on your host. The only thing … Continue reading

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