CozyNet Blog

Wednesday & Thursday Journal (20260723)

Publish Date: 2026-07-24

I'll probably start doing an image of the day soon

Today I did some work on the CozyNet site to improve the pagination buttons for "Next post" and "Previous Post" to better handle single day multi-posts. I touched on this a little earlier this Monday, but didn't complete it.

The issue that I was facing was organizing posts by date and time that fell on the same day. The naming convention wasn't lending itself to be very helpful here since it only tracked the date and the file system doesn't seem to keep track of creation time. Also, I'm not particularly fond of basing scripts in this manner upon the file creation date and time anyhow, since it's something that's often easily modifiable. Back when I migrated CozyNet to a new server, my file migration process changed the time stamps and date of every file since they weren't preserved; I find this method of tracking highly unreliable and prone to future instability.

So I had to figure something out. My example files were "20260720_blog" and "202607202_blog," which if you pay close attention, it has an additional 2 appended to the end of the date. This is simply to indicate that it's a second file, but it can be any range of number. When I finish my blog posts, I run a few follow up scripts to auto generate the comment table, update the site search indexer, and to update the pagination nav buttons. It all takes about 5 seconds, but the pagination nav button script is a little unique.

The nav buttons are actually a PHP scriptlet that simply pulls from a pre-arranged listing of blog posts in a text file outside the webroot. I didn't want PHP to do any heavy lifting or processing here beyond ingesting the file list into a variable and walking it based on the source name of the requested document. The pre-arranged listing is generated by the pagination script that I run after completing a post, which simply lists the contents of /blogs/ while filtering out irrelevant files.

What I ended up having to do was simply adjust the list filter to introduce "sort" and that was all I needed this whole time. I spent a few hours coming up with an elaborate solution, only to find that "sort" without any flags or additional commands would sort it correctly. You'd think that with 202607202 being a larger number than say 20260723, that it would sort it higher, but nope! Apparently the "-n" flag would read this numerically, but the default sort behavior will collate lexicographically. I guess I never really noticed that until today.

There wasn't much else going on in the office today since I completed most of what I needed to do in the morning. It was just more the same stuff from yesterday, which I don't think is worth repeating here.

After work, I had a wedding to attend back at the church. Thankfully I packed a supper the night before so I didn't have to go out and spend more money to eat. I got back home right at dusk and spent a little time with the cats since they'd been cooped up in their room the past two days and made a vanilla ice cream float with some cream soda too for dessert.

SharePoint outage, Aaaaa!!

Yeah, that was going on back in the office, but it didn't bother me, just the other departments. There was a global or regional outage of the SharePoint service from Microsoft, which I'm sure caused a stir for some people.

Anyhow, I wasn't well rested this morning. I had trouble staying asleep over night and probably only got three hours at the most. Fortunately I don't bother much with the SharePoint stuff, so my rolling out of the bed last minute wasn't met with a firestorm of activity.

It was a laid back day since I work remote on Thursdays. I didn't feel like making anything for breakfast this time either. I spent my time following up and closing out tickets and working on this here blog.

I'm glad to see that my remediation script is working at removing the .NET 6 runtime from off of peoples workstations. I don't think I quite yet had the clear to do that, but I didn't care and launched it anyway. Now I can watch number line go up in remediated devices and the other number line go down for detected vulnerabilities; this feels silly...

I also found out after a security review meeting that some tickets I was addressing (they were auto assigned to me from the CSO's account in Jira) had hallucinated missing patches and was auto-generated by a product called Nagomi. In case you're wondering what it is, it's yet another AI dashboard security product. I spent probably three hours in Qualys pulling up reports to counter the Nagomi findings only to be told that it was an accident and wasn't supposed to be assigned to me in the first place...

To uplift my spirits after that, I made homemade Pizza for supper! This time I made them small, like personal pizzas, since my little electric oven is... well, little. I wish I could get propane to the house so that I could use my nice big gas oven and it not just be there as a kitchen prop, but alas that's yet another item on my to-do-list of repairs. I aught to share some before and after photos of the house so you guys might understand how shot this place was when I got it!

A little while later that evening, I had a bible study meetup to get to. I like to keep two note books for these where one notebook has my sloppy poorly written notes written in haste and the second one I transcribe my sloppy notes to with more attention and care. I only keep the second note book with me to look back in review or reference for the meetings and don't actually write anything to it until the next day. I think I've written about this before, but I find that writing things down helps me to better internalize them, and I mean physically writing things down because typing doesn't work for me.

Something that was said during the meetup that I thought worth noting down was that faith grows in us by exercising it, and that it's not about the size or quantity (hence the mustard seed parable.) It starts off small, but if we faithfully work with what little we have, it'll grow.

Thanks for reading my blog!