Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, January 18, 2026, and this is show number 1080. Before we kick into gear with this week’s show, I want to let you know that next week’s show will come out early, I think on Saturday, because Steve and I are headed out to Texas for a few days to play with Kyle and our grandkids. That means there will be no live show on Sunday, January 25th. We can now resume our regular programming.
PBS Tidbit 16: How Podfeet.com Works
Bart Busschots has started keeping a running list of things he hears me say I don’t quite understand. He saves these as ideas for what we call “Tidbit” episodes of Programming By Stealth. They are one-off topics, rather than a miniseries, like learning JavaScript, Bootstrap, or Git. Over the years, podfeet.com has gone through quite a number of server changes as the site grew and technological advances made improvements possible.
When Bill Reveal helped me do a major migration a few years ago, we changed the web server to something called NGINX, and along with that came something called PHP-FPM. I never knew what PHP-FPM was. Later, Tage Bushman helped me do yet another major migration, moving from the deprecated Linux operating system CentOS to Rocky Linux. Some time after that, the site was getting hammered by some external miscreants, and one of the symptoms we could measure was PHP-FPM processes hitting 100%. Again, there’s that PHP-FPM thing I didn’t understand.
In our most recent installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through the evolution of podfeet.com as a case study to explain the technology changes in web server management and what cool things are possible today that were not available to us more than 20 years ago when podfeet.com was born. The last part of the story finally teaches us what the heck this PHP-FPM thing is.
If you’d like to hear the story as taught by Bart, check out Tidbit 16: How Podfeet.com Works, at pbs.bartificer.net/…
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Support the Show
Whenever someone makes a new pledge to support the Podfeet Podcasts via Patreon, I immediately log into the service to check their work. You see, when you pledge to support the NosillaCast, you choose a dollar (or Euro, or Yen) on a per-episode basis. The great thing about Patreon is you can also set a limit to how much per month you want to pledge, regardless of how many episodes I make in a month. You know you’ll get a new NosillaCast every week, but some months have more weeks than others.
The reason I check is that I get an email that simply says what the per-episode pledge is, but that doesn’t tell me what monthly limit might have been set, and once in a while, people have made mistakes that would have left them quite cranky with the service and with me.
That happened just this week when John Denning became our latest Patreon donor. His per-episode pledge was extremely generous, so I wanted to check whether he’s set that same amount as his monthly max. It turns out he’d set his monthly max to $240/month! I know John, and he’s a fantastic guy, but I was relatively certain that’s not what he meant to do. I wrote to him immediately and he was able to fix it to set it to the correct amount.
I tell you this story for two reasons. One is to thank John publicly for the years of support through fun email exchanges, as well as his generous donations. The second reason is to let you know about this monthly max trick which makes managing your money easier and more consistent.
If you’d like to check it out, please go to podfeet.com/patreon and pledge your support.
Security Bits — 18 January 2026
Transcript of NC_2026_01_18
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Did you know you can email me at [email protected] any time you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet.com/mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcasts on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com/youtube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com/slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely NosillaCastaways. You can support the show at podfeet.com/patreon like John Denning, or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com/donate with Apple Pay or any credit card, or through podfeet.com/paypal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, you’ll have to wait till February 1st to head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5 PM Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.