In the first session we learnt more about the MySQL relational database management system and certain SQL functions that are useful for reporting. From examples, we saw how to list the result of applying functions to all records in a database or deal with groups of records in turn using SQL aggregate and group functions.

During the next two sessions we covered secure web server communication. We discussed encrypting all traffic between the browser and server using certificate authority (CA) signed certificates and corresponding keys. We also explored user logins and reviewed the main principles involved using encrypted session cookies.

During practical sessions we generated a private key and public certificate for each server. We then updated virtual host configuration files to ensure that all web traffic was encrypted and safe against any eavesdropping attempts. Once the httpd process was restarted we could see secure pages being displayed with 'https'. However, we did find that Chrome didn't recognise our self signed secure certificate, although other browsers allowed us to specify the level of trust we were prepared to assign.

Later we installed another two Perl modules to enable encryption for session cookies. A number of Perl scripts, Javascript and HTML files were copied to the servers to establish a full program driven framework for each web server and web sites hosted on them. Through simple file edits we were able to change the content, section and subsections menu names, and CSS style information (and much more).

Our last session today was our first introduction to Google Analytics and its importance in monitoring how users navigate through a web site in order to assess how successful a web site is.