Keeping a WordPress site secure is paramount. Without using plugins—we’re going DIY—here are ways to secure a WordPress site during your lunch break. The big, popular security plugins use many of these tactics and code, so why not implement them yourself? At least learn what they are. If nothing else, one less plugin running in the background frees resources, leading to faster site load times. Delete default admin user WordPress powers roughly 30% of the […]
Continue Reading …All right. Here’s a simple explanation of how end-to-end encryption works. Recently there’s been a healthy amount of chatter in the news regarding WhatsApp, and i’ve noticed more and more of my contacts using (installing at least) Signal on their phones. This will give you an idea essentially of how our text message convos go when unencrypted and encrypted, and you’ll, hopefully, come away with why it’s important. I’ll probably do a more extensive write-up later […]
Continue Reading …I love command line tools. I love learning of new ones to implement into my workflow. Pa11y is one such CLI that i’m using regularly these days. It helps me keep or get my projects into Accessibility 18F shape. Very important to me that the web is as open and accessible to as many people as possible. Screw you, Dominos (i stopped being one of their customers because of their stance). Granted, if you have […]
Continue Reading …For various reasons, i recommend installing WordPress (WP) in a sub-directory rather than in the default root of the domain — such as in the /public_html or /htdocs directories. From here on out, i’m going to reference the root directory as mysite.com/. If you already have a site installed at the root directory, perfect. This guide is exactly for that situation. If you do a fresh install, these can be adapted to it. Just follow […]
Continue Reading …I’ve been sick of using JetPack or Disqus on my site for years, so i googled “lightweight WordPress commenting system” and didn’t get anything exactly mentioning that phrase. I got merely two articles talking about a new plugin called wpDiscuz, so i gave it a shot. This was sometime in 2017/2018. I’m finally getting back to this drafted post about it. wpDiscuz is fast being that it uses AJAX lazy loading. I liked that it […]
Continue Reading …Here are some of the plugin gems i found for Sketch! Please, let me know if there are any others you recommend in the comments.
Continue Reading …Previously, i lauded a lightweight carousel, Flickity, but on a current project, i inexplicably ran into an image loading issue that i spent about two hours trying to fix. No luck.
So, throwing my hands up in the air — literally — i googled “lightweight slider carousel” and the top hit was Siema.
Siema describes itself aptly as “a simple and very lightweight slider / carousel plugin written in pure vanilla JavaScript without any dependencies.”
Continue Reading …This has driven me mad over the years when i sporadically have to update an old App that was previously installed by a former user. And every time i have to spend 10 minutes or so scouring the web for a correct answer. Here’s the process to fix this. Go to the Applications folder. Find the app that you’re trying to update. In this instance, it was Bitdefender Virus Scanner. Command+Click the app, then click […]
Continue Reading …In case you run into an odd situation like i did where i didn’t have access to phpMyAdmin and the password reset via email wasn’t working, but i did have access to MySQL Workbench and the database, this can help you. First, make sure you can connect to your WordPress database via MySQL Workbench. Second, use this MD5 Hash Generator website to create a new MD5 hash of your desired password. Basically, on the site, […]
Continue Reading …Off and on i’ve toyed with leaving Google Analytics. The primary reason for this is their unruly tracking practices not respecting user privacy — at all. Google hoards and controls a ton of user data; user data they grab while users travel around the Internet. And, even when consumers grant consent for some things, it’s a blurry line that Google toes. I don’t need all the stuff Google tracks, like gender, about my visitors. A […]
Continue Reading …MailChimp is the gorilla of the email marketing world. I needed an alternative. With its growth and popularity over the years, the tried-and-true increase in prices and decrease in free-tier plan features has come along with it. We see it all too often in every industry.
Continue Reading …Yes, I know you’re busy, you have a social life, you’re a parent, you need sleep, you’re dealing with a chronic illness, etc. I get it.
Continue Reading …For the first time last week, i received a “Security Alert Digest” email from Github.
Inside were all the dependencies of a project, gatsby-starter, that had known vulnerabilities. It listed the name of the dependency, its version, and the version i should upgrade to to be safe. Okay.
Continue Reading …Although at the end of this month i’m publishing a post about Google Analytics alternatives, i still deem it necessary to educate and help people use the popular tools to their advantage.
Continue Reading …Yoast irks me. Why i left them maybe a year or so ago in lieu of The SEO Framework. I have gists and a post about Yoast removing Yoast superfluous code — <article> tags — from the <head> of the site, sending Yoast meta box to the bottom of Dashboard editor pages. Yoast was like a needy child, always nagging about something. It was also slowing down my site with its bloat. I needed something simple. […]
Continue Reading …Have you ever had people tell you your emails inexplicably went to their spam folder? Do you ever email yourself from your own domain, like say [email protected] to [email protected], but it goes to spam and that seems odd since it’s the same domain? Well, the problem is most likely related to DMARC. It stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) and is used by Google, Yahoo, and all other major email providers. It’s a […]
Continue Reading …I ended up having 100s of crawl errors in Google Search Console for URLs that were ending in /blah.php and macariojames.com/dir/subdir/subdir2/blah.php for some reason. Some even ended in .html, which was easy to resolve since WordPress doesn’t use .html files, but .php files. After failing to write my own .htaccess RewriteRule and RewriteCond code, i found some useful code that i was able to tailor to fit my needs. I’ve shared it below. This code […]
Continue Reading …Taking a break from my usual tech posts, i started researching the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) back in 2017, and i’m just getting back to finishing this piece in 2019. Important Note: i am NOT a lawyer nor trained in anything regarding legalese or the like. Nothing henceforth should be taken as legal advice; it’s just what i’ve been able to find after reading official governmental documents […]
Continue Reading …TL;DR Plugin developers should use if(is_admin()) and get_current_screen() to determine the page and load these scripts and files conditionally. And the non-plugin developers, we can dequeue the scripts and css files easily. In short: Be an awesome, caring and courtesy developer, please.
Continue Reading …Speed up a website by removing unused CSS from stylesheets. Use Chrome’s DevTools Coverage tool as a guide for what to remove.
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