Posts tagged “education”
Unless you make a living building websites, you’ve probably never asked yourself Why SEO Matters. CEOs and business owners have more pressing matters to deal with like growing a business and establishing a customer base. Sure, maybe you’ve taken the time to put together a quick website and stay engaged on social media with a myriad of phone apps but who’s got time for Search Engine Optimization and all that malarkey?
Now this was a head-scratcher: the BackupBuddy settings on 5 of my client websites simply reset for no apparent reason. And that means the websites were not being automatically backed up. Not good.
After chatting with iThemes Support (the people who make BackupBuddy), I learned that connectivity issues between the website and database can fool BackupBuddy into thinking there are no settings causing the plugin to revert to defaults. Connectivity issues could be due to DDoS attacks or a problem with the hardware. iThemes said they are aware of this issue and have built in more checks but as is life they can’t account for every single scenario.
Fortunately I caught the problem during a routine maintenance check on a client’s website. BackupBuddy now comes with a way to export the plugin settings so it’s a good idea to save a copy just in case.
Chrome’s Network tab alerted that a client’s website was downloading Roboto from Google Fonts. The problem was that we weren’t using Roboto for this project. After some troubleshooting we discovered Roboto was being downloaded on pages displaying an embedded Google Map. Why, Google?
Thankfully, Stack Overflow has a pretty simple solution.
It took me a while to really grasp the power of WordPress’ Actions and Filters. Now I love using them and have recently discovered how they can be used to generate the correct Schema data depending on what the WordPress Loop is generating.
Read more »OK, it seems we need to review Form User Interface 101: when providing users a choice of items, ensure the list is exhaustive.
Case in point: I was filling in the registration form for Brunei’s upcoming Century Run when I came to the field labelled Higher Education Institution. The choices were presented as a select menu. See if you can spot what’s wrong:
The list only contains Brunei institutions of higher learning with no catch-all option for foreign universities. And since this was a required field I had to select something. So congratulations Universiti Brunei Darussalam, for the purposes of The Century Run I am unofficially an alumni! You lucky guys, you 🙂
iThemes recently held a free two-part webinar discussing WordPress Security. The first video takes an introductory level approach but I still grabbed a couple good tips from it.
The second video talks about the company’s iThemes Security Plugin and also hosts a Q&A session with Chris Wiegman, the developer of iThemes Security, as well as Tony Perez, CEO of Sucuri. Unfortunately the sound was non-existent during Chris’s portion so you might want to skip that section until it’s fixed.
I found Tony’s section particularly interesting as he talks about higher-level approaches to security. He also touches on the wide-spread belief that using a shared host is less secure because you run the risk of other websites on that host being infected or hacked. The tl;dr is this does not happen much today with reputable web hosts (Tony specifically mentions BlueHost, HostGator and GoDaddy as being OK).
Here’s that portion of the video:
Sometimes well-meaning security tweaks to your website can actually inhibit, or even outright kill, intended functionality. It is imperative web developers understand what they are trying to achieve and the different ways to get there.
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