WordPress

How to make your blog a secure and trusted place

Neville Hobson Blogging, Hardware, Reputation, Software, Technology, Web, Weblog Tools, Weblogs

If you run a self-hosted blog – like WordPress, for instance – now’s the time to enhance your confidence and that of your visitors and community in its security and trust. While this is mostly about data security, it’s also about search engine optimization and search results ranking by Google. I’m talking about enabling https, the secure form of http (hence the ‘s’) that offers important benefits: In its popular deployment on the internet, HTTPS provides authentication of the website and associated web server with which one is communicating, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, it provides bidirectional encryption of communications between a client and server, which protects against eavesdropping and tampering with or forging the contents of the communication. Authentication of and confidence […]

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Developing peace of mind with WordPress plugins

Neville Hobson 7 Comments Blogging, Experiences, Software, Weblog Tools, Weblogs

Whenever a new release of the WordPress content management system comes out, I’m usually on it immediately, updating all my sites running WordPress to that latest version. But not this time. Not yet. Version 4.4 of WordPress was released on December 8, but I’m still on WordPress 4.3.1, the immediately preceding version. The reason? It’s about plugins, the eminently useful add-on software you install that adds additional or improved functionality in many different ways to the core of WordPress itself. The screenshot above shows the problem for me – eight already-installed plugins that have updated versions available but cannot show whether they’re compatible with the new version of WordPress: all I see is ‘Unknown.’ I’d usually go ahead and update […]

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The richness of WordCamp London 2015

Neville Hobson 17 Comments Blogging, Communication, Events, Experiences, Professional Development, Social Media, Software, Technology, Weblog Tools, Weblogs
wordcamplondon2015

#wcldn (@ WordCamp London) https://t.co/RpOQMSlSQ7 pic.twitter.com/ZFgx9DWeFA — Neville Hobson (@jangles) March 21, 2015 This past weekend, as many as 600 people got together in North London to talk about things WordPress, the content management system that is the platform of choice for more than 75 million websites worldwide, and is in a market-leading position with blogs. It was WordCamp London 2015, a three-day event comprising a contributor day on Friday, and the two-day conference over the weekend that I attended, with speakers from across the WordPress community, with talks for designers, developers, writers, business-owners, freelancers, anyone who is at all interested in WordPress. As a blogger whose blogs run on WordPress – and who first experimented with WordPress in 2004 […]

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Just a bit less minimalist

Neville Hobson 10 Comments Communication, Experiences, Marketing, NevilleHobson.com, Software, Web

About a month ago, I made a big change to this website when I redesigned it and combined the blog with my business website, with both on the same single domain. At the time, I talked up my strong feeling about a minimalist approach to a presence on the social web, doing away with all the clutter that tends to populate so many websites with widgets, ads, popups galore, and more. If you observed that change and have visited this site since then, you’ll notice another change if you’re reading this on the site itself rather than via the RSS feed or syndication elsewhere. I’ve reverted to a website based on the Genesis Framework – in my view, the best […]

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A minimalist approach

Neville Hobson 20 Comments Communication, Marketing, NevilleHobson.com, Web

[Updated July 27: Today I reverted to the Genesis Framework and the eleven40 Pro child theme. Concise reasoning in today’s post about the change.] Today I re-booted this website. It has a new look and feel, quite a bit different to what went before it. And the domain on which the blog has run since 2006 is also now home to the separate business website I’ve had for some years. So everything you want to know about me is housed under one roof instead of fragmented in a few places – all now at NevilleHobson.com. The whole site uses the Decode theme for WordPress. It’s the most attractive and simplest theme to set up that I’ve come across since starting to […]

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