WordPress

Converting this WordPress site from http: to https: – Part 2

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One of the things that kept me from the change to SSL was that my hosting company, Pair.com, did not have any nice (convenient) way to use the free Let’s Encrypt SLL certificates.

Pair now offers an easy one click interface to set up SSL and they automatically renew the certificates, so there’s really no excuse to not do it.

Sign up for Pair.com now and enjoy 20% off your first pair Networks bill! Use code:
pairref-XGp4U9mb

What does the interface look like? You go to the Manage Your SSL page and look for the button next to your domain name that says:

Click the Let’s Encrypt button and you’re good to go!

After a few minutes (so that you think the computer was doing some really difficult task) it’ll present you with your domain name with a super-intelligent shade of green lock next to it. All done with the easy part!

Now for the less easy part…

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Converting this WordPress site from http: to https: – Part 1

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Part 1 – A rant about flaws in the design concept of WordPress

This site launched on September 11, 2006.

At the time, I didn’t love the concept of running software on the server to create the site. I was also looking at this Blosxom software which generated a static site. It’s usage was a little programmer-like rather than writing-like, and WordPress promised a friendly interface for typing.

(If only Microsoft Frontpage had kept on developing…)

Running live website creation software on the server seemed like a bad idea to me. So open for all kinds of security issues, performance issues, and (as time has proved) software update issues. So much yuck for the sake of a certain type of convenience.

Note:  that link to Blosxom is something I just found. It used to be at a URL like raelity.org and that seems to be some sort of copy on sourceforge. I don’t think Blosxom is updated anymore (although static site generation is becoming a thing again.)

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How To Include Amazon Text and Image (Enhanced Display) Affiliate Links In WordPress – Part 2

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Feh. As per my previous post on inserting iframe tags in the TinyMCE editor in WordPress for amazon affiliate links and youtube videos, this is something a user needs to be able to do without having the editor delete them as soon as you switch into WYSIWYG mode. This plugin — Amazon Widgets Shortcodes — … Read more

Check Your WordPress Website’s Speed and Make It Faster

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Google thinks the web should be fast, and that’s kinda the final word. Here’s some (older but still useful) info on site speed as a ranking factor.

I recently found a useful website for testing your website’s speed – it checks the website by accessing it from multiple locations (in multiple countries) and thus gives a better test than just checking the speed in your own browser.

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WordPress – Be Ready To Be Hacked Again

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Ahh… the dreaded

3.0.4 Important Security Update

…a very important update to apply to your sites as soon as possible because it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES. I would rate this release as “critical.”

Yeah. What that says to me is, “A hacker has already looked at the vulnerabilities in 3.0.3 and written a script to exploit it and deployed it on the websites he/she has already hacked so that it can go out and get access to even more web servers by simply crawling the web looking for WordPress installations that haven’t been updated yet.”

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Getting WordPress Multisite to Work Part 4

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Discover how ManageWP solves all these problems and more!

New way to tackle this… Last night I tried to install WordPress MU instead of WordPress 3 Beta.

After all, I don’t particularly care about the exciting new features — I just want to run multiple domain names off a single WordPress install so I only have to keep one WordPress install updated and secure instead of 10 or 20 or 50.

For all the stuff I’ve seen about installing MU, I thought it was going to be difficult. It wasn’t, but…

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