All recent posts on wppov.com were composed on a freshly disinfected keyboard while wearing latex gloves and fabric face cover and enjoying an antimalarial beverage through a straw.
Rambling thoughts about WordPress
Miscellaneous
Captcha Kerfuffle
Bit of a kerfuffle on the Cloudflare Community forum lately, over Cloudflare’s switch from Google’s reCAPTCHA to Intuition Machines’ hCaptcha.
What is Yoast playing at?
I’m a fan of the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin. I’m also a fan of the Yoast SEO Plugin. Both have been very helpful on multiple occasions. But … on all of my sites Health Check is suddenly giving me a “Critical” – and, it turns out, fake – SEO error: “Your site cannot be found by search engine”; “This was reported by the Yoast SEO plugin”. Read more What is Yoast playing at?
Covid 19 Pandemic: What can I do to help?
Like many of us, I have never experienced anything remotely like the current Covid 19 (or, more descriptively, the Chinese Bat Virus) pandemic. I just completed my first week of lockdown/telecommuting, with who-knows how many weeks to go. What can I do during this time to help?
Will Coronavirus Break the Interwebs?
It’s a fair question. Lotsa people who don’t usually telecommute are telecommuting. Many more will be doing so soon. That’s gonna put a strain on the interwebs.
humans.txt
humans.txt is, I suspect, a joke. If so, it’s a pretty good one – a mildly clever play on robots.txt. When I first learned of it I smiled.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a copy of your privacy policy
All my websites should have a Privacy Policy. Even though its a GDPR requirement, and it would please me to replace my privacy policies with a simple statement: “Privacy Policy deleted to annoy evil European despots.”
Read more If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a copy of your privacy policy
Cloudflare and the Incredible Magical Expanding IP Whitelist
Doing some routine firewall tinkering in Cloudflare, I happened to notice that my IP whitelist – which I have never deliberately added anything to – had grown huge. Apparently it had been growing slowly over the years, I just didn’t notice.
Read more Cloudflare and the Incredible Magical Expanding IP Whitelist
Good bots
Cloudflare offers a field called cf.client.bot that I can use to avoid having my firewall rules inadvertently block search engines and other good bots. But what does Cloudflare consider a “good bot”, and does their definition match mine? Kinda hard to say. Cloudflare does not make an up-to-date list of good bots available to the public. But, I can set a firewall rule to Allow cf.client.bot, then monitor the firewall event log over time to see which bots are being allowed. I’m unlikely to catch all the good bots, but I will get a pretty good idea. Read more Good bots
Helpful Online Resources
Some of the helpful free online resources I use … these are not specific to WP …
WP as FrontPage
Way back in the prior millennium I got my start developing websites using FrontPage. FrontPage was much maligned by web elitists, but it worked great for me. Its intuitive WYSIWYG editor is still my favorite of all that I’ve used. I clung to my flat HTML site for years after FrontPage was discontinued, struggling to update it using whatever free tool Microsoft offered at the time. Finally in 2015 this approach – using crappy tools to maintain an antiquated site – became so obviously untenable that I was forced to find another solution. I found WordPress, fell in love with it, and never looked back.
Cloudflare slopes get slippery
For many years since it’s founding in 2009, Cloudflare stood firm as a bastion of Internet freedom, refusing to police the content of the sites that use its services.
AdSense gone Rogue
Some months ago, Google introduced AdSense Auto-Ads, which promised to make website monetization easier and more effective. It sounded kinda cool, so I tried it out, and … nope.
Read more AdSense gone RogueTaking the Block Editor Plunge
It is approaching a year since the WordPress Block Editor entered production with the release of WordPress 5 in December 2018. Up to now I stuck with the Classic Editor. Classic works fine for me. But WP support for Classic will not go on forever. At some point I will have to switch to Block, so I might as well start the transition now. This is my first post using the Block Editor. And … I’m immediately stuck. Where is my trusty Pixabay plugin? The only way I can find it is using a Classic block.
Cloudflare Workers
In September 2017 Cloudflare introduced Workers, a new feature that deploys JavaScript code to Cloudflare’s edge. Six months later Workers became available on the free tier. Basically, Workers enables me to code my own new, unique, features into my instance of Cloudflare.
