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 RogueRambling thoughts about WordPress
Taking 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.
Greetings byGosh
Greetings byGosh is my initial attempt to build experience in WP development, and my first plugin to be accepted into the official WP repository.
Learning WP Development
WP is awesome in part because it gives me the tools to build websites without bothering with knowledge of what is going on under the hood. If I learn just a bit about the under-the-hood stuff – HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript – I can do a lot more.
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.
WP Security Approach: Maginot Line vs. Kursk
There are various approaches to WP security, but I’ll vastly oversimplify it into two: Maginot Line or Kursk. (1)
Space Alien Technology and WordPress
Update (August 2, 2019): In case it is not obvious – this post is a joke! To the best of my knowledge – and I have a high level of confidence about this – no space aliens are being held captive at Area 51. Please do not storm area 51 based on this post.
WordPress is awesome but could it be even better by incorporating space alien technology? Of course it could.
cPanel and the greedy, treacherous betrayal
cPanel is easily the king of the hill when it comes to web hosting control panels. It is, in a word, awesome. It gives me an intuitive interface to simplify the process of managing my site. cPanel had its origin in the late 1990s. With ongoing improvements it became the default hosting control panel of choice early in the millennium, and remains so today. But likely not tomorrow.
Text to Speech
[responsivevoice_button voice=”US English Female” buttontext=”U.S. Female Voice”][responsivevoice_button voice=”UK English Female” buttontext=”U.K. Female Voice”][responsivevoice_button voice=”US English Male” buttontext=”U.S. Male Voice”][responsivevoice_button voice=”UK English Male” buttontext=”U.K. Male Voice”]
I launched my first website way back at the dawn of the millennium. It features public domain literature. From the start, it cried out for text-to-speech capability, but I could find no practical solution. I could have recorded my reading of each page in an audio file, but that would have been way too time consuming and storage-intensive (at the time, disk space was dear).
JavaScript Challenge Rule
In addition to my crazy long Cloudflare firewall “block” rule, I use a JavaScript challenge rule for pages that I want to restrict to human users, keeping out bots.
.htaccess impact on site speed
I’m a big fan of the 6G firewall, from Jeff Starr of Perishable Press. It lives in my .htaccess file, and does a great job of protecting my site against a wide variety of malicious requests, bad bots, spam referrers, and other attacks. It adds 76 lines to my .htaccess file, some of them filled with long regular expressions. WordPress and Litespeed Cache also add chunks to my .htaccess file. And, .htaccess being exceptionally flexible and useful, I add other stuff as well.
Crazy long, but free – Cloudflare firewall rule
On Cloudflare’s free tier I am allowed five firewall rules. This is very generous of Cloudflare, considering the free part. But it turns out to be much more generous than it first appears.
This is My WordPress Point of View
WordPress Security
I am by no means an expert on WordPress or web development in general, but I have dabbled for quite a while and have stumbled onto some things that might be of interest.
DDoS Protection
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a large-scale attack using multiple IP addresses, attempting to overwhelm a site with requests, crashing it or slowing it to a crawl. DDoS attacks vary in sophistication. The most sophisticated use thousands of IPs accessing multiple URLs with random query strings to bypass caching and increase the CPU load.
Robots dot text
Robots dot text (robots.txt) is a really interesting, conflicted, frequently disrespected – but useful – little file. Its intended purpose is to give me control of how bots visit my site. Depending on the bot though, my robots dot text directives might be obeyed, ignored, partially obeyed, and/or interpreted in different ways.
