Website speed tests – Part 2

Posted on May 18, 2019 by Kenny

Awhile back I bemoaned the very inconsistent results I get from online website speed checkers. Not just inconsistency from checker to checker, but also from the same checker at different times. I test-drove a few of the checkers and …

In summary, results are all over the damn place. My site’s speed grade is A, B+, B, or C. Load time is less than or second, or over 4 seconds. Also, there seems to be no correlation between grade and actual speed. Pingdom gives me a ‘C’ with less than a second load time, Uptrends gives me an ‘A’ with a 4.4 second load time.

Furthermore, if I use the same 10 checkers again, I will get different – sometimes wildly divergent – results from the same checker at different times.

McAfee SiteAdvisor Rocks!

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Kenny

Big shout out to McAfee SiteAdvisor for quickly correcting their assessment of this site and one of my other sites.

McAfee SiteAdvisor rocks it like a wagon wheel!

A bit of background ….

Prank contact form emails

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Kenny

My first website, byGosh.com – launched at the dawn of the millennium – features public domain literature. It includes all the classic stories for kids. I rewrote parts of many kid’s stories to remove the violence. Red Riding Hood is rescued by her grandmother who chases the wolf away with a broom, Jack returns the harp and lets the giant climb back up before cutting down the beanstalk, none of the three little pigs get eaten – even the wolf lives happily ever after, and so on.

Optimizing the WP task scheduler

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Kenny

Certain WP tasks need to be executed in the future, either one time or on an ongoing basis. These tasks include things like publishing a scheduled post (one-time) and checking for WP, plugin, and theme updates (ongoing). WordPress includes a built-in component called wp-cron.php that triggers execution of these scheduled tasks. But not always when I would want or expect it. It runs on every page or post load. This works fine on a site with a regular stream of moderate traffic. But …

Cloudflare Canaries

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Kenny

Update 2020-01-02: In its latest Transparency Report, dated December 20, 2019, Cloudflare killed a key canary. The third bullet in the list below, “Cloudflare has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure”, is … well, to paraphrase the great Monty Python parrot skit:

Zero-Day WP Plugin Vulnerabilities

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Kenny

New zero-day WP plugin vulnerabilities are announced with alarming frequency. I gotta keep all my plugins up to date so that any new vulnerability gets patched. I use my custom plugin to auto-update everything – WP, themes, and plugins.

WordPress Lives!

Posted on March 17, 2019 by Kenny

Any question of the demise, or even decline, of WP due to the inexplicably clumsy imposition of the block editor has been resoundingly answered with a thunderous “nope”. WP continues to thrive. In fact, WP just passed a huge milestone – it now powers over one-third of the web! From about 13% in January 2011, WP use has grown steadily to 33.4% to start 2019. Non-CMS share of the web has correspondingly plummeted, from over 75% in January 2011 to less than 50% today.

The trends appear intractable, so much so that I will make a foolishly reckless prediction – WP web share will surpass non-CMS before the end of calendar year 2019, U.S. Pacific time.

Bad Bot Honeypot

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Kenny

Jeff Starr of Perishable Press offers what appears to be an excellent, free Blackhole for Bad Bots. Unfortunately it does not work with all cache setups, and I use some pretty crazy aggressive caching to boost site speed. I have not been able get Jeff’s plugin to work for me. I decided to make a very much simplified, less automated version, that will require an ongoing bit of my time but hopefully will thwart naughty bots.

Cloudflare Access

Posted on February 19, 2019 by Kenny

Back in January 2018, Cloudflare introduced a new service, Cloudflare Access. As is their generous habit for many of their features, CF even made it available on the free tier. CF describes Access as “a perimeter-less access control solution for cloud and on-premise applications”. Basically, Access lets me host internal applications on the Internet, where use is controlled, authorized, authenticated, and encrypted. For the end user, it works very similar to two-factor authentication. But it all happens on Cloudflare’s servers.

MDD Hosting and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Kenny

or, How to Destroy an Entire Data Center with a Typo

First, MDD Hosting is awesome. I’ve been with them for about a year and a half, and will likely stay for decades if they stay awesome. Uptime – with the one big exception described below, has been good. Speed is great. Price is reasonable. They check all my must-have and nice-to-have features: LiteSpeed server; cPanel; free Let’s Encrypt SSL; CloudLinux account isolation technology; SSD storage; Softaculous Autoinstaller; PHP version selector; Not associated with Endurance International Group (EIG); No obnoxious up-selling or other BS marketing games. Most impressive is help service – always prompt, courteous, and knowledgeable.

But last September (2018), MDD and its clients endured a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day – several days actually.

WordPress Plugins vs. Cloudflare Apps

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Kenny

Cloudflare Apps are a lot like WordPress plugins. Each App adds specific functionality to my website. Like plugins, Apps are available in multiple categories such as SEO, Security, Social & Communication, etc. Another similarity – some Apps are free, some are not.

Cloudflare as a Registrar, Part II

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Kenny

I received notification of early entry to the Cloudflare registrar service. I transferred a domain (this one) for a test drive. My initial impression … pretty awesome!

Facebook Post Optimization

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Kenny

Once in a while I get lucky and someone will ‘like’ or ‘share’ my site on Facebook. By default, the FB post can look crappy, unlikely to drive much if any traffic my way. FB makes guesses about the title and description, and crops an image from my post or page to fit the space allocated on the post – not exactly the best Facebook post optimization.

A crappy-looking Facebook post

Read more Facebook Post Optimization ›

Coming Soon: Cloudflare as a Registrar

Posted on January 8, 2019 by Kenny

For awhile now, Cloudflare has been quietly advertising “coming-soon” no-added-fees registrar services for Cloudflare customers – even those like me on the free tier. According to the sales pitch, CF will charge exactly $0 for this service, adding no fee at all to the Wholesale Registry fee (currently $7.85 for dot com) + the $0.18 ICANN fee. So, CF will register a dot com domain for the bargain annual cost of $8.03.

Cloudflare and Free Speech

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Kenny

Cloudflare, even more so than other tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, has the capability to fight subjective hatred and injustice. That is, to limit free speech in accordance with the highly subjective viewpoints of its executives. A huge amount of web traffic flows through CF. It would be trivial to silence any voices that proliferate truly despicable hate speech and/or offend the easily-offended sensibilities of the cry-baby left.

To Cloudflare’s great credit – unlike other, mostly ultra-left web corporations – they have proven remarkably reluctant to do so.

Read more Cloudflare and Free Speech ›