Pop-Ups are Depraved

There is a very special place in hell reserved for those who subject their website visitors to pop-ups. It is below the level of serial killers and just slightly above the level reserved for Hillary Clinton. Pop-ups are so viciously, fundamentally evil it would not surprise me to learn that Hillary herself invented them, perhaps with assistance from Internet-inventor and billionaire climate alarmist Al Gore.

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Images, Copyrights, and the Pixabay Plugin

Choosing images to use in my pages and posts can be a minefield. How do I steer clear of unintentional copyright infringement? I could pay for commercial images from a reputable supplier, but that would violate my guiding principal of not paying for web stuff when at all practical. My preference is to always use images that are verifiably public domain. When I can’t find or create an applicable public domain image I resort reluctantly to Creative Commons, though I cringe at the hypocritical requirements and restrictions.



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Allowing only Cloudflare traffic

No piratesIn other posts I give my point of view on the security advantages of using Cloudflare. But what’s to stop a bad guy, gal, or bot from accessing my site directly by IP address? I can try to keep my IP address secret, but a determined hacker will find it without too much trouble. He or she or his/her robot minions could then avoid Cloudflare security by attacking my site directly – unless I take explicit measures by allowing only Cloudflare traffic.

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WP Accessibility

WP AccessibilityAn interest of mine, in addition to WP, is document accessibility. Over the years I’ve learned quite a bit about it, in particular relating to PDF files. My website on the topic is TaggedPDF.com. I know much less about web accessibility, just have never made it a focus of study since from an income perspective (another interest of mine) it seems to be well-covered by others. So, I got to wondering, how are my sites when it comes to WP accessibility?

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Website speed tests

It’s Sunday, too hot to be outside, and I’m kinda bored. I think just for fun I’ll test-drive a few of the website speed checkers that clutter the web. Speed matters. WP, like any CMS, is handicapped from the start. My browser asks a flat html site for a page, the site says “OK, here you go.” By comparison, WP says “OK, sure. Hang around a bit. I’ll query and pull a bunch of stuff from the database, fetch some images, some CSS and Javascript files, and build that page for you.” So, I do what I can – or at least what I think makes sense – to make my sites speedy.

Website speed tests

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Bad bot login attempts

Bad bot login attemptsOne thing that consistently amuses me on the usually excellent WP support forum is the experts’ responses to questions about bad bot login attempts …

  • “Don’t worry about it”
  • “It’s normal”
  • “I get way more malicious login attempts than that” – as if it were a badge of honor.

Bots constantly pound away at WP login pages – usually using ‘admin’ as username and a list of common passwords. These hacks are easy to thwart. Just use a non-obvious username and strong password. Problem solved, right? Well, kinda – with a strong password and a username other than ‘admin’, I won’t be hacked by this vector. But I refuse to accept my site being constantly under attack as somehow ‘normal’.

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Web Cache Deception Hacks

Web Cache Deception Hacks

Web cache deception hacks are a fairly recent threat, first described by Omer Gil in February 2017. In certain situations a hacker could leverage a misconfiguration between a web server and a proxy cache like Cloudflare to reveal sensitive information that could help the hacker takeover my account. To be honest, this seems like a very unlikely threat. The situations that could cause it seem complex and obscure, and large scale attacks of this sort have not been observed in the wild.

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Health Check Plugin

The free WP Health Check plugin is a relatively new arrival, having been introduced a few months ago by “The WordPress.org community”. It has a remarkably polarized set of user reviews – divided almost exclusively between 5s (“Works great!”) and 1s (“Warning! Broke my site!”).  The authors strongly urge to backup your site before installing and using this plugin – always a good idea.

wp health check plugin

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Do not go gentle into the GDPR

The GDPR – the grotesque deprecation of personal responsibility, the ultimate pinnacle of arrogant, tyrannical, despotic big nanny government – is effective as of the date of this post. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of your rights.

Do not go gentle into the GDPR

Also freedom to bear arms.
Apparently Norman Rockwell never illustrated that one. I bet it would have been cool.

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