In the last 24 hours, I’ve had two seperate phishing emails, pointing to dummy banking sites, as they do. Both had set up shop, so to speak, by commandering someone else’s site and setting up their replica pages in a deeply nested sub-directory - exactly like the parasites they are! Presumably, the site owners did not even realise there was anything afoot.
This prompted me to wonder how the perpetrators had gained access, and how secure my own sites are. So I did a bit of research, specifically in the area of securing WordPress (although many of the principles apply to other kinds of site too)…
Continue reading ‘How secure is your site?’
Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!
Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way - the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links - I had no idea!
Continue reading ‘Easiest way to manage broken links’
Image courtesy of Darwin BellIt’s happened to us all. One day you’re merrily surfing along, you click a link, and Bam, you get a page not found error. Why, what happened? Well, chances are the link you followed used to resolve to a legitimate page, but the page has now been taken down or moved to a new location. Couldn’t it have left a forwarding address? Well actually, yes it could (and should) have.
Continue reading ‘The 2 best ways to Redirect a URL’
As I mentioned previously, a few well-chosen images can really help to give your blog a visual lift. One problem that you may have come across though is that often image files can be quite substantial in terms of size. So today I want to show you how to resize them using GIMP, a popular open-source image editor.
Image courtesy of cpt.spock
Continue reading ‘How to resize images using GIMP’
The other day I mentioned in passing that I’d needed to transfer some files to my web server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), so thought I’d elaborate on that a bit. Now, modern blogging platforms like WordPress have drastically reduced the need to use FTP for day-to-day tasks like posting articles and such, but if you run your own website or blog, you will find that you need to use it at some point for things like:
- Retrieving backups
- Installing plugins
- Redirecting URLs
Continue reading ‘How to use FTP to transfer files’
