Happy birthday, WordPress! What does that even mean, though? WordPress is the community of people who have built it and contributed to it over the last two decades, and before that, when it was a little known blogging package called b2. So, thank you so much to everyone who has […]
WordPress
Redirecting ?replytocom so bots go home
Earlier this month I noticed that a particular bot that likes to visit my website, “MJ12bot/v1.4.8” seems to be particularly attracted to the “reply to comment” links generated by my blog. Those are links that bots see, but we see the “Reply” button that uses JavaScript to reply to a […]
WordPress
The Mastodon Onslaught on your blog
You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there. If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers […]
WordPress
How to add your blog to Mastodon
Introduction Before we start, do you know what Mastodon is? It’s sort of like email, where you can send an email from gmail.com to a yahoo.com account, except it looks very like Twitter. This pcmag article is a good introduction to it. Jeff Jarvis wrote a good post too, and […]
WordPress
How to “remember me” on the WordPress login page
If you’re like me: You’re the only one who logs into your WordPress website. You only do it on your computer at home. You lock your computer every time you step away, even when there’s nobody at home. You have a 2FA plugin which adds a new field, and means […]
WordPress
Hide featured image if it’s in the post
I’ve been running a photoblog at inphotos.org since 2005 on WordPress. (And thanks to writing this I noticed it’s 15 years old today!) In that time WordPress has changed dramatically. At first I used Flickr to host my images, but after a short time I hosted the images myself. (Good […]
WordPress
Crowdsignal Polls in your Block Editor
The Crowdsignal team at Automattic have been quietly working on a new poll block for the last few weeks. We finally made it public today on WordPress.org! We set out with the task of creating a block that would allow the writer to quickly insert a poll in their posts […]
WordPress
WP Super Cache 1.6.9: security update
WP Super Cache is a full page caching plugin for WordPress. Version 1.6.9 has just been released and is a required upgrade for all users as it resolves a security issue in the debug log. The issue can only be exploited if debugging is enabled in the plugin which will […]
WordPress
WP Super Cache 1.6.3
WP Super Cache is a full page caching plugin for WordPress. When a page is cached almost all of WordPress is skipped and the page is sent to the browser with the minimum amount of code executed. This makes the page load much faster. 1.6.3 is the latest release and […]
WordPress
WP Super Cache and Cookie Banners
EDIT: Updated for WP Super Cache 1.6.3 and newer. More sites use cookie banners now that the GDPR is active but some are finding that their banners are misbehaving once they enable caching. This is a similar issue to the one that happened to some page counter plugins in the […]