In the course of blogging about important issues, there are times when you may need to link to dubious or objectionable material in order to provide context for your post. For example, some subject matter may necessitate a reference to racist material or a fraudulent business. Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, the age old…
When we talk about the basics of WordPress security, we always tell you to use a very strong password. The recently added password strength meter helps to facilitate the process. But what about usernames? WordPress offers a way to change your display name which acts as a username alias. However, it doesn’t hide the username…
Over the past 30 years, emoticons have become a staple of digital communication. People rely on the smiley to add tone and feeling, which are often absent when communicating online. This is especially important in the case of text messaging and micro-blogging applications like Twitter where characters are limited. An emoticon can make all the…
Are you in love with the new WordPress.com smilies? Their modern look is a bit more expressive and endearing than the old emoticons. If you view them side-by-side, there is simply no comparison, especially when you zoom in: Although there is a ticket open for updating WordPress core emoticons for self-hosted sites, there’s no telling…
Founded in 2006, Qik enabled mobile phone users to share live video with their friends, family and followers. In January of 2011, the company was acquired by Skype. Three years after announcing the acquisition, the company has announced they will shutdown the service on April 30, 2014. The shut down means all mobile apps will…
Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features: The goal of this project is to emulate…
Announced at WordCamp San Francisco during Matt Mullenweg’s State of The Word 2013 presentation, developer.wordpress.org will host educational tools for developers in the form of handbooks and code referencing material. It will be the go-to place to discover WordPress best practices. Since educational materials surrounding WordPress are spread across the web, it’s hard for developers…
Emoticons are believed to have been invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested that they be used on “computer bulletin boards.” Though not widely used at that time, emoticon usage exploded with the popularity of AOL’s Instant Messenger in the 1990’s. Now, more than 30 years later, emoticons…
Over the weekend, we reported that WordPress For iOS 4.0 was released. Not only did I upgrade, but I also enabled the single-sign on Jetpack module for WPTavern.com and two-factor authentication for my WordPress.com user account. Within the comments of the post, Jonathan Lyman mentioned WordPress For iOS is incompatible with two-factor authentication: Just a…
PhpStorm is a popular IDE that many developers depend on to code more efficiently, debug applications, and run unit tests with integrated version control and command-line tools. The upcoming version 8 will add official support for WordPress. According to a recent survey conducted by SitePoint, PhpStorm is by far the most favored IDE among PHP…
WordPress for iOS 4.0 has been released. Stats are now a native component, improving their look and feel on devices running iOS. While I didn’t have a problem with the traditional web view, the native view is a considerable improvement. Being a native component has also given the stats a noticeable speed improvement when loading.…
Marcus Couch and I were joined by Steve Burge, founder of OSTraining.com. OSTraining was launched in 2008 and is one of the few websites dedicated to educating users of three major open-source platforms: Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. Through OSTraining, Steve has a unique perspective on the pain points users are encountering with each platform. We…
A WordCamp mobile app may soon be a reality. WordPress was accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. As part of that process, the community prepared a list of ideas for GSoC projects that students can work on. The creation of a WordCamp mobile app was among those ideas. The application…
ThemeCheck.org is a new site that provides a free validation service for WordPress and Joomla themes. Visitors can upload themes and templates and the service will analyze the files and run tests to verify security and code quality. The site gives each theme a quality score along with a list of alerts and warnings. For…
Due to its popularity, WordPress is a favorite target of hackers looking to exploit any vulnerability to gain access to your site. Once inside they can do things like compromise your files, deface your website and start gobbling up all your server’s resources until you are shut down. With services like BruteProtect gaining traction and…
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