Tims musings and pontifications

Blog and Articles

An eclectic mix of how-tos, insights and musing from Tim. From security to community and everything in between there is something for everyone.

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My ‘Must Use’ plugins

My ‘Must Use’ plugins

WordPress

Tim takes a look at what was in his MU plugins folder in his latest project and not a top 10 plugin was to be found anywhere?

New WordPress Workshop in Leeds UK

Events and Talks

Tim will be doing a one day workshop on Scaling and Managing your WordPress stacks in Leeds in September and you can grab your place today.

Encrypting emails with PGP and WordPress

Encrypting emails with PGP and WordPress

Security | WordPress

PGP has been in the news recently thanks to Google, but it’s strange how for something that’s been around over 20 years very few services send encrypted email. This article looks at PGP and how you can use it to encrypt outgoing emails, personal content and almost anything within WordPress.

Writing articles on performance or security, read this first

General | Security | WordPress

Writing a post on WordPress security or performance, then why not let me take a look at it for you for free before you publish?

Going Beyond LAMP Again…

Events and Talks | WordPress

I gave a variation on my WordCamp Sheffield Talk at Manchester WordPress User Group, this time concentrating more on how to make things go a bit faster, the slide deck is similar but not identical to the WordCamp Sheffield deck which also includes links to lot of the bits I spoke about. I dwelled a […]

WordPress Leeds / Northern Bloggers Update

WordPress

One of the oldest UK based WordPress User Groups is back thanks to Duke Studios providing us with a new space. As we relaunch we are looking at how we can change the format a bit and as always we are looking for speakers, helpers and sponsors.

Going Beyond LAMP – WordCamp Sheffield 2014

Going Beyond LAMP – WordCamp Sheffield 2014

Events and Talks | WordPress

WordCamp Sheffield was this weekend (24th April) and I did a short presentation about ‘Going beyond LAMP’ and looking at direct replacements and complimentary services.

Building a CDN over SSL with CloudFront and SNI

Building a CDN over SSL with CloudFront and SNI

DevOps | WordPress

Amazon CloudFront is remarkably simple to setup, you don’t need a S3 account, simply use your own HTTP server as the origin. SNI allows multiple SSL certificates to be associated with a single IP but is not 100% supported. Amazon CloudFront supports using your own SSL certificate with SNI. The combination means you can quickly build a CDN for your site.

Becoming an oEmbed Provider

Becoming an oEmbed Provider

WordPress

oEmbed has been around for quite a while but has been making the WordPress news recently, so what is it, how does it work and how can you turn any WordPress site into a oEmbed Provider all really good questions someone should answer that!

Why Blog? – WordPress Sheffield Talk

Why Blog? – WordPress Sheffield Talk

Events and Talks | WordPress

This is a bit of an unusual presentation, normally I talk about indepth technical articles but this time around I get to go all egotistical and talk about why I restarted the blog and where it’s going in the future as well as what’s keeping it up and running now.

What does your credit card say about you?

What does your credit card say about you?

WordPress

Most people have shopped online with a credit or debit card and these days we barely think before using the plastic. But, the credit card details we put in don’t just make purchases. They can also tell us a lot about the user including, banking habits, information such as town of origin and even fraud risk.

Blog like a confused hacker

Blog like a confused hacker

WordPress

For many, the concept of using WordPress as a static site generator would seem quite mental. Static Site Generators basically take a content management system’s content and combine it with a theme and generate static html pages. No dynamic content means they can be hosted more or less anywhere, consuming few resources to improve performance and, because they don’t require any specialist software, reducing the complexity of any stack. Imagine hosting your WordPress site entirely on Amazon s3 or Github, well you can but at a cost.