Blog and Articles

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?

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Setting up WordPress is famously easy! It takes only 5 minutes but it’s worth taking some time to look at the best way to structure your next WordPress project. Tim looks at his current preferred WordPress structure and discusses some of the rationale behind it. Continue Reading

Many plugins call on 3rd party services when they do those services often provide some form of credentials and 9 times out of 10 those credentials get stored in wp-options table. Except I don’t want my security credentials in my database. Where you store you secrets can be deeply personal thing.

A common way to call credentials in plugin is something along the lines of

$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' );
define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );

if you are going to do that, then try this instead

if ( ! defined( 'SECRETKEY' ) ) {
$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' );
define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );
}

By checking if it’s already defined before pulling it from DB it allows me to add the API key in the wp-config.php and avoid putting it in my DB.

If you develop plugins that make use of third party services and storing API keys, then give your users the flexibility to store the keys where they want.

Welcome to TimNash.co.uk come sit down and find out what’s new and different about this incarnation of TimNash.co.uk Continue Reading