Daily ArchivesSeptember 11, 2021

Because of the popularity of WordPress, it has become one of the prime targets of hackers. This isn’t because of any particular weakness in WordPress itself, but rather because the sheer number of sites running WordPress make it an irresistible temptation for those who make money from exploiting honest site owners.

We’re going to look at a few of the reasons why hackers would want to gain access to your WordPress site and offer a few simple rules that will help you fight the hackers that would target your site and turn it against you.

Why Do Hackers Hack?

The first thing to understand is that the attack almost certainly has nothing to do with your business or what it does. Instead, hackers want access to your site’s visitors or resources for several reasons:

Magento, in both its community and enterprise editions, is overwhelmingly the most popular open source eCommerce platform available. Much of its power is baked right in, with almost all the features an online store needs, but there are also many third party integrations that extend Magento’s functionality considerably.

Integrating Magento with external services is the best way to build a true end-to-end retail platform that encompasses every aspect of retail from marketing to fulfillment and beyond. In this article we’re going to highlight 10 integrations, both free and paid, that a Magento store owner should seriously consider adding to their retail processes.

MailChimp is the pre-eminent email marketing solution. Email marketing is an essential part of eCommerce lead generation and the Magento / MailChimp integration allows for the easy creation of segmented mailing lists that are synced with Magento newsletter subscribers. Magento users can also take advantage of MailChimp’s Mandrill transactional email service. Read More »

The educational world has been changing in recent years. Today, it’s expected that teachers will put a significant amount of their course material online. There are dedicated open source educational platforms, but WordPress, the world’s most popular open source content management system, has many features that teachers can leverage to easily make the most of online educational techniques.

WordPress is easy to setup and manage. Once the site has been configured, it mostly gets out of the way and allows teachers and students to concentrate on creating content.

We’re going to have a look at some of the ways that teachers and students can make use of WordPress to improve communication with their students and provide an interesting and exciting way for students to create and share content.

Google Chrome has gone from strength to strength since its introduction a few years ago. One of its biggest benefits is the huge ecosystem of extensions and applications that can be used to add features and customize the browser experience.

Given the prevalence of WordPress and of blogging, it’s no surprise that many developers have turned to solving blogger’s problems with extensions. It’s possible to adapt Chrome so that you never even have to visit your blog to post, monitor, and engage with readers. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but it can be very handy to dash off a quick comment or a minor post without seriously interrupting your workflow.

In this article we’re going to show you 10 extensions for Google Chrome that will turn it into a blogging powerhouse. Read More »

Southfield, MI, July 17, 2013 – Hostdedi, a Magento Platinum Hosting Partner, is pleased to announce that it is sponsoring and presenting at this year’s MagentoLive Conference in Sydney, Australia.

MagentoLive Australia is Australia’s preeminent Magento conference and will provide educational and networking opportunities for developers and users of the world’s most popular eCommerce platform. Alongside eBay and PayPal, Hostdedi is a Platinum-level sponsor of MagentoLive Australia. Over 250 leading eCommerce merchants, partners, and developers from Australia and internationally will be in attendance.

Hostdedi is a trusted provider of Magento hosting, offering optimized hosting packages for Magento stores of all sizes. As evidenced by authorship numerous content pieces on Magento performance, a Varnish caching extension of Magento dubbed Turpentine, and a very special hosting platform made just for Magento called the M-SIP, Hostdedi makes the Magento community its highest priority. Read More »

Travel blogging has become wildly popular in recent years. With the rise of the life hacking and digital nomad trends, more and more people are taking advantage of the abilities technology provides to cut the ties to home and hearth and do the work they had been doing remotely from whichever destination they choose.

For such traveling workers, blogging is as common as owning a backpack. While many rely on social networks for sharing the obligatory photos and experiences of their journey, a blog is great accompaniment to social media. They offer a great deal of control over how and when content is published and how it is displayed. Using a CMS like WordPress offers both extraordinary flexibility and ease of use.

We’re going to have a look at some of the options traveling bloggers have for creating the perfect environment to easily share their experiences. Read More »

Since Tumblr’s recent acquisition by Yahoo! for $1.1 billion, and in spite of Marissa Mayer’s assurances that they wouldn’t “screw it up”, many Tumblr users have become wary of using the platform. Yahoo! may have the best of intentions, but they’ve spent a huge amount of money, and they’ll need to see some sort of return on their investment. Inevitably, that means Tumblr is going to change, perhaps for the better, or perhaps not.

For those who want to make the move, there are various options to consider, but one that should be at the top of the list is self-hosted WordPress. Self-hosting means that you pay for disk space and bandwidth from a hosting provider, install and configure WordPress, and administer your own blog.

It’s a very different experience from using a “cloud” service like Tumblr, but in many cases those differences are strengths. In this article we’re going to lay out the case for considering WordPress if you choose to make the move from Tumblr. Read More »

If you’re a WordPress user, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of testing every significant change you make to your installation before deploying it on your production hosting. In most cases, upgrading, adding plugins, or tweaking a theme won’t cause problems, but occasionally you’ll get incompatible plugins or break something. The last thing website owners want is for those errors to be visible on their site. WordPress users have several options for testing prior to deployment, including setting up a “testing” or “staging” subfolder on their host, using a cloud hosting platform like EC2 to spin up a temporary WordPress instance to try things out, or creating a local development environment.

If you’re a solo blogger or site manager, the latter option can be a lot more convenient. Everything can be served from your local machine, shortening the typical workflow of editing, uploading, and refreshing. It’s great to be able to play with plugins, test out design ideas, and experiment with configuration options without having to upload anything to the Internet.

There are 4 basic components that any WordPress site needs: an operating system to run on, a MySQL database, a functioning PHP environment, and a web server. Read More »

Blogging is about more than just the blogging platform itself. WordPress forms the hub of most blogging workflows, but much of the work both pre- and post-publication takes place elsewhere, whether that’s research and creating a content calendar, or promoting posts on social media. There are lots of ways of tying these various disparate components together, but IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That is one of the most powerful and flexible tools for improving WordPress productivity.

IFTTT acts as a sort of clearing house, linking together online services. We’re going to explain how IFTTT works, show you how to create your own IFTTT workflows, and point out some of the best WordPress workflows that have been created by others.

How Does IFTTT Work?

From IFTTT’s perspective, WordPress is a channel. Channels are sources of information and actions that IFTTT can integrate with. It simply looks for an action on one channel and then triggers an action on a second channel using whatever information it has been passed. These combinations of channels are known as recipes. For example, you could have a recipe that sends a tweet whenever a new item is added to your WordPress site’s RSS feed. Read More »

Last year, eCommerce sales exceeded $1 Trillion for the first time, and the smart money is on the growth trend continuing well into the foreseeable future. If you or your business sell products, then you need to be selling online or risk obsolescence.

The move online is a no-brainer, but after the initial decision, you’ll have to choose which platform you’re going to use to build your web store. Magento is by far the most popular choice and with good reason.

We’re going to take a look at some of the reasons that Magento should be your first choice, whether you’re a solopreneur, own a small business, or represent an enterprise giant. Magento is simple to deploy, manage, and configure, while being powerful enough to meet even the most demanding online retailer’s requirements. Read More »