Think Local

Our family and our small business does its best to think local and buy local whenever we can do so. We do our best to buy products made in the U.S. even if we have to pay more to do so. I would like to encourage you to do the same; doing so keeps more of the dollars...

The Security Dance – Part 2

Welcome back! Last week’s article, There are no wallflowers at the security dance! Get to know your dance partners covered getting to know your security dance partners: If you are the business steward or a part of the management team, you already know the burden...

The Security Dance – Part 1

If you have your business on the Internet, you are a part of a line dance. You can chose to be a wallflower, and face the consequences of doing nothing. Or you can get to know your fellow dance partners (maybe picking replacements for ones that no longer fit), and be...

PCI Compliance Scans and Small Business Gripes

Just as more government regulations tend to strangle a small business to death (worse case) or slow its growth (best case), so goes for PCI Compliance standards which add little to no practical value to security. Some house keeping first in terms of going over some...

How to downgrade a WordPress Plugin

Generally you wanted to be on the very latest version of a WordPress plugin. However, there are times you do need to be one or more versions behind. What are some of the reasons behind making such a decision? Recently a plugin was throwing errors for me after updating...

WordPress White Screen of Death

What is the WordPress White Screen of Death? It is when you go to your site and see just a blank, empty, white page rather than your site. While you may not have known the name of the problem, it is something you can experience with WordPress (as well as other content...

Making WordPress more secure

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let me share steps you can take to make your WordPress site more secure against hackers. Please note a number of the steps I will share are listed on Hardening WordPress, Official WordPress Codex article. In May 2011, I...

Find the hacker

I received a phone call towards noon today from a hosting provider in Florida who, after spending days of trying to locate the source of spam coming from sites they host, needed expert help to locate the source of the problem. While they knew the domain names of sites...

WordPress Updates and FTP

Are you hosting with a WordPress hosting provider where you are asked for your FTP credentials when you go to update WordPress itself? WordPress Plugins? WordPress Themes? Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to enter the FTP information (and not save...

How to help customers move to WordPress

A large number of our customers come from the boom days of Microsoft FrontPage. For those of you who don’t know about Microsoft FrontPage, it was both a tool for web hosting customers as well as an a server-based application for web hosting providers to allow...