After a couple of weeks of rumors, Google announced that it will add an ad-blocker to the Chrome web browser next year. Chrome is the most popular browser on the web with a market share of over 60%, and the introduction of always-on, activated-by-default ad-blocking will have a substantial impact on the advertising and publishing […]

Readers and viewers don’t like advertising. Few people visit a site because they want to see the ads. As loudly as the ad-tech industry argues otherwise, it hasn’t figured out how to display relevant, non-offensive, and non-exploitative advertising consistently. Malvertising attacks site visitors without the knowledge of the publisher. Advertising and its attendant tracking code […]

JSON Feed is a new feed format that provides the same functionality as RSS, but without asking developers to tangle with the complexities of XML, the format underlying both RSS and Atom. The creators of JSON Feed have released a WordPress plugin, which makes it simple to add a JSON Feed to an existing WordPress […]

If you’re anything like me, you’re full of ideas for projects you’d love to work on if only you had the time. I’m a writer, and I have no end of ideas for essays, blog articles, and books I’d like to write. Most of us are the same; whether it’s writing, photography, music, podcasting, art, […]

One of the most compelling parts of the WordPress ecosystem is the huge number of high-quality plugins. If you want to add a feature to your WordPress site, there’s almost certainly a plugin that will do the job. Plugins allow WordPress to be flexible without becoming bloated and they allow the WordPress ecosystem to advance […]

Supporting an ecommerce site with WooCommerce means you have to the full force of WordPress behind you as well. And because WordPress is consistently one of the best platforms for blogging, all those words give you a boost in SEO. But more than giving you an online notepad, WordPress also offers additional SEO bonuses with […]

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen several incidents of previously trusted plugins being infected with malware by malicious developers. Plugin vulnerabilities are nothing new: developers make mistakes and those mistakes have consequences for security. But many of the recent attacks involved the deliberate introduction of malicious code. Does that mean we can’t trust […]

The next release of WordPress has entered the beta phase, which means it’s ready for testing by WordPress hosting clients who want to check out the new features, test for plugin and customization compatibility, and give the developers a hand tracking down bugs. WordPress 4.9 focuses on improvements to the Customizer, adding some nice features […]

Most users of WordPress aren’t interested in how the sausage is made, and rightly so. But those who are interested in the history and management of WordPress often find the many organizations and sites involved confusing. The confusion is understandable: these organizations are usually mentioned with little explanation of who is involved and what they […]

In previous articles we’ve talked about why criminals are interested in attacking WordPress sites and some of the methods they use. Today we’re going to look at drive-by downloads, a common category of attack used by criminals to infect site visitors with malware. Drive-by downloads are software downloads made to a device without the permission […]