Dodge Web Solutions

Move Over, Caching

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I listened to a few downloaded youtube videos (sort of a choose your own adventure poor man’s podcast) while I was on a recent road trip.  They were by Miriam Schwab, and one was about speeding up your site, (and so was this one) and a very approachable one was about securing your site.  I listened to one about content security policies (and another on the WordCamp 2018 livestream Guitar track, starting at 29:02) which, full disclosure, was a little over my head.  Like, not completely over but I had to stand on tiptoe.  Both were good, especially since they challenge us to start thinking about ways to make our sites faster and and more secure; at the end she talks about her new company Strattic which sounds like it will do both.  Or like caching, only better.

I described it to my dad thus:

Molly: Picture you could make a cardboard cutout of me, and it was ready instantly. 
Dad: So we wouldn’t have to wait for you to get ready before we could leave for breakfast. 
Molly: Yes. 
Dad: Like, it’s just a cardboard cutout so it’s ready to go, we could just pick it up and there’s no waiting. 
Molly: Yes. But also, the cardboard cutout can’t be hurt.  Like, it’s impervious to stab wounds.  So it’s me, it’s the latest version of me, but ready at a moment’s notice and completely secure. 
Dad, interrupting: …stab wounds?!?! 
Molly: What I mean is, in this example I/the website can’t be hurt.  Your site is the latest version, but blazing fast because it’s also static, and un-hackable, because it’s not a living, dynamic thing. 

I’m only curious about how often you’ll need to do changes – obviously on most sites pushing out a new version once a day would be more than fine.  But on huge sites or membership sites it could be a problem.  Also, I guess this wouldn’t work for something like membership site with a discussion board.  And – I’m showing my ignorance here, but I think it would interfere with any contact forms giving confirmation messages, right?

Still, I love the elegance of the security and speed inherent in simply serving a static site.  What do you think?

 

Easy Way to Link to a Specific Spot on Someone’s Site

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Probably everyone else remembers how to do this, but I didn’t, and if it helps even one person I’ll be glad.

Suppose you’re writing a blog post, and suppose you want to link to a nice useful chart on a page in someone else’s site.

It’s very easy.  anchor link instruction screenshot

  • Step 1, create the link in your WordPress page or post.  If you’re still using Class Editor, just click the Insert/edit link button and add the url you’d like to go to.
  • To find the anchor text, just right click on the area you’d like to link directly to, click Inspect to inspect the element (if you’re not using Chrome, a) why? and b) you may have to do this slightly differently but I’m confident you’ll figure it out or come back to the One True Church of Google) and find the name of the section you’d like to specifically link to.
  • Step, 2, toggle over to Text view and add #WhateverTheIDis to the end of your url in the a href.  (come to think of it, you can also just do this in the visual version while adding the link if you know the anchor text…but if you’re like me and have the working memory of a goldfish, just put in the link from the pages address bar, and then find the link again in the text view).

Unfortunately, if there is no id or section name – as is the case in many WYSIWYG sites like this one, you’ll have to try a different method.  You can look for any nearby headers and sometimes cheat the system (eg, if there’s a single H3 there, it will take you where you need to go) but this is really not a perfect solution.  Gutenberg will allow us to start easily adding anchor links to our sites if you want to have them on your site.  Per Kinsta, they are helpful for users and give a little SEO boost, so why not?  Only possibly downside I can think of is your extra time in creating anchor ID’s and the slight extra time for loading the slightly greater amount of code.

If you’re not completely sure about what an anchor text is, here is a nice intro from Mozilla.  They’ve always got our backs.

 

When IT Tells You to Change Your Password…

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So great news, guys!  Sort of!  Turns out changing your password every [specific period of time] is no longer necessary.  Bill Burr (not this guy) the man who first authored the new password standards and protocols for NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2003.

An excerpt:

“Another recommendation is to favor long phrases, rather than short passwords with special characters. There should no longer be a requirement to have a certain mix of special characters, upper case letters and numbers for a password. It turns out that adding in these artificial password restrictions actually produced less secure passwords. Additionally (and unsurprisingly), the guidelines recommend screening passwords against commonly used passwords or ones that have been compromised.”

Basically, just think up an answer to a question only you’d know (eg, didwegetliceinneworleans) and you’re pretty much set.  But probably you should read the actual NIST publication, not my quick recap of it.  And no, we did not, one of us just had bad dandruff.

Font Awesome IS!

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Loving these easy to add icons from Font Awesome!  I think this is one of these times where I’m embarrassingly late to the party (like that guy at your neighbor’s barbeque who keeps asking if you’ve seen WhateverLatestMeme) but I just found these and am realizing how terrific they are.

Easy breezy, just sign up and put the script in your header (if you have Divi or Studiopress there are theme option or hooks to do this easily!)

I don’t entirely still understand how icons from FA work…  It almost seemed like hotlinking at first but that didn’t seem quite right…  I did some digging and by putting the script in your header, you now have a different font available to use.  The icons are just “letters” in the font.

Per my smart friends at Stackoverflow:

“FontAwesome icons are fonts.”

“The icons are the font’s characters. As a crude example: the letter “Z” could be designed to look like a suitcase, saved as a font and then used on a website.”

“…Icon fonts are just like any other font except that the characters are styled to look like icons. FontAwesome uses a range of characters reserved for “private use”. 

So good stuff!  An easy way to use icons and know they will just work, rather than fussing with your own graphics.  Let me know how it works out for you if you try using FontAwesome – I love the feedback.

Stuff I Learned This Week (That I Want to Teach You)

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Whether you are a techy or not, we ALL use the internet, so I think it behooves us all to become a little more conversant with its nuts and bolts.  To that end, in no particular order, I give you Some Stuff I Learned This Week:

  • Asynchronous Loading – instead of loading consecutively, scripts for a page can load simultaneously.  How handy!  There can be some user experience drawbacks (the dreaded page “flicker) but overall it helps your site to load faster rather than each script waiting in line for the one before it to finish.
  • All sites on wordpress.com are just millions and millions of sites on one giant multi-site install.  Mind.  Blown.  If you really think about it, it makes perfect sense, with all those subdomains (yoursite.wordpress.com).  But I was still the girl at the Philadelphia WordPress meetup who was astonished by this simple fact.  I can’t wait to go back and see what they teach me next!
  • Improve site load time by including the forward slash. (bonus – remember which is which by thinking forward slash leans forwards and backward slash leans backwards.  A, um…friend of mine has to use that trick to remember.  Not me.  Ahem.)  So sometimes I would see a url with a forward slash on the end and wonder why precisely.  Turns out, by including a forward slash on the end of the site’s address, you are directing the server to go to a directory, not a specific file.  When it gets to the directory, it will look for the default file (usually whatever you have designated as the home or landing page).  But if you direct the web server to the file, there can be a problem if there are two files with that name (not that common, but it can happen) and it also takes a little bit longer to get to a file than to the directory.  So use that forward slash!

Forwarding, Masking, DNS…good stuff

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The internet is great (guess we can all agree on that – hello, ordering pizza while you pretend to listen at a continuing ed conference!).  It even gives you a chance for a do-over.  To wit, I realized I liked my other domain better.  And GoDaddy has some very helpful domain masking and forwarding instructions on their site.  So you can still come to mollydodge.com, but you’ll now see me as the More Serious, More Professional Sounding and Eminently More Trustworthy dodgewebsolutions.com from now.

 

 

Video Backgrounds

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So, I love these.  I automatically think I’m cool just for finding a site with one.  However!  As with most things I find cool, you should approach with caution (I am also an enormous fan of puns, for example).

You have to keep in mind that too long of a video can affect load times of your site negatively, while too short could end up looking choppy and confusing visitors.

And speaking of which, there is some evidence that video is best used when you want to evoke a certain mood in your visitors; if the goal is a conversion (be it sales, leads, or just persuading/educating) you don’t want to distract your visitors from the task at hand (registering to vote, signing up for your newsletter, ordering a pair of shoes).

Divi lets you add background video easily (and put a translucent layer over it to camouflage low resolution videos, and there are of course plenty of plugins.  Background videos are not loaded by default in mobile devices, but I believe Slider Revolution works around that nicely with Content Layers.  Tell me what you like or dislike about background video – do you think it will continue to gain popularity?

Home / Landing / Front – Which?

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I have been guilty of using these terms interchangeably, as I think have many of us.  As a public service (and a public mea culpa), here is the difference for these types of pages, in the WordPress world:

  • Landing Page – this is mostly seen if your site’s goal is conversions (sales) or leads.  You can have a landing page that visitors are funneled to after they have “met” you on your home page or front page.
  • The Home Page or Front Page is like the front door to your house.  It’s where you welcome your visitor, and they learn about you (and decide if your site is worth their time to stay and look around)

The difference between a Home page vs a Front (or Splash) page is uniquely a WordPress thingie, though.  It comes down to the hierarchy of the templates of your theme.  Per the WordPress Codex (emphasis mine):

On the site front page, WordPress will always use the front-page.php template file, if it exists. If front-page.php does not exist, WordPress will determine which template file to use, depending on the user configuration of ‘Settings > Reading ->Front page displays’, as follows:

  • A static page: WordPress uses the Static Page template hierarchy: Custom Page Template, page-{id}.php, page-{slug}.php, page.php, index.php
  • Your latest posts: WordPress uses the Blog Posts Index template hierarchy: home.php, index.php

To recap, landing pages is a term for marketing/sales/lead generation page.  Front page is the first, “home” page you come to on a brochure or static site, as long as the WordPress theme contains that template.

Preloaders – the Personalized License Plate of the WordPress World

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I started a complicated analogy of custom license plates, the DMV, honeymooners, and, inevitably, prison riots.  It just went off the rails, so I deleted it and am sticking to dignified directness in my writing tonight.

Often, we have to wait for a site to load.  But what if you start to customize a users experience, even before she or he sees your site proper? I’m talking about a customer preloader, and it’s so easy!

For WordPress, there are plenty of preloader plugins.  I chose the one that had been downloaded 10,000+, Preloader.  It’s a free plugin, search for it and download (or upload, whatever’s your pleasure) and activate.  You’ll need to upload a .gif for the custom preloader – I bought a really, truly cool radar one that turned out to be a little too complicated for me (it was a Photo shop file and I’m just too tired tonight).  So I got a free one at Preloaders.net and it’s still pretty neat.  Just upload your .gif to your WordPress Media library, add the file path to the settings in the plugin (it’s easier than it sounds, and they give instructions with pictures.  All class, man) .  The only *slightly* tricky part is adding the css to your header template, but you can do it!  In my case I have simple hooks so it was even easier.

After that, it’s like a friendly welcome mat to your site.  Like a favicon, a custom preloader is just one more way to set your website apart and show your are interested in creating the best user experience you can.  Let me know if you have another way you prefer to handle your custom preloader!