security — Page 2 of 2 — Piper Haywood

Published Friday, 23 October 2015 by Piper Haywood

On archiving/preserving websites

SB and I have been chatting about the whys, whens and hows involved in archiving a website. Archiving is always an uphill battle. It’s hard to take care of things as they age no matter what the material, and ageing code comes with a specific set of worries.

Let’s Encrypt to offer free, trusted HTTPS certificates

Looks like Let’s Encrypt will be offering free, trusted HTTPS certificates in November ~~next~~ this year, see Ars Technica article on the subject. Pretty cool.

Edit 22/10/15: I read the date completely wrong in that article! Hadn’t had my coffee yet.

Published Thursday, 13 August 2015 by Piper Haywood

Using Metadata to find Paul Revere by Kieran Healy

Using Metadata to find Paul Revere by Kieran Healy. See also Data Visualisation in Sociology, coauthored by Healy and James Moody.

Published Wednesday, 25 March 2015 by Piper Haywood

WordPress security resources

Introduction to WordPress front end security: Escaping the things, a CSS-Tricks article
WordPress front end security: CSRF and nonces, a CSS-Tricks article
Step-by-step WordPress security guide from WP Beginner
Wordfence, a security-focused WordPress plugin
“Is shared hosting secure?” on Quora
Let’s Encrypt, a free, automated, and open SSL Certificate Authority
haveibeenpwned.com; check your email / password against existing data dumps
1Password, a cross-platform password manager
PHP version calendar, don’t use an end-of-life release!

Links to a few of the security resources I find useful, some WordPress-specific and some more general.

A note about that “step-by-step” guide: it’s pretty decent, but IMO Wordfence is a better security plugin to go with. Sucuri is maybe more user-friendly, but Wordfence comes with more out-of-the-box (incl. two factor authentication and login limiting) and the settings seem more granular. Doesn’t hurt to try both though to see what’s the best fit.

Last edited 22 June 2019