How It’s Working - Page 13

For anyone who doesn’t know, Shellshock is the name of a particularly nasty vulnerability in Bash, the standard shell for most Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems.) As of press time, new vulnerabilities due to this bug are still being discovered. Some distributions have only released patches that fix part of the problem, and a vast number of Internet connected computers are unpatched and vulnerable. There’s bound to be some negative outcomes from a security problem like this, but let’s see if we can scrape out some positive results.

When searching through all of the potential plugins to install on your WordPress site, you may notice that many of the popular plugins have to do with security. This may seem very tempting to let a plugin handle all of your security needs for your site but, security plugins forget one important fact about the web: if your site is too slow for people to navigate it, people won’t visit your site.

Over the past few months we’ve really revamped our Knowledgebase to not only make it easier to use, but also to stock it with a ton of helpful articles. Some prefer to watch a video instead of reading an article though. In our constant quest to offer you the best service possible, we have recently launched a new section of our blog; The A2 Posting Video Library.

We provide backup services on all of our Managed hosting accounts. Most quality hosts do. But whether we’re lucky enough to be your host, or you’re with someone else, it’s important to not rely solely on your host’s backup services. For your sensitive data, you should have additional backups elsewhere. That means your database and any custom code as well. It’s unlikely that your data would ever become totally unrecoverable, but unlikely things do eventually happen to someone. If you are that someone, you can avoid potential disaster by having an independent backup of all your sensitive data.

With many websites there will come a point where optimizing PHP code, adding memory to a server and tweaking configuration files can’t provide enough optimization to keep the site running smoothly. Even though server technologies are improving rapidly, all of the code processing, compiling and database queries that happen when serving up web content can take their toll on the available resources of the server. Eventually with a growing audience and without the proper solutions in place, the speed at which the server is able to deliver content begins to slow down.

I’m surprised whenever I look at recently written PHP and see folks are still writing their HTML inline with their code. Perhaps it’s because so many PHP tutorials teach this style, or maybe people just aren’t aware of the advantages of separating it out. If you still write this way, feel free to comment on why. I’ll try to explain the advantages of separating it out here. I won’t get into the details of Model-View-Controller programming here, see that Wikipedia article or a blog post I will probably eventually do about it. But for now I will just plead that you separate out your display HTML from your functional PHP code.