January 2011 - Helpful Colin

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On 24th May 2018 I attempted to get GDPR compliant and added a Privacy Policy. Mmmm – needs further work I suspect.

As of 26th February 2018 I have installed a badge on my site just to indicate to visitors that I protect my site with the free Wordfence Security Plugin. Wordfence give me a firewall and perform some scans. Visitors selecting the badge will be directed to the Wordfence web site where they can find out for themselves what Wordfence do. I am not paying for their Premium service yet but I am contemplating it.

It’s 23rd February 2018 and I just realised I haven’t got a GravityScan badge. Not because I’m on a blacklist this time, but because GravityScan is no more. They had to wind up their business due to insufficient take up. There is obviously a lot of educating to do among thousands of WP bloggers if they don’t grasp some of the basics of security. This badge was free. Now we’ll just have to go and pay for one. They probably haven’t converted their sites to https either.

On 3rd February 2018 I posted an article written entirely using the Gutenberg editor. I know we’re advised not to use it to edit real sites yet but I wanted to give it a go. I was so pleased with it that I’m well on the way with my next post using Gutenberg too. I can’t justify text to make it line up on the left and right margins, and the Text used for image titles doesn’t look correct because a different construct is being used to manipulate them. There is also a problem turning Comments on. I have to redo it using Quick Edit after each edit of a post.

Nearly 2018 (its 30th Dec 2017) and I haven’t had any further problems with Gravityscan since I got the badge back in September. I’m very pleased with it.

I’m also pleased that Wordfence is protecting my site adequately.

It’s 5th October 2017 and I have just asked 1and1 Internet (they run my server) about what Sitelock scans. I had a trial of their premium service running. That scans up to 500 subpages. I asked what constitutes a subpage. They gave me the impression that with WordPress each post is a subpage and each image (JPEG, PNG, etc.) that can be selected from a post and shown in its own page as an enlargement is also a subpage. If that’s the case then I must be near to the 500 subpage limit. They told me Sitelock can’t test more than 500 subpages. Logically I think there is something wrong here. There must be professional websites that need protecting with more pages than I have. I would expect Sitelock Premium could be sold to them. Anyway until I get more information I have removed my site from the Sitelock scheme before the end of the 30 day trial. I will continue with Gravityscan alone as it seems very good so far.

Tag Clouds are back (2nd October 2017). After probably 2 years, at least, tags can be seen in one place again. They went away when my tag plugin reacted badly with other plugins. They’re on the Posts & Tags menu. You will find them in groups. Mostly they are in alpha-numeric groups but some are more easily found in Places or People for example.

I am also trying to redirect links as a result of post title changes and picture name changes. With this I am having limited success. I have 8 yrs of problems to fix. The problems are not on this site they are caused by others saving links which are now out of date. I can observe 404 errors seen by others.

It’s 20th September 2017 and my Gravityscan Badge is back, after 8 days, as you can see. I’ve learnt a lot in the last week. I now understand that my IP address is shared so I take the rap for the actions of others. For now I’ll wait and see what the future holds. You may see the badge come and go as a consequence.

Well on 12th September 2017 I had a Gravityscan setback. My 1&1 server was found to be on a spamming blacklist. Why I don’t know. Gravityscan have not found malware on my site. I have now deployed Sitelock too and that hasn’t found a problem with my site either. I will automatically be removed from the blacklist after 7 days if there are no more spamming incidents in the meantime. Meanwhile I don’t have a Gravityscan Trust Badge but I do now have a Sitelock Badge.

I’m currently trying to improve older posts which have fallen foul of theme changes and don’t have satisfactory images.

To improve site security:

I consider the action I took on 13th August 2017 to harden my header against Cross-site Scripting, Cross-site Tracing, Clickjacking, MIME Sniffing and Directory Listing by sending messages to the server from my .htaccess file to be ineffective. I will try again.

I took on the benefits of Gravityscan as of 28th July 2017. It checks this site for malware every day as you can see from the Gravityscan Trust Badge in the page header. Gravityscan have changed the date display to an international format yyyy-mm-dd. Selecting (clicking on) this badge will take you to the Gravityscan website.

On 30th June 2017 I took the step of securing my server communication with browsers by using 1&1 Internet’s TLS and certificate services. So now my main URL is HTTPS://helpfulcolin.com. Readers will see a padlock in their browser as a consequence.

I have also taken two more domains onboard “helpfulcolin.co.uk” and “helpfulcolin.uk”. Connections to them use HTTP not HTTPS but security is maintained by them redirecting links to “HTTPS://helpfulcolin.com”.

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The site helpfulcolin.com was originally built in September 2011 by Digitalog© using the Side Blog theme and handed over to Helpful Colin by his mentors (see their links below) in December 2011. It was changed to a ‘Twenty Fourteen’ child theme in February 2014 by Helpful Colin.

The latest major change took place in December 2015 when WordPress version 4.4 became active and Helpful Colin changed the theme to the ‘Twenty Sixteen’ theme which is designed to look good on all screen sizes. Although this may have improved the blog for mobile users it has removed some functionality available in ‘Twenty Fourteen’.