Editors Blog

Taking care with Wordpress plugins

I had two shocks over the past two weeks that were unexpected - in each instance, a Wordpress plugin was causing serious display problems on two of our financial sites.

The first was on Finance Markets, which covers personal financial news.

The related posts plugin being used on the site suddenly stopped working properly. The result was that it now took an age for the pages to load up in IE, because it was waiting for the related posts plugin to stop searching and finally display the related posts intended.

I tried an upgrade, but found it didn't solve the problem - the whole process was just taking far too long.

In the end, I found actually downgrading to a simpler related posts plugin allowed the site to start running at proper speed again.

The other instance was with Banking Times, dealing with news in the banking sector.

Again, it was an errant plugin, this time the supercache plugin. Even though it was no longer supposed to be active, it no longer allowed URLs to be displayed correctly.

It actually took a long time to figure out what was happening - I kept editing the htaccess file, and found the site worked when blank - which is bad because all of the URLs are rewritten. That was no solution, as the site would have been completely restructured.

It was only after a lot of frsutrated tweaking and exploring I eventually found an error message I could trace the cause of. Even still, getting rid of supercache wasn't as easy as I'd thought, and ended up having to use phpmyadmin to remove all trace of the plugin directly from the database itself.

Once done, the site started working fine again.

It both instances, though, a lot of unnecessary frustration.

I normally take care with plugins, and try to use the minimum required. That's still a good philosophy I think.

Creating a new brand

Finding a brand you can use and run with is a challenge at the best of times.

So I thought I'd explore whether it may be possible to take the "Brite" from Britecorp, the company behind Brite Media, and see if it's brandable.

Certainly would make more sense than creating a whole string of trading names, such as Brite Security, Brite Office, and Brite Insurance, right?

After starting to create websites for exactly these names, I thought I'd be ballsy and see who was using the domains brite.com and brite.co.uk.

The former appears to have been taken by Intervoice Inc, which is now part of Convergys.

However, the .co.uk version was for sale, so I put in a basic offer, expecting the seller to be after a stupid sum.

The purchase price turned out to be reasonable - I won't say how much - but figured it was worth a punt.

Anyway, it's now time to start developed Brite as a brand properly in the UK.

The initial project is to develop a financial services portal, offering broker services in insurance, loans, and mortgages - Brite.co.uk.

However, the aim is to expand this over time into something much bigger and far more interesting. :)

Using unused satellite domains

I noticed recently I'd made a point to register a number of domains a while back, in case I wanted to expand further into the FTA market.

Techwacth is already a very successful site in the FTA area, but there's no way I'd have time to develop the new FTA domains.

Therefore instead of having pointless dead domains, I've made a point to just set up a landing page on each, to help promote Techwacth.

Perhaps not the best use of resources, but better than leaving them unused.

See what you think:

FTA cards
FTA PC
FTA receivers
FTA Sat
FTA TV

The challenge of branding in challenging markets

Setting up and delivering a brand can be challenging at the best of times, but trying to brand online is even more difficult when domainers, webmasters, and corporate entities have cleaned up a huge swathe of brandable domain names.

Back in 2004 when first setting up the site Finance Markets, branding wasn't a concern - simply developing any kind of online media presence in financial news was the first hurdle to tackle.

Over time the site has developed and grown, with more and more writers set up on the news desk, and community forums opened up for discussion.

Now I look at the site and I'm realising what a mistake it is to think about branding second - now the challenge is to try and define a brand when the brand opportunities for domain names are even more diminished.

I've been toying around with a few possibilities - namely Financial Week or Financial Daily, and so far seems so good.

But not great.

In an incredibly competitive market such as finance, there is even more danger of stepping on trademarks and similar branding issues that could kill a project before it starts.

For example, with my previous suggestions, it turns out that there is an original financial week in the states - but that this publication has now closed.

Does that mean a branding opportunity has arisen, or is there a trademark still in play behind it? If so, with what reach and to what extent? What about a buying opportunity? Is Cain publishing even looking to sell? Would it be worth even buying?

And so the questions continue.

The one play I'm keeping very strongly in mind is that any brand is only as good as you can build it, and that the foundations, such as a domain name, don't need to feature too strongly in that.

But I would rather create the strongest foundations I can and try and live up to strong brand potential.

I may have made a mistake here with FM, but I still have the opportunity to move it to FW or FD if I want. Perhaps I don't even need to.

The need to question seems core, and no matter how satisfactory or not the answers are, the importance is in still asking.

As Jeff Bezos recently commented: "What's dangerous is not to evolve".

Keeping check on forum URLs

I was doing a routine check on one of my earlier blogs, when I noticed a couple of the links were out of date. In correcting them, I found to my horror that a whole string of main navigation links on Techwatch were broken!

This wasn't a minor matter - literally, most of the left hand navigation links into the forum were broken:

<blockquote>

Satellite forums:

• Satellite TV forums
• Satellite for Beginners
• Satellite Help
• FTA
• Cams
• Satellite TV on PC

Satellite Receivers:

• Dreambox
• Technomate
• Manhattan
• Comag/Silvercrest

Cable forums:

• Cable TV
• Cable Modems
• Eurovox
• Dbox
• Starview
• FTA 101

</blockquote>

What had happened is at some point the main categories in the forums had changed.

Previously they had been running on .html extensions, but now were ending in folder.

So /forums/eurovox.html had become /forums/eurovox/

The really amazing part is that this was not noticed, and that for probably a couple of months, the main navigation on the site has been sending users to non-existent URLs which redirected back to the forum homepage.

It's a remedial error and it should never have happened, and while it wouldn't have had a major impact on the site usability, it was still unwelcome, unwanted, and totally unnecessary.

The lesson is, whenever making even minor changes to your URLs, double check your navigational menus and other user pathways to make sure you're maintaining their integrity.

After all, a main menu of broken links isn't going to help the perception of anybody's brand.

The problem of forum spam

I just logged on to the CCTV core security forums for the first time in a few weeks - it's a quite site that normally requires little attention.

Only, this time, it had been badly hit by forum spammers.

Luckily, basic anti-spam tools already installed to the forums had prevented almost all from being published, but it still left me having to clear up hundreds of spam postings.

Interestingly, the majority of it was coming from a single IP: 194.8.74.155 - so that's now blocked from the site.

I also updated the forum anti-spam features of vbulletin to add a new custom question and answer, as it appears that numerical based anti-spam systems are now failing. I've also seen it advised that any security question should not mention the answer in the question.

Because much of the spam appears to come from Russia, China and Eastern Europe, I've set up questions based on UK politics, society, and general information that would be easy for almost any Brit to answer, but may leave spammers have to do some research - thus making it not worth their effort.

And, of course, if they do crack the answer - I can just change it again.

Even still, while the steps to make a forum more resistant to spam are fairly simple, if you manage a number of boards it can become a pain. But the issue of forum spam is now a major issue for every single forum out there, and needs to be taken very seriously indeed.

DDoS then server move failure

The past week is one I'd rather forget at present, due to a range of technical issues with Techwatch, our flagship technology news site.

We were hit by a DDoS attack at the end of February, occurring periodically over 3 days, a matter that was reported in The Register due to the possibility of multiple tech sites being attacked for extortion purposes.

We applied some aggressive IP filtering - basically, allowed access only to known UK IP ranges - and that seemed to do the trick long enough to make the DDoS attackers get bored, and the rules were relaxed.

Then last Wednesday the attackers returned in force with an even bigger botnet, with traffic spiking at 1.5 GBps. The attacks continued three times per day, and while we were able to cope with the morning and afternoon attacks (a combination of a beefy server and aggressive IP rules again), the evening attacks were just too large and aggresive.

Because Techwatch is advertising driven, it was seriously threatening the site's income, and it was disappointing that the datacenter we are currently with was not able to stop the DDoS attacks.

So I looked around for DDoS protection services and eventually took up on a recommendation from BurstNet for Black Lotus, and ordered a new server with DDoS protection.

A couple of hours after paying for this, the original datacentre emailed that they'd found a way to successfully null route the DDoS attacks rather than domain.

Sod's law, but oh well - let's get the site moved anyway.

Then the real nightmare began.

Despite sharing the same basic software installations, different releases were used and after uploading all of the static files successfully, everything stalled badly when trying to move the site databases.

Then to cap it off, when trying to abort the move, a still unexplained error led to problems with the DNS - I thought TW was down most of this Monday, but luckily it was still online for some people - just not for me, even though I desperately needed to admin the site after the aborted move.

A few days of complete stress, but finally managed to get everything running smoothly again.

If I were my own boss, I would have sacked myself for the cock up.

In the meantime, still scheduling a move but taking far more car and time with planning, and will be working with a sys op friend directly to oversee the move.

And I'm finally just glad this week is almost over, that TW is still online, and I don't have to fight command line prompts today. :)

Crisis even among car insurers

I've just posted about the savings crisis in the UK, and how it underlies core problems in the UK economy at present. And then I just found this on Insurance Daily - One in five motorists drive without insurance. Again, it's a study from Moneysupermarket, and again it underlies the financial problems affecting the whole of the UK. The irony is that car insurance is one of those areas where consumers traditionally fight for the cheapest deal, and that insurers are often happy to try and scrape the barrel for them. The result is cheap car insurance, but with poor service. So it's pretty frightening that in a product area where consumers are generally used to getting a heap deal, that consumers would even begin to shun these. A sign of the times, or an inflated claim? Probably a bit of both, but either way, it's a another worrying signal on how badly the current financial crisis is developing.

Savings crisis? It's an economic crisis!

Finance Markets reports on a savings crisis in Britain, as a study by MoneySupermarket.com suggests people are saving far less than in previous years. It's a very real concern, not simply in economic terms or for the banks, but also for savers themselves - simply put, there is little incentive to save at present, and much of the savings market seems to be going overseas to offshore banking services rather than staying within the UK. The irony remains that the very banks that caused this economic crisis are the ones benefiting the most and directly from government bail outs, while the ordinary consumer is being hit on all sides: - low interest rates on savings - rising unemployment - increasing property repossession - wage cuts & freezes No wonder people are put off from saving when there are far bigger personal finance concerns in play. We are in an economic crisis, the biggest since the Great Depression of the 1930's - we can expect that we face further problems across the board, and that the drop in savings is a very real economic canary on what could follow.

3D gaming coming online soon

An interesting report from the BBC details how Mozilla is currently developing graphical standards with Khronos for 3-D browser gaming. What's especially interesting is that the development is taking place among companies for setting web standards, rather than private gaming companies such as Blizzard, whom I would have thought would have been jumping at the chance to be involved. Does that constitute a weakness or a strength? On the one hand, keeping close to browser standards would allow a wider potential platform for developers to work with across the board - but the danger is that developers are already far ahead in the game and that the issue of web-based standards for gaming is one of catch up rather than leadership. This is probably why there's little excitement in my favourite gaming forum, as until such advances in browser-based games make for mainstream reality, it's going to be a subject that keeps the techies talking, while everyone else remains glued to their consoles.