I use Wordfence as a Wordpress security solution. Even the free version has a comprehensive set of features, and the premium version is even better. It’s very easy to install and configure Wordfence as a regular plugin. However, the step to “Optimize the Wordfence firewall” fails for many people. This is not the fault of Wordfence, since different steps may be required depending on how your web server is configured. My solution is for those who are hosting their own Wordpress, but may be helpful to other situations. Please note that these instructions affect the security of your system, and are aimed at users with intermediate to advanced Linux knowledge.

I’ve migrated my blog from GoDaddy to a paid plan with Wordpress.com. I decided to trade flexibility for simplicity, since I don’t want to spend time fiddling around with the administration of this site. When I spend all day on IT, doing IT for a blog is no longer on my list of hobbies. With GoDaddy, you are responsible for all aspects of security, including updating Wordpress, updating themes and plugins, and installing a security plugin to block the thousands of known attacks against Wordpress. I have two major security concerns with GoDaddy. I had to allow insecure ciphers in order to connect to the shell on my site via SSH (or SCP). Why on earth haven’t they updated to a recent version of SSH?!? GoDaddy also requires you to purchase an SSL certificate from them to enable TLS on your domain. There’s no way to install a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt. I looked into enabling two-factor auth, but you have to manage it yourself with a plugin. With a Premium plan from Wordpress.com, SSL is enabled automatically with a certificate from Let’s Encrypt. I can use my domain name, and security is mostly handled for me. I can enable two-factor authentication. The downside is that I’ve lost some flexility; I can’t use my own theme or install my own plugins unless I upgrade to a Business plan. Also, I have to set up ads through Wordads.com to try to cover the cost of the site. I was fairly successful in covering the cost of hosting with Google AdSense; I’m not sure how effective WordAds will be.

Short answer: not really! A few years ago, I was fascinated with the idea of microformats. The concept is to add structural data to common HTML tags so that certain types of data on a web page can be clearly identified. Adding structural information makes it easier to automate the parsing and indexing of web content. The original microformats included common data sets that contain well-defined data, such as contact information or a calendar event. In the intervening years, microformats were replaced by microformats2, with additional draft standards for more items such as recipes, resumes, etc. I decided to use my resume as a “use case” for structured HTML data. My original plan was to use the h-resume draft specification from microformats2. I modified my plan when I realized that major search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex) have decided to parse another semantic technology, microdata (microdata W3C spec). There is no point in creating semantic web pages if nobody is going to parse them, so I used the microdata specifications that are available at schema.org and placed them into an h-resume framework.  I used the event class to represent each position I held or educational achievement, because the event class is the only one with start and end dates. Is it worth the effort to add structured data to HTML pages? Generally, no. Here’s why:

I’m almost finished with a round of updates to the infrastructure of this site. I upgraded Wordpress and changed my hosting from a friend’s virtual server to Linux hosting with GoDaddy.com.  The price is right and so far the service has been great.  I’ve used GoDaddy for domain name registration for many years. [ad#GoDaddy Hosting] Comments are now protected with reCaptcha to try to reduce the amount of link spam that I have to sort through.  If you have a problem posting a comment, or notice any other aspect of the site that is “broken,” please contact me at the email address shown on the About page. I still have a bit of work to do on updating my theme to take advantage of the features of Wordpress 3.

I found two complementary plugins that enable me to put highlighted formatted code in a Wordpress page or post. Here’s an example of what they do:

[sourcecode language="python"]
# Plot flux at continuum boundary
pylab.figure()
pylab.hold(True)
pylab.plot(nd_times, Jl_BD, 'b-', label="Flux from BD simulation")
pylab.plot(nd_times, Jl_BD+Jl_BD_std, 'b.', label="Flux from BD simulation")
pylab.plot(nd_times, Jl_BD-Jl_BD_std, 'b.', label="Flux from BD simulation")
[/sourcecode]

Test successful! Note that Javascript must be enabled to see the highlighting. Get the plugins here: