Some of you might have heard of Velocity. To use the words already stated on the website:
Velocity gives your Windows desktop offline access to over 150 API documentation sets
So this is exactly what it is. You can download the documentation of many documentation sets and use them offline, or for easy access. Velocity is a Windows port of Bash, the original program available on the Mac.
Read more: Velocity - documentation offline
SSL is the precursor if the present TLS (Transport Layer Security) en both are encryption protocols for the security of communication between computers on the internet. It will take care that your data can't be monitored or faked. HTTPS means you visit a website who is using the TLS security. This is also visible in the address bar where you can see a green lock icon. This is especially important for web shops and web sites where you have to login, so your data is safe.
When you save personal data in your web site it is required to use a secured connection, at least here in the Netherlands. I don't know how this is arranged in other countries.
So you don't have a web shop or a web site where sensitive data is stored, why would TLS/HTTPS by interesting for you? It secures the data transfer from your web site to the visitor, no one should have the need to monitor this. There can be many companies or agencies interested in just harvesting data and once maybe is it. And also, it might benefit your ranking.
In 2014 Google announced it will favour web sites in it’s ranking who use HTTPS in it’s ranking. So getting higher (or not dropping) in the ranks is also possible by using TLS/HTTPS.
Obtaining a SSL/TLS certificate was not cheap a while ago. Depending on the type of certificate you needed it could costs a lot of money. This all changed when Let’s Encrypt started. This organization (not-for-profit) is backed by a lot of large organizations but also small donators and wants to improve the security on the internet by providing free TLS-certificates.
Lot’s of (good) hosting companies are implementing Let’s Encrypt in their environment so if a website owner wants to get a certificate he or she can do so in a few clicks. At least, it was that easy for me!
This is a first summury, there will be a few informative articles about SSL
SSL, I can imagien every internet user has heard of that term. Simply said, SSL is a security layer between the device you are using ( a computer or mobile phone) and the server you are visiting. You don't have to do anything as an user, lucky you. But if you manage a website you have to implement this.
A long time SSL was a paid option, you sometimes had to pay a lot of money to implement a SSL-connection. But not long ago Let's encrypt was established, a organisation who has the goal making SSL easy for most owners of websites. That is why I can now use SSL for my website.
It has been on a list of mine for a while but it all seemed somewhat difficult, editting code for implementation. But I dsicovered I can implement it on my server with only a few clicks. There is a SSL menu item in DirectAdmin and on the following page you select Let's Encrypt, tick the sub domains you want to use it for and click on OK. That's it! I can imagine Plesk and cPanel offer similar options.
A little while ago Jisse, from Yireo, asked if I would like to write a blog for Yireo. This blog would be about the Joomla extensions he writes. Of course I was flattered and I started writing. I picked the extensions myself, these three looked like very usefull extensions to me. I hope you also like them. This blog on Yireo can be found here.
Dynamic404 is a powerful tool, for example to use for pages not found on your website. You can let Dynamic404 choose the most relevant page to redirect to or to redirect to a custom article or menu item. Dynamic404 can handle 404-errors but also: 400 Bad Request, 401 Unauthorized 403 Forbidden and 500 Internal Server Error. You can choose to use an article or menu item for those redirects.
And not only can Dynamic404 be used for redirecting HTML client errors but it’s also possible to use it for short URL redirects. This can be very useful for marketing! See more about Dynamic404 on its dedicated page.
Most people are familiar with Google Analytics to get insights into the website traffic. But there is an alternative, Piwik. Piwik is a free, open source, standalone, analytics platform. And the smart thing about Piwik is that it can use a PHP API. The benefit of this is that you don’t need a cookie to get the analytics and you don’t have to warn your visitors for the analytics cookies.
You can easily install Piwik on your server, for example in a subdomain and use the Yireo Piwik plugin to setup the PHP API. The Piwik plugin is available here.
When you take a look how many javascript and CSS files are being loaded one by one you can imagine this can slow down your website. Yireo has the perfect tool for this problem and it’s called ScriptMerge. Not only can this plugin combine the separate files into one but it can also compress it or use GZIP and thus saving bandwidth and time. It’s also possible to exclude items like certain files, stylesheets, menu items or components.
Another option is to make use of data-URIs to transform images to a base64-datastream. This way the total sum of HTTP-request will go down and will make your website yet a little faster. A maximum file size can be set for skipping images that are too large. ScriptMerge is available for download here.