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- Written by: Hans
- Category: General
SSL/TLS/HTTPS, what is it exactly?
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.
Required?
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.
I don't have a web shop, why do I need TLS/HTTPS?
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.
Google 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.
Free TLS-certificates!!!
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!
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- Written by: Hans
- Category: General
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
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.
Piwik
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.
ScriptMerge
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.
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- Written by: Hans
- Category: Joomla
Once again, I was visiting the Joomla!days Netherlands this year, which started on friday 15 april with a Pizza, Bugs & Fun (PBF of #pbfnl). When I arrived they were busy with fixing the WiFi signal but soon after that the hotel delivered a nice big switch and lots of UTP cabes so everyone could connect to the internet. Personally, I felt quite at home because it brings back memories of the LAN-parties I visited in the past.
As usual there were some issues preselected by the organisator which they wanted to test. These issues were on post-its and hanging on a "billboard" and at the end of the evening those issues were almost all tested. It helps when you're working together in the same room, a lot of knowledge combined. Personally, I was planning to do some translating on the Joomla! documentation during the PBF instead of testing patches of issues. I didn't make that much progress as I wanted but it's also a bit social event, so I talked a bit. Of course some with Elisa who I've been tweeting back and forth with.
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- Written by: Hans
- Category: General
In october 2015 Google announced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), used for making smaller web pages to be shown on mobile devices. Many pages are now not optimized for mobile use which results in downloading lots of data which can be optimized.
What is AMP?
AMP HTML is actually normal HTML but with some restrictions to get reliable performance and some extra extensions for rich formatting. The AMP JS library is used for the speedy rendering of the AMP HTML web pages. What really happens is that your web page is stripped from all the unnecessary elements with minimal resources. Also Google offers it's own AMP CDN.
Why is this important?
Google will now show AMP results combined in your search results. So the expectation is websites offering an AMP-version will score better in it's search results.