Buy us a beer?

We here at Weigold Enterprises try to help out as much as we can.  We’re currently supporting a number of WordPress plugins for free and we often provide advice and occasionally support to people at no charge despite the fact that we too have bills to pay.  We also provide significantly discounted services to non-profit agencies, especially those in the animal rescue and welfare arena.  If we’ve provided you with some advice or support that was of value or wish to help us continue to work on our free WordPress plugins or other projects and would like to “buy us a beer”, we’d really appreciate that!

Feel free to enter whatever amount is comfortable and click “pay now”.  All of our online sales and credit card processing is handled by Paypal, and you need not be a member.

[gravityform id=”1″ title=”false” description=”false”]

 

Use a little security by obscurity

W only smWordPress users: as we clean out this mornings reports of the thousands of brute force hack attempts last night across our many WordPress sites, two things come to mind.

First, if you’re using WordPress anywhere, make sure you are using plugins to help limit login attempts and perhaps even log failed logins.

Second, take advantage of a bit of security by obscurity. Remove the default Admin user. They can’t guess a password to a user that doesn’t exist. WordPress makes it easy to assign posts to another user, so do so, and remove “admin”. That step alone will foil 90%+ of the brute force attempts we’re seeing.

Oh, and a pro tip: If you’re using your own server, consider logging WordPress failures to the syslog and then using a product like fail2ban to just blacklist the source IP.

Are you managing your own WordPress site, but not sure how to do the things we’re suggesting?  Contact us at sales@weigoldenterprises.com and we can provide the support you need to help keep your site safe.

Time to Update!

W only smIf you’re like many of our clients and you’re using WordPress, it’s time to update!  Wordpress 4.3.1 is out and you can find more information about it here!  If you have a WordPress site and you aren’t already a Weigold Enterprises client, please feel free to send us an email at sales@weigoldenterprises.com and we’ll be happy to help you get your site upgraded.

 

3D Modeling for Clients

While much of our business involves electronics ranging from component level circuit board design through various types of IT support, we are occasionally called on for CAD requirements in support of our other projects.   Here’s one example of such an alternative challenge.  This is a 3D model of a foundation project for some wireless networking infrastructure.   If we can be of service with your 3D modeling requirements or any other project requirements, please contact us at sales@weigoldenterprises.com for a no obligation quote!

Missing Facebook Updates?

Facebook users:  are you missing updates from your favorite pages?  As a page owner, are you frustrated that the “likes” you already have aren’t seeing your content?  Well, this might help.  Facebook has added control of some settings that should make it more likely for page content to appear in the newsfeed.   As always, your mileage may vary and as we know Facebook changes things frequently, but give the below instructions a try.  (Or suggest your page “likes” do so).   These steps will make sure the page updates are set to show in the newsfeed and that Facebook knows you want to see all of them.  Facebook users, you will need to do this for any page you want to make sure you get all updates for.

WP Sentry Enabled Navigation

Since we use WP Sentry for access control in a number of sites, one of the challenges we’ve faced is dealing with custom navigation bars which are WP Sentry compliant, meaning they don’t show links to pages the user isn’t supposed to know about.   Sentry would have blocked access to the page, but better that they didn’t see the link in the first place.   While this isn’t a “completely” Sentry compliant nav bar, you can see how we handled the need to hide an Administration page from a site except for those logged in and authorized to see it.  It’s likely there are other possibly better ways to handle the page ID and such, but this might help get you started!

<div id="navigation">
  <ul id="top-level">
    <?php
      global $WP_SENTRY;
      $current_user = wp_get_current_user();
      $current_user_id = $current_user->ID;

      $page = get_page_by_title( 'Administration' );

      //List all pages except administration
      wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li=&depth=3
           &exclude='. $page->ID );

      //we want to do the administration page separately and only show if
      //user is a member of the admin group and already logged in
      if ((current_user_can('level_0'))&&
           ($WP_SENTRY->user_is_allowed($current_user_id, $page->ID)))
      {
        echo "<li><a href=". get_permalink( $page->ID ) 
            . ">Administration</a></li>";                            
      }
    ?>
  </ul>
</div>