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Author: Mark Cahill

Defending Against a WordPress Brute Force Attack

Defending Against a WordPress Brute Force Attack

Security experts are warning about a large botnet attacking WordPress sites using brute force attempts to break passwords. It is important to note that WordPress is not insecure.  It is, however, a big target with a massive number of sites installed, many of which were installed by morons who use things like “God123” as their password.  Do yourself a favor, protect your WordPress site from brute force attacks – hire a professional to install it or at least to run…

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WordPress 3.6 Coming – But I Really Want Workflow

WordPress 3.6 Coming – But I Really Want Workflow

We’ve got another fairly interesting release from WordPress on the way – 3.6.  From Mark Jaquith’s post on features: Post Formats:  Post Formats now have their own UI, and theme authors have access to templating functions to access the structured data. Twenty Thirteen: We’re shipping this year’s default theme in our first release of the year. Twenty Thirteen is an opinionated, color-rich, blog-centric theme that makes full use of the new Post Formats support. Audio/Video: You can embed audio and video files into…

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Migration from Drupal to WordPress

Migration from Drupal to WordPress

I’ve been working on migrating a fairly large site from Drupal to WordPress (actually WP is just a middle ground, it’s moving from there to another platform) and noticed a lack of decent information about Drupal to WP migration.  Since I had to put some time in cleaning up MySQL scripts, and working through the move, I thought it’d be a good idea to document the information for anyone who needs to make the migration in the future. First off,…

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Again with the “WordPress Isn’t Secure” Meme

Again with the “WordPress Isn’t Secure” Meme

As I was going about my morning reading, I came across an article with this dire headline: “The Perils of Using WordPress as a Hotel Website Content Management System.”  Of course, being a professional who spends much of his time working on WordPress, my interest was piqued.  From the article: WordPress technology is ill-fitted to power hotel websites’ content management systems and is only adequate as a blogging technology. Hmmm…that’s a pretty serious allegation.  So I read on.  The crux…

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Death of Journalism – In the end, it was us all along

Death of Journalism – In the end, it was us all along

In the end, it wasn’t the Internet, or televsion or even bad management that killed journalism; we did it to ourselves. When I was in college, we held up the Bob Woodwards of the world as our mentors.  The story mattered above all else.  No matter who it was, it was the journalists job to expose corruption.  We were to be that shining light in dark places. This election cycle has shown us the lie in that.  We’ve got supposed…

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Blue Ice – the new Techno-thriller by Mark N. Cahill

Blue Ice – the new Techno-thriller by Mark N. Cahill

26 years in the making…I finally got the proof copy of my novel, Blue Ice. It’s true – I started writing it, and in fact, most of the first chapter remains from 1986, when I began writing it in Manomet.  From the jacket copy: I started writing Blue Ice in 1986, on a cold windy night in the house I lived in on the beach in Manomet, MA, using an IBM PCjr who’s only storage was a 5 1/2″ floppy…

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Oracle moves emperil web development with Mysql

Oracle moves emperil web development with Mysql

Often the biggest threats come not from without, but from within. There’s a big issue looming for web and mobile developers, and if it happens, it will affect virtually everyone that uses the web.  The problem is that a very large proportion of database driven websites and applications (think of the stuff on your phone) is built using a MySQL database.  We developers used that particular database, in general, because it was free, and most websites can’t afford the license…

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Web Design and Engineering Posts at CahillDigital.com

Web Design and Engineering Posts at CahillDigital.com

  I’ve started blogging on my new company site – http://cahilldigital.com so you will definitely want to add that to your reading list.  My last post was about Responsive Design, Retina Displays and their importance in new site development.  The title is “Welcome to Retina-stan.” Meanwhile in the present day, designers have to deal with a web that requires a “responsive” design – on that by using media queries will present the appropriate css 3 styles to a browser, be…

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