Technology Resources
Explore the latest web design trends and tools with our comprehensive technology blog, packed with valuable resources and information.
Circle with Disney: a Review
As IT professionals, our work occasionally verges into bartender/priest territory: we’ve seen it ALL. And yes, some of it we’d rather unsee. And if we wanted to maintain a sense of naivete about what kids are capable of on the Internet, well, we just can’t. Think of all the hijinks you got up to when you were a kid in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or even 90s… and that was without a limitless world of communication and information at your fingertips. If someone wanted to bully you, he had to stand in front of your locker or wait for you after school. If you wanted to read age-inappropriate material, you had to get an older accomplice to check it out for you from the library. It’s almost laughable in comparison to the landscape that confronts children now. Parental controls are nothing new, but so many parents don’t bother to use them, or don’t know how. Where a parent might spend half an hour wading through menus to set up parental controls, kids are often able to find a workaround in a matter of minutes. There is, however, a device we’re enthusiastic about that helps you get in touch with your kids’ online activities effortlessly: Circle with Disney.
Top WordPress Backup Plugins
We’ve said it before, but we can’t say it enough: you have to back it up. And when we’re developing or maintaining a WordPress website, it’s especially critical. Your hosting company will often offer a free backup service, but don’t count on it. In our experience, even the best hosting companies will hang you out to dry. There is no substitute for taking backups into your own hands. There are several backup services we recommend for backing up the entire contents of your hosting package—particularly CodeGuard—but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to discuss WordPress-specific backup plugins and services. (Incidentally, CodeGuard costs $60 per year for a WordPress site under 5 GB.) In this post, we’ll discuss a few backup plugins for WordPress, which can help you secure your site at minimal or no cost and with very little effort.
Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress: a Review
The great thing about WordPress is that it lends itself to good SEO practices right out of the box. The code is lean and tidy, which means it gives searchbots less irrelevant junk to sift through, and this clean code foundation results in sites that have comparatively fast load times favored by Google. Moreover, WordPress is designed to show search bots the content of your site before the Javascript and CSS. You can set up your permalinks so that they include keywords. It prompts you to add keywords and change the title any time you add an image. In general, it’s just all-around great. But there are myriad plugins that have been developed to improve upon WordPress’s SEO performance too, and Yoast SEO has emerged as one of the leaders of that pack in the past few years. In this post, we’ll explore whether Yoast is still a standout performer, and what it can do to increase your site’s SEO-friendliness.
