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My Top WordPress Tips and Tricks

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Gotta say this one took a while to start up, i think its been like 4 years in the drafts, not that i didn’t have anything to say hahaha, more that i was changing my mind, i kinda always want to make interesting posts and not just another copy paste nonsense, if i say something, it means i tried it and it works!

WordPress has been an important part of my web stack, i would say half of my sites run wordpress, as a cms or even as a simple app, wordpress has grown a lot and it has changed a lot, so take my ideas with a grain of salt, also im keeping this more general, i’ll make more posts about each point, especially if you guys ask for it! ;D

Some hehehe of my Best Tips and Tricks for WordPress

Get yourself some good hosting! No you don’t need AWS iron clad professional hosting or “professional wordpress host”, but you need something that works good from a reputable company, i’ll post some recommendations below, but if you want your wordpress site to run smoothly it all starts with a good host.

WordPress.com is a good alternative! On the segway from hosting, you can instead of self host, always try wordpress.com in my opinion its expensive, but you absolutely get what you pay, so if you are 100% newbie or you want to run a super high end wordpress site, just pay for wordpress.com.

Backup Backup and Backup some More! My backup strategy is multilayer and maybe a good idea for a future post, but make sure your host makes backups and you make backups as well, in my opinion the best is if you can make them automatic, so you don’t need to worry, the more important the wordpress site, the more backups you should have, it’s good your host makes backups but never rely on those, i’ve learned that the hard way!

Create Layers of Security! I see a lot of people recommending security plugins for wordpress and “firewalls”, not saying that they aren’t good, things like Jetpack Protect are pretty good, but don’t let your security be based on just one plugin and one setting, your host should already provide some security, i also like to lock down most things in the wordpress settings, especially if its stuff i don’t need, like file editing and finally i use Cloudflare to keep the site fast but the also to lockdown and secure the backend, also you can separate the backend from the main site (ill post about this some other time) to create a static wordpress site! The point is security works best if it has several layers to go through.

Keep Everything Updated! I don’t mean just wordpress, plugins and themes, i mean your host needs to update things or if you are running the web server, you need to keep the updates, you can’t rely just in strong security, that’s just one like of protection, keeping everything updates means most of the time better performance and better security.

Setup WordPress Correctly on First Install! If you setup wordpress correctly that avoids a lot of the issues of wordpress, things like not having an admin user or the database be called wp_ , there are a bunch of sites online that explain this step by step, and i know wordpress taunts that its super easy to install, but trust me, take 15 minutes to install and setup and you will have a more secure and performant wordpress.

Use a Cache Plugin! I hate this, i think wordpress should have a caching system and a SEO system built in, but it doesnt and it makes a huge diference, if you have a litespeed server, you can use the plugin Litespeed Cache, but i also like WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache, but any of the top plugins will do just fine.

Try and Avoid Overusing Plugins! WordPress plugins are great, they open up the platform, like i said above im going to install a cache plugin and a seo plugin, but think extra hard about installing any plugin, the less you have the more performance and secure your install will be, so only install the absolute essential plugins.

And that’s it, why oh why did it take this long to publish this… oh well better late than never, have a good one!

Oh and the hosting recommendations, well check BuyShared from BuyVM (its where this site is hosted), also check MyW and Knownhost! ;D

Black Friday Deals Page

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Not sure about you, but on Black Friday and Cyber Monday i tend to take both days like a big tech shopping day, every year i randomly spend both days finding all the promotions and getting myself some sweet sweet deals, so if i’m already spending some time shopping around why not share my finds, it’s a win win for everyone.

And be sure i’m not going to put every single tech deal i find, just the ones i think are cool, a really good deal or even if the deal isn’t awesome that i think the product itself is worth it, that’s it, so between black friday and cyber monday expect me to update my black friday & cyber monday deals page with some juicy offers.

Also i’m adding to the page other pages that feature black friday deals as well as a quick search engines that checks all of these pages for deals, so even if i don’t add this or that deal you can easily find lots of deals or search for specific deals you are interested! ;D

And finally i’m not gonna add like amazon, walmart, staples, microsoft, steam, google links or other major stores, i know these have black friday promotions, and you can go check out your favorite stores, but most of my offers will be from independent companies and products and not a specific product in a major store.

Ah and just in case you don’t know what im talking about, The term “Black Friday” is believed to have originated in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Stores would use the term to describe the increased traffic and congestion on the day after Thanksgiving. The term “Black” was used to represent the stores’ profits turning from “red” to “black” due to the surge in sales. Black Friday has since become the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States. In 2022, consumers spent an estimated $9.12 billion on Black Friday.

And Cyber Monday was created in 2005 by retailers in an effort to extend the Black Friday shopping bonanza to the online world. The term quickly caught on, and Cyber Monday has become the biggest online shopping day of the year. In 2022, consumers spent an estimated $11.9 billion on Cyber Monday.

How Reddit Got into Trouble

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Reddit ohhh Reddit the “community”-driven social media site, is currently facing a major crisis as the “community” grows increasingly dissatisfied with recent decisions, leading to a strike by moderators and an exodus of key users. This situation kinda highlights a crucial error made by a lot of social networks, they think that users seek only the services, but in fact they mostly seek connections and a kind of sense of community, and erecting barriers to access ultimately erodes what users want and need.

I think the key factors for Reddit’s success were that they capitalized on other similar platforms shooting themselves in the foot (I’m looking at you, Digg), letting each topic create a community around it and let each community grow, and finally being somewhat open with an easy API and letting anyone use the site in creative ways, something that other platforms have been cracking down on for years, like Facebook, Twitter and such.

But here lies the crux, if the users and mods are the ones really creating the content and moderating it, then the only thing Reddit needs to-do is keep the platform running and run ads and account subscriptions, which seems like an ideal setup.

Unfortunately, it seems that Reddit like other networks before it, wants more, and as slowly been creating new revenue streams, creating more schemes, things like pushing web users to its kind of lousy app, app only features, having a new slow design that favors Tiktok like mindless media consumption instead of community consumption and interaction, not implementing or supporting the mods, pushing gimmicks like NFT’s and community awards, creating restrictions and paths to make it increasingly harder for mods to manage and grow their communities, and pushing the users to a more “reddit is the main page” instead of “reddit is all about the communities”.

Also, the current path Reddit is heading is that instead of 100,000 small interesting and quirky communities, they really just want and promote 100 super large communities, with never-ending posts of boobs, cute and fails, If it sounds like TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, you wouldn’t be wrong, and that’s… a shame, more of the same is boring, it might make money, but it has no future; they will be just another one..

And even after all of this, Reddit is still apparently in the red, I think it’s in the red because it’s badly managed, it wants to run like a Facebook with huge budgets and staff working on a billion unrelated things, a network like Reddit can and should run more slim and could be profitable with little adjustments and by cooperating more heavily with its mods and communities, just look at Wikipedia!

But no… Reddit and its CEO Steve Huffman view Reddit as a cash cow that has just not been milked enough, so they decide to turn the free API to an extremely expensive and restricted API so as to kill all competition and fuck what the communities need or want, its literally another one of those killed by a thousand cuts, when this time he just cuts a little bit too deep and the cow decides to give a nice kick, so what happens…

Thousands of Reddit moderators initiated a blackout, blocking access to over 8,000 subreddits (including my community). With several demands, like the implementation of accessibility features for blind users and revisions to the API to support third-party apps, both in price and restrictions.

And this puts Reddit in a bind, since the value of Reddit is its constant flow of content, its communities, and its enormous database of information, so if channels go dark, all of this disappears, if Reddit pushes forward and channels start deleting, then this treasure trove starts depreciating even more, if Reddit decides to kick its mods and force open channels, then who is going to manage and moderate? Is Reddit who is the red going to be able to afford to pay moderators? Naaaa, it will turn into a dumpster fire…

This, of course, is not what everyone wants, mods are weaponizing their channels and communities to try and pressure the company, but the company that was supposed to be all about community doesn’t seem to care, and this opens up a bad precedent of communities not trusting the platform, it’s all about the money and fuck the ethics, so here we are in a tug-o-war with some channels open, some channels restricted, and some channels private, all waiting to see who folds first.

I’m writing this because I’m also Reddit user and a mod, so my views are not exactly the mainstream, but alas my channels are closed for the time being, so I have some skin in the game, but I’ve been burned before, one of the reasons that 90% of what I manage is 100% under my control is because I’ve been rugged pulled before, several times, I’ve joined great platforms with awesome features and I’ve sometimes spent years making something amazing for that platform to eventually see it all just crashing down, my work erased, decide that I should pay 100x more or change the rules for no reason, and most of the time there is no recourse for me, it’s a deep breath and move on, so this time with Reddit I’ve decided to make a stand, it’s a small stand but its one nevertheless because what makes Reddit strong it’s the communities and mods and if these turn on Reddit then the cow dies… a slow painful death…

Bye Blogger Hello WP!

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This isn’t so much why am i using WordPress, because by now im a power user, about half of my sites use WordPress in one way or another its still a great platform.

No… this is more about Blogger, the Google owned blogging platform was always one of my favourites, its simple and super fast, especially for a plain site/placeholder and or blog it has served me well and its has slowly been updated.

However its getting worst and worst with time, it keeps restricting or worst removing old posts, because a silly image is considered adult, because i link to a site that Google doesn’t approve, because of something i said, why?

And its not on one go, its like every couple of months it scans the site and deems what is approved and what isn’t and for EACH post i have to make a claim that its ok and they are brought back, if Google does this to its own blogging service, what else are they doing to search, but i don’t care, if Google wants to fuck around, go for it, they can even remove my site from their index, i…. don’t…. care.

So moving what little i still had from Blogger to WP, I was considering Tumblr but that also seems like its gone down the drain, so self host is best, at least you don’t have your overlord landlord overbearing and deciding what they deem right or wrong… and that can only make me happy! ;D

New Site! Mamilo

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Ohhh the re-launch of mamilo (means nipple in portuguese), its a simple but cool public image gallery about… guess… boobs and cute and awesome ones hehehe ^_^ yes it shares the same design as gomenasai and functions (anyone can register and upload), but totally diferent goal and language, since this is also a portuguese only site ^_^ still pretty easy to browse in any language and who doesn’t love boobs hehehe

New Site! 4kun

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Does it sound a bit like another site you know? … like 4chan? well its kinda in the same vibe and not, if you don’t know we already run 2 anonymous imageboards, neechan (a cleaner nicer themed imageboard) and tentakle (more gritty traditional ffa imageboard), and although its been a lot of fun running them, its a bit of a pain in the ass, with the continuous spamming, if they look so good today is because of all staffs work with the “daily cleaning”.

So what is 4kun, first i thought the domain was funny ^_^.oO(“chan” being a japanese honorific for cute young female, and “kun” for young boys),  yes the site is still a imageboard, the twist is that its not anonymous, yep you have to make an account to post, OMGWORSTTHINGEVAH!!!

Well not really, i do understand the point and nicety of an anonymous imageboard, but i also understand that non anonymous board can also be fun and cool, first it will not keep the trolls away, but its way more effective at keeping the spammers away, second, because users have to jump a further hoop to registered, i think they also receive a greater appreciation for their sharing, if they are awesome at it, then they get the recognition for it, unlike the anonymous random nature of a traditional imageboard.

So there ya go, yeah its still rough on the edges, but like all s2r sites, its a work in progress and it will only get better with time ^_^

Dropbox Clone Copy Launches

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Yeah i know this could be seen as a infomercial so you guys will click on my Copy referral link (and we both will get 5GB for free), but i am very interested in cloud hosting and i do try a lot of them, i use it daily for my backups, for business and for sharing (i’ll make another post later on with more details), so testing new cloud storage is important to me, since i do have some issues with the ones i use currently.

My Cloud Providers

Dropbox (Free 20GB) for syncing of work material, its absolutely flawless, but it tends to bog down from time to time (burst of CPU) and also although secure its not encrypted and i know i could do it myself and in some ways i do, but with encryption on my side there is a risk of corruption and data loss, so i avoid putting there anything that is really private, mostly work files, stuff i need on the run or that im currently working on! (Update a day or so after posting this, Dropbox decided to cut a chunk of my referrals, wtf is with that after years! they go back on referrals! thats fucked up, ill probably make a post about it tomorrow, but for today they lose their link on this post and worse, my trust).

Box (Free 50GB), i always liked Box, their web interface is really good, but the best is that my account has like 5 years and all my files are still there, i should like delete some, but the combination of 50GB and never deleting a file ever, makes it perfect for small backups and old webfiles, their sync app is pretty bad, so i dont use it (tried it twice).

Mega (Free 50GB), what? MEGA!!! yep, as it seems the fact that your files are encripted and they dont delete files and they have backups and they dont have file size limits, makes mega awesome for website backups, sometimes if its a database heavy site its pretty small, but if its a media heavy website, its gonna get huge, so mega is awesome for that and yes i do encript all files myself, so no security issues there! and super fast upload and download!

I do have a owncloud instance but i only use that to sync my music, maybe if i encript it and make automatic backups, ill use it more ^_^’

Cloud Providers i Tried and Quit!

Cubby, pretty good cloud hosting, with local sync and web sync, but with their change to a paid service  they basically cripled every free user to a less than useful service, before it had some interesting features now its way less usefull, that and a touchy sync (sometimes it syncs, sometimes it doesnt and says everything is synced…)

Rapidshare, this one is going down the drain, i dont know what they are thinking, i was still barely using them, but the last files i had there died a couple of weeks ago for no reason, no point using them for anything.

Mediafire, good for sharing, horrible for backups, your files dont stay if they are too popular or not popular enough, im not sure why they keep saying they are a dropbox clone, they are a basic filehost.

Skydrive, searching your files for images or whatever is beyond me, i dont care if its automatic, any host that searches your files is not a host that i will ever use.

Google Drive, im slowly moving away from Google services, but i did try it and it worked ok, i didn’t liked they changed their pricing at the time, but i dont care cause i dont want to use, that and their terms of service that give them a lifetime license to your stuff, again shit beyond me.

So how about Copy?

Well I’ve only tried for a few days, but its very similar to dropbox (thats a good thing), lightweight and i like their android app, worked great for now, quick syncing, i did wished they did something different, instead of a pure clone, still if i get more than what i have in dropbox you never know hehehe.

So yeah i put in this post my copy and my dropbox referral use it if you are interested in signing up youll get extra space, ohh and here is my Copy referral  (If you sign up you will get an extra 5GB!)

Nulo Simple Weather

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A quick 2day hackathon later! and here is Nulo Weather! Its a simple weather site, i know i know its nothing new, but i thought i could make something a bit better, a mix between overly simple (does it rain or not) and the abundance of overly complicated weather sites out there.

Its simple and plain, it shows the weather now, today and tomorrow, it uses geolocation to try and give you your weather right away but you can search any city anywhere to check its weather.

  • The good… humm it runs pretty quickly and looks if i say so myself pretty spanky good!
  • The bad… its unfortunately not perfect, with the lack of a decent weather API’s im using Yahoo Weather API (probably with time ill have to change), although good its still a bit wanky and not 100% responsive, also the geolocation isnt perfect and if no city is presented you are greeted with a random city, but if its a strange city Yahoo Weather API might just fail and you are greeted with a empty page… oh well ^_^’
So yeah go check it out and see if you like it! ^_^

Incult! Search Scientific Books and Documents

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New site! Yay! Welcome to Incult yep snazy domain, its a pretty cool and simple science search engine, the cool thing is that it caches copies of the works so you can always find the books and documents you need, for now we are focusing on public domain works, but in the future we will add also free documents and everything in between.

Other cool features is that if it doesn’t find any book on the database it will use google search (focused on the best book and documents sites) to give you some good alternatives, so win+win.

As of now the database is still being worked on, we have just a basic web scraper working, so its still gonna get more improvements, but for now like the death star… it is fully operational! ^_^

Ultimate Adblock Privacy List

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[ For you guys that know how this works, the filter subscription url for ablock plus is http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt ]

I was having a chat the other day about privacy and how the value of facebook is around not only the people/clients, but also everything you/upload/say on facebook is property of facebook and even when you are online all those like buttons, means they are still tracking you and selling who you are and what you do to the highest bidder…

That got me thinking, first thing i did was “clean up my facebook account”, ill still use facebook its a great site and communication tool, and i know facebook works like a subversion repository and everything you do is recorded for all time, so my clean up is purely aesthetic, but still this way not only is my facebook a bit cleaner but its also a reminder for me to not add more personal stuff there…

Next i searched around for that privacy protection, from Noscript, to an improvement on my hosts file (mine is already a beauty to behold, but more on that on another post), but i realized that i could use the awesome adblocking extension, adblock plus to do that job, especially cause i want for instance to block facebook or twitter buttons, but i dont want to block facebook or twitter, so i searched around and actually found they already have a couple of nice “privacy” filters, i put “” cause although good, they aren’t as cutthroat as i want them to be, that took me to my next step….

My very own privacy filter for adblock plus, it isnt huge and its not all encompassing, i have no big issue with small vendors or even a big vendor knowing a bit about me, my issue is they know too much, so this adblock filter is more of a privacy crippler that in conjuction with my hosts file and adblock plain list, makes my web oh so much more wonderful and safe!

How to Install this Beauty

Its simple, get yourself a good browser like firefox or chrome (remember both these browsers already track some of what you do, so if you want to go private all the way go for SRWare or something), then find on their respective Add-Ons/Extensions sites Adblock Plus and install it, then on the adblock plus options you will see a Filter Subscriptions, just add a new one and put whatever name you want, like “Awesome Privacy List” and put this url http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt and thats it! It will update itself once a week when i add or remove hosts, the original list is part my personal choices and the awesome privacy lists from Abine and Privacy Choice.

Note: Well this was shortlived! but mostly cause a few friends pointed out that other people were already doing this, so why should I! hehehe sorry, so check out Fanboys Anti Tracking+ Annoyances as well as Adversity! Its the ones i use and they kick ass!