March 2015

It's time once again for News and Notes to be delivered direct to your inbox. If you are overwhelmed by this monthly newsletter, please follow the link at the bottom to unsubscribe. There are other ways to keep informed. The archive is accessible (there's a link at my site) and I also share the newsletter on Facebook and Twitter. 

There have been many announcements in the past few weeks of security issues related to various WordPress plugins from both Yoast SEO plugins and WooCommerce. The great folks at Sucuri wrote up a guide to Understanding WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities and also about why you should care even if your site is small. One of the most common attacks on sites is a brute force attack. Last Summer, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, acquired the plugin BruteProtect, so it was timely that JetPack 3.4(.1) was released incorporating the features of BruteProtect into JetPack. Is it the only answer you need to keep your site secure? No, but it is an easy way for you to add an extra level of protection to your site.

It's very easy to be overwhelmed by daily demands and interruptions. It's easy to ignore the plan and just work on the newest task that grabs your attention. Over the years I've fine-tuned my systems to help me stay on top of both the routine and the urgent. This month, in my How I Work series, I shared why I value sleep more than crossing off every single item on the task list.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by the option to choose a category for your blog posts or confused about why you should add tags? This topic doesn't need to be overly complicated. I baked cookies to explain categories and tags.

Though there's still snow in my front yard, for this month's Ask Penny column at The Patterned Blog, I offered up some spring cleaning tips for your WordPress site.

Any new tech issues or questions this month? Please let me know, I'd be happy to help.

keep well,