UK Gov sites hijacked by Cryptominer, and Subresource Integrity

Over the weekend, thousands of websites around the world, including the UK’s NHS and ICO and the US Government Court system, were compromised, and caused visitors to mine crypto-coins – generating money for the miscreants. These sites were using a popular plugin called Browsealoud. Their support software “adds speech, reading, and translation to websites facilitating … Read more

State of the Web – Autoplaying Audio and Video

It’s an ongoing debate – users do not like videos to autoplay (apart from YouTube), and designers want their website to feature their video and audio immediately on visiting the page. In the distant past, this has often been ‘solved’ by using Adobe Flash to play videos. Browsers soon caught up to this madness, and … Read more

Which Payment Gateway

Often, the choice of which payment provider to use is a case of which offers the lowest cost, or which offers the functionality that’s required for your business. Once past these limitations, many payment providers are the same; offering either an on-page or external redirection site to take payment, and returning a secure callback to … Read more

Plan your Upgrade Process

Whilst designing new websites, it’s common to use an off-the-shelf theme as basis for a new site. However, making changes to a theme or plugin can cause problems when it comes to upgrading. When making changes to plugin or theme code, it’s important to be aware that when these plugins or themes are upgraded – … Read more

Mozilla Observatory – Test your SSL

Mozilla have put together a tool for testing many areas of SSL security. We’ve recently discussed using the free Let’s Encrypt service to secure your site, but it is also important to ensure the security settings are up to date. “While we’d love to say that any site that scores an A+ on the Observatory … Read more

Keep up with Magento 1.x and 2.x Maintenance

Probably the most tedious part of running a website is the constant maintenance and updates. Continuing our previous post on WordPress, we’ve put together a quick guide of routine checks and changes for both Magento 1.x and 2.x. A poorly maintained website can be a security nightmare, or even impact on your website appearance and … Read more

Keeping up with WordPress Maintenance

WordPress maintenance is a tedious and thankless chore, but absolutely essential to the smooth-running of your website. A poorly maintained website can be a security nightmare, or even impact on your website appearance and search position with potential attacks and spam. We’ve put together a basic list of the most essential WordPress maintenance; Backups A … Read more

Cisco SPA-3102 and FreePBX (UK) with Caller ID

The CISCO (or even Netgear) SPA-3102 was a Voice Gateway device, used to convert between the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) and a VOIP server. The device is very much end-of-life, and although not sold new, is widely available and still very popular. There are many online guides for using the SPA-3102, but since it … Read more