0Site Updates Log

Known issues / work cur­rently in progress

• Update all old posts to use pre and code tags
• Need to do some ser­i­ous tag reor­gan­isa­tion — too many tags are in use
• Rebuild all favicons etc
• Tweak next and pre­vi­ous but­tons on mul­ti­part pages, and cus­tom­ise their meta descrip­tion and title for google
• Fix all down­load page links to dropbox
• Mon­it­or pro­gress of HTTP/3, QUIC, RusTLS, e‑SNI, ECH, JPEG-XL

09-Jan-24 (pending — in progress)

• Migrated OS from Cen­tOS to AlmaLinux
• Updated whole LEMP stack
• Replaced ino­ti­fy­wait script with functions
• Replaced gravatars with HTML/CSS which is much more efficient
• Enabled http3
• Switch to sep­ar­ate caches for each site
• Dropped duplic­ate certs — only using EC now, no RSA
• Replaced PNG sprite with SVG sprites
• Moved many cus­tom func­tions out of theme into plugin
• Tweaked image sizes (and code) to make everything even more responsive
• Tweaked avif, webp code to get bet­ter bal­ance of quality/size
• Added code to ensure caches are cleared whenev­er word­press updates are done
• Removed numer­ous old plugins
• Replaced numer­ous favicons and sim­il­ar with a single SVG favicon

16-Jun-21

• Adjus­ted styles to centre (ver­tic­ally) gal­lery images
• Re-did all cus­tom image sizes to ensure there are respons­ive ima­gess avail­able for max­im­um qual­ity on hi-dpi screens
• Enabled Avif images to improve page load times for mod­ern browsers
• Need to extend hi-dpi image work to the avatars

6‑Jun-21

• Adjus­ted styles to centre (ver­tic­ally) the thumb­nails in the pop­u­lar sidebar
• Replaced a num­ber of images with SVGs and added cus­tom func­tions to enable SVG’s and com­press SVGs on upload
• Enabled next-gen sup­port in nginx (altho no word­press plu­gins exist yet) thanks to UIdrafter guide

25-May-21

• Removed redund­ant files in web root
• Updated logos and favicons fol­low­ing Evil­Martins guide

20-Dec-20

• Updated Fea­ture-Policy to Per­mis­sions-Policy, changed syn­tax and remove obsol­ete elements
• moved sev­er­al inline styles into the theme css
• added as=“style” to preload
• Remove inline script from com­ment form — use event­l­isten­er instead
• Fixed theme script file to use up to date jquery syntax
• Sim­pli­fied ad dis­play js code
• Fixed mini­fic­a­tion bug affect­ing pop­u­lar posts widget
• Fixed CSP bug pre­vent­ing com­ment form work­ing correctly
• No SRI in use as the only extern­al scripts in use don’t sup­port a CORS header
• Removed jquery-migrate js
• Removed SRI plugin
• Tweaked first-vis­it cook­ie to make it more secure
• Fin­ished replace­ment of tabber-tabs
• Made CSP stricter — no more unsafe-inline scripts

09-July-20

• Changed back­ground trans­par­ency set­tings (used in this theme on oth­er sites).
• Cre­ated css to enable respons­ive images and iframes with aspect ratio respected.
• Fixed minor visu­al issue with pop­u­lar vis­it numbers.

01-July-20

• Removed some excess JS from theme.
• Removed jquery migrate by modi­fy­ing plugin.
• Added below fold styles to head­er preload.
• Updated WPP plu­gin with new ver­sion that does­n’t have inline JS so everything now passes CSP
• Star­ted work to replace out-dated tab­ber-tabs plu­gin with much light­er code
• Fully replaced wp-cron with sys­tem cron

21-May-20

• Migrated to new VPS which is faster and more secure.
• Fixed script error with ads.
• Removed some inline CSS that can go in stylesheet. Wait­ing for fix for bet­ter com­ments plugin.
• Added CSP report only on top of exist­ing CSP to mon­it­or oth­er things that can be improved
• Added form policy to CSP
• Replaced out­dated syn­tax high­light­er plu­gin with new plugin

06-Jan-20

• Added print CSS to remove wid­gets, head­er etc from prin­ted pages.
• Resolved and doc­u­mented fix to Word­Press updates pro­gress.
• Tweaked head­er code and file­names to make logo image dis­play more intuitive.

29-Dec-19

• Removed some unneeded html attrib­utes to improve validation
• Removed nginx help­er plu­gin as it made updat­ing posts take a long time. Nginx cache plu­gin can do the same thing

28-Dec-19

• Removed errant CSS zoom setting
• Dis­abled font-awe­some in STCR plugin
• Removed some unnec­cesary roles in HTML
• Removed some old vendor spe­cif­ic css resets which don’t appear to be needed
• Dis­abled WP Typo­graphy set­ting that gen­er­ates inline CSS for Safari
• Dis­abled WP Typo­graphy set­ting that gen­er­ates extra javas­cript that isn’t needed

24-Dec-19

• Con­tent Secur­ity Policy breaks the word­press visu­al edit­or but­ton — fixed
• Made all cook­ies secure
• Tweaked and re-enabled con­tent secur­ity policy

22-Dec-19

• Tidied up CSS files so there are only unmini­fied files to edit and these are auto mini­fied and compressed
• Sim­pli­fied and tidied up ad load­ing code
• Added check for track­ing pro­tec­tion block­ing ads
• Made ads dis­play a little neater
• Added cus­tom func­tion to fix word­press send­ing mail via SMTP so it no longer gets flagged as spam
• InPro­gress: Fix­ing amazon product embeds have image blocked
• InPro­gress: Social Login plu­gin too out of date to be useful
• InPro­gress: Test­ing fix for word­press updates not show­ing progress

13-Sept-19

• Replace jquery 1 with jquery 3
• Fixed bug in javas­cript code — replaced (window).load(function()) with (window).on(“load”, function())
• Added lazy­load­ing for images to save band­width for mobile visitors
• Dis­abled ewww show­ing unres­ized images
• Added Secur­i­ty­Po­licy head­er. Still need to check on inline javas­cript ref­er­ences and remove as many as possible.

6‑Aug-19

• Updated PHP
• Fixed bug in syn­tax high­light­er plu­gin, thanks to crunch­i­fy
• Fixed a small num­ber of minor issues thanks to health-check plugin
• Removed leg­acy pack­ages from serv­er (lib­brotli, apache, old php)
• Made some changes to cach­ing on serv­er: removed apc; enabled opcache and redis

20-Jul-19

• Removed point­less type attrib­ute from script and style tags.
• Removed incor­rect async from inline script.
• Removed unneeded guten­berg css.
• Tweaks plu­gin css remov­al priority.
• Turned the stat­ic gzip and brotli script into a ser­vice with info from stack­ex­change

19-Jul-19

• Enabled tcp fastopen.
• Enabled reuse­port.
• Added serv­er push for first time vis­it­ors, using a cook­ie to check if vis­it­or has been before.

13-Jul-19

• Switched jquery back to loc­al ver­sion. Acu­ally faster over­all, avoids com­pat­ib­il­ity issues, and pre­vents google using it as a track­ing tool.
• Con­firmed pre­vi­ous fix to plu­gin updates is work­ing well.
• Removed script async and defer for edit­ors — func­tion­al­ity is more import­ant than speed for editors
• Fixed bug with com­ment email veri­fic­a­tion on line 205 — made func­tion static

11-Jul-19

• Fixed issue with CORS block­ing access to google recaptcha (SRI plu­gin also adds crossorigin=“anonymous” which is a prob­lem. Tweaked plu­gin and excluded recaptcha in case it comes back)

7‑Dec-18

• Removed con­fus­ing (and out­dated) Pragma header
• Fixed code injec­tion bug in “Sub­scribe to com­ments reloaded” by prop­erly san­it­ising email
• Fixed bug in 404 page and added addi­tion­al CSRF protection
• Tweaked serv­er to make sure extra head­ers are always added, includ­ing to 40x responses

6‑Dec-18

• Added nonce to 404 sub­mis­sion field to pre­vent CSRF attack
• Don’t cache robots.txt
• Update to Word­Press 5

4‑Dec-18

• Secur­ity head­ers added
• Extra word­press harden­ing with Sucuri
• Return 444 for xml-rpc, readme.html, license.txt, and php files in sub folders
• Fixed some php warn­ings from new­er ver­sion (needed ’ marks around variables)
• Blocked User enu­mer­a­tion using the REST API
• Added cook­ie set­tings to php to reduce CSRF risks

3‑Dec-18

• Fin­ished enabling all fea­tures from October
• Removed serv­er head­er information
• Updated to PHP 7.2
• Switched to lossy PNG com­pres­sion to enhance site speed
• Star­ted addi­tion of secur­ity head­ers (see SecurityHeaders.com)

18-Oct-18

• Switch DNS pro­viders to increase speed and enable new fea­tures (DNSSEC)
• Enable use of wild­card cer­ti­fic­ate for all subdomains
• Enable dual cer­ti­fic­ates (ECDSA and RSA) via cert­bot and acme.sh. See here

16-Oct-18

• Enabled TLS v1.3 via nginx-more
• Enabled block­ing of brute force login attempts via nginx. See here for more
• Removed login lock­down plu­gin as the above replaces it
• TLS false start was already work­ing so no need to con­fig­ure TLS 1.3 for that
• nginx does­n’t sup­port 0‑RTT yet, and there are pos­sible secur­ity implic­a­tions anyway
• Fixed trans­posh to use en_GB by default (see “I am using the flag inter­face” on the trans­posh FAQ)
• Fixed mixed con­tent issue caused by “bet­ter recent com­ments” plu­gin by reset­ting all instances
• Added 2‑step authen­tic­a­tion for added secur­ity and tidied up login screen

30-July-18

• Replaced word­press cheap-mans-cron with prop­er cronjobs to help site speed.
• Fixed a couple of minor php bugs that were gen­er­at­ing logs
• Increased php work­ers as lim­it was being hit and plenty of memory spare

8‑June-18

• Added extra head­ers to pre­vent con­tent load­ing in frames and XSS stuff
• Enabled Cer­ti­fic­ate Trans­par­ency (without enforce at the moment)

2‑Apr-18

• Fixed com­ment­ing bug caused by file_get_contents being used by the captcha system.
• Switched mail send­ing to use gmail smtp serv­ers to avoid issues with spam, due to dmarc fails (as per this guide)

13-Nov-17

• Moved sev­er­al scripts to foot­er to help ensure they run after jquery

12-Nov-17

• Updated gravatar cache func­tion to use avatars from google as well.
• jquery link uses integ­rity so can­’t be pre­loaded at the moment, see this article

10-Nov-17

• Added SRI ref­er­ence for jquery
• Will switch to nginx with dynam­ic mod­ules once more repos are avail­able — will then include pagespeed mod­ule along with exist­ing brotli mod­ule already in use
• TLSv1.3 sup­port should auto­mat­ic­ally kick in once OpenSSL 1.1.1 becomes avail­able as a package
• Using a plu­gin to auto­mat­ic­ally optim­ise data­base to speed up page loads for non-cached resources
• Removed unused data­base tables left by old plugins
• Recon­figured and reoptim­ised cach­ing and set­tings for both mysql and php (includ­ing php opcache)

1‑Nov-17

• Re-enabled pre­load­ing now that browsers sup­port it with updated syntax
• Will enable HTTP PUSH in April once nginx get support

28-Oct-17

• Updated edit_custom_walker.php from the plu­gin “sweet cus­tom menu” to fix php errors. Lines 18, 27 and 39 mod­i­fied, based on the advice on this thread
• Tweaked php-fpm con­fig­ur­a­tion to increase max_packet_size
• Upgraded PHP ver­sion to improve per­form­ance and security
• Fixed vari­ous minor php warnings/errors to reduce php-fpm log writing
• Tweaked con­fig to lim­it num­ber of post revisions

22-Oct-17

• Upgraded nginx to sup­port a range of new technologies
• Reduced num­ber of cipher suites sup­por­ted to improve secur­ity, and to speed up TLS negotiation
• Using brotli to cre­ate com­pressed brotli resources to speed up page loading
• Com­press­ing gzip resources using zop­fli for smal­ler gzip com­pat­ible files
• Tweaked DNS entries to add extra domains, remove unused domains, and remove email access to the old VPS IP address
• Enabled DNS CAA records

8‑Feb-17

• Updated OpenSSL to enable sup­port for ALPN
• Added sup­port for HSTS preloading
• Ready for CAA record when Route53 sup­ports it
• No serv­er push in nginx yet
• Not enabling cer­ti­fic­ate trans­par­ency due to complexity

22-Dec-14

• Set cray­on syn­tax high­light­er and social-login to defer instead of async to fix jquery issues
• Tweaked HTML to fix 3 val­id­a­tion errors
• Tweaked HTML to address a warn­ing about sub­op­tim­al use of semant­ic sections
• Fixed incor­rect archive pages 7 search res­ults page
• Fixed prob­lem with titles where input fields for yoast had some­how gained a hid­den inval­id char­ac­ter which was invalid
• Fixed code sur­round­ing social-net­work login but­tons for com­ments, as the HTML was invalid
• Fixed a code error in sub­scribe to com­ments reloaded which caused a val­id­a­tion error
• Fixed open­graph val­id­a­tion error

22-Dec-14

• Tweaked captcha recaptcha so it is only in use for non-logged in users
• Fixed incor­rect menu icons
• Fixed styl­ing of con­tact page
• Removed related posts from con­tact page

18-Dec-14

• Removed no captcha reCaptcha plu­gin and added sys­tem manu­ally to com­ments — so it can be dis­played only for non-logged in users

15-Dec-14

• Added Google No Captcha reCaptcha to 404 sub­mis­sion form and con­tact form
• Styled 404 sub­mis­sion form
• Cre­ated site options key for the captcha keys etc
• Dropped google ana­lyt­ics — it isn’t being used enough to jus­ti­fy the pri­vacy inva­sion asso­ci­ated with it
• No longer prefetch­ing JS which is high in the head any­way — no bene­fit shown
• Set head to get face­book app id, face­book admins and google pub­lish­er val­ues from set­tings page rather than hardcoded

14-Dec-14

• styled com­ment list
• styled con­tact form

13-Dec-14

• Fin­ished tweak­ing menu style and positions
• moved back to loc­al­cur­rency from worldcurrency

11-Dec-14

• Replaced com­ment e‑mail veri­fic­a­tion with the new google no captcha recaptcha
• Removed a couple more plugins
• Fix Google ads still using non https script and called in the foot­er rather than async in the head

10-Dec-14

• After 1 year of slow pro­gress the site has been suc­cess­fully migrated to a new VPS
• New serv­er uses secure-HTTP (TLS), SPDY and is HTTP2.0 ready
• Ditched Var­nish cache as it causes too many problems.
• CSS and JS resources are pre-gzipped. Web­serv­er only gzips html.
• All page speed met­rics are greatly improved
• Rebuilt theme from ground up. Few­er requests are made, CSS is split into above and below fold. JS files are mostly async, but jquery ones are defer
• Reduced num­ber of plu­gins, some func­tion­al­ity has been built into theme
• webp images are now served to chrome users to fur­ther improve site speed
• Moved bread­crumbs to side­bar which is much tidier
• Found much bet­ter ways to tweak the out­put of the plu­gins used to pop­u­late the side­bar. These are both clean and will sur­vive plu­gin updates
• Mobile PageSpeed score is now above 90.
• Reduced image com­pres­sion set­tings to ensure large images don’t timeout on upload
• Added plu­gin JS to theme. All jquery depend­ent scripts work as they are deferred. Oth­er scripts are asynced

13-Sept-14

• Fixed prob­lem with com­ment email veri­fic­a­tion emails going to spam folders
• Fixed slow VPS due to disk full
• Updated down­loads page
• Upgrade to Word­Press 4
• Fixed backup failures

15-Dec-13

• Added trans­la­tion options into mul­tiple languages
• Cus­tom­ised the icons on the word­press submenu

11-Dec-13

• Restored related posts buttons.
• Added shar­ing but­tons to the sidebar.
• Tweaked the way ad javas­cript works to speed up page loading.
• PageSpeed score on homepage is now 99.  YSlow is 98.  On posts scores are 95 and 91.
• Mobile pagespeed scores are 80 and 77.  Only sug­ges­tion would require rewrit­ing CSS to use as little as possible.
• Homepage loads in under 1 second.
• After mak­ing changes it seems to work best if W3TC is dis­abled and re-enabled after everything else.
• Restored cus­tom 404 page and enhanced the style of it
• Fixed rel­ev­anssi not updat­ing index by deac­tiv­at­ing and react­iv­at­ing — search is now improved

10-Dec-13

• Fixed vari­ous meta tags.  Code is still val­id HTML5 and both face­book and twit­ter now val­id­ate open­graph tags.
• Sub­mit­ted request approv­al to twit­ter for twit­ter cards
• Used cus­tom func­tion to gen­er­ate excerpt since this can­’t be done out­side the loop using built-in func­tions anymore
• Using cus­tom design respons­ive google ads
• Restored last para­graph on posts invit­ing people to comment

02-Dec-13

• Updated VPS and tweaked set­tings to improve var­nish performance

01-Dec-13

• Fixed social login by tweak­ing var­nish con­fig­ur­a­tion to pass cook­ies and by tweak­ing nginx con­fig to use the cor­rect port.
• Finally got cook­ie-free CDN work­ing cor­rectly with no problems
• Mod­i­fied social login to use CSS sprites.  Details are on the word­press sup­port site for social login

28-Nov-13

• Removed Word­Press Pop­u­lar Posts now that Pop­u­lar Wid­get can col­lect data and man­age 2 instances.  Will reduce the amount of javas­cript and CSS required
• Mod­i­fied WP-Mini­fy to put Javas­cript slightly lower in the head­er and enabled mini­fy­ing of JS
• Load­ing JQuery from google CDN as many users will prob­ably have it cached, and CDNs are good anyway
• Tweaked a few more rich snip­pet entries
• PageSpeed score for homepage and nor­mal pages is A rated for both desktop and mobile.  YSlow for homepage and posts on both desktop and mobile is a rated a B.

23-Nov-13

• Fixed HTML5 error caused by wp-social-login insert­ing a <style> ele­ment.  Added the fol­low­ing to functions.php

  update_option('wsl_settings_authentication_widget_css','');

• Fixed align­ment of wp-social-login icons by chan­ging one of the set­tings to include some html code…

  </span></p><p class='text'>Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:</p><p class='none'><span>

• Added pre­vi­ous styles for the com­ment form to make it look nice
• Added lots of struc­tured data, mostly schema.org microdata but also hAt­om micro­formats and some RDFa for face­book and twitter

25-Oct-2013

• Upgrade to word­press 3.7
• Using wp-mini­fy to com­bine and mini­fy css and mini­fy html
• Mod­i­fied google ana­lyt­ics code to lim­it it to primary domain and exclude sub­do­mains ahead of enabling cook­ie free CDN

24-Oct-2013

• Cus­tom code for cach­ing gravatars loc­ally — so no requests are made to the gravatar serv­ers on page load, only on com­ment sub­mit.  Gravatars are updated with a cron job
• Fixed strange error with set­ting com­ment par­ent where exist­ing value would be lost.  Had to use a data­base query instead of get_metadata()
• Cor­rec­ted my own e‑mail address on some older com­ments, so it’s con­sist­ent for all com­ments I’ve made now
• Tweaked respons­ive CSS so low res screens don’t get the menu images or the widgets
• Re-added styl­ing for com­ments by post authors.  Might change this to be by ‘users’

21-Oct-13 — New build of theme

• New theme is respons­ive and mobile first so much bet­ter for mobile devices with small screens and lower band­width connections
• Sub­mit­ted word­press fea­ture request on trac to make strip_shortcodes accept an option­al value .  If it’s accep­ted then will try to get pop­u­lar-posts plu­gin updated to make use of it
• New theme is built using LESS for CSS which should reduce the size of the CSS and enables it to be min­im­ised out-of-the-box, rather than by a plugin
• Tweaked the styles of all wid­gets so they have the same style
• No hard­coded addresses in theme — using word­press func­tions so theme can be used with oth­er sites.
• Replaced HTML com­ments with PHP com­ments which are auto­mat­ic­ally removed by the PHP pro­cessor, lead­ing to smal­ler HTML files being sent to the browser
• Updated some head­er code to provide bet­ter meta-data for face­book, twit­ter etc
• Using built-in word­press sup­port for menu classes for styles, so chan­ging menu order does­n’t mess up all the menu images
• Returned to .ico for favicon as can have 16 and 32px images in it, and big­ger aren’t really needed.  32px is high enough for HiDPI devices at the moment.  Also reduces num­ber of png links in head­er — which reduces num­ber of HTTP requests and removes a few hun­dred bytes of code
• Using MicroData instead (or as well as) Micro­Formats now that google, bing, yahoo etc have agreed on MicroData
• Val­id­ates against HTML5 spec now it is final­ised and not a mov­ing target
• A new col­our scheme to freshen things up.
• Prop­erly organ­ised and com­men­ted the vari­ous cus­tom func­tions in functions.php
• Tweaks are done mainly in functions.php instead of in each tem­plate file, so only 1 place has to be edited
• Edit to Render.php of Ulti­mate Tag Cloud Wid­get to pre­vent it fail­ing val­id­a­tion.  Just com­ment out lines 331–333.  Sug­ges­ted option to developer.
• Tweaked the wid­gets so they show short­er snip­pets and take up a bit less height
• Replaced change to Word­Press-Pop­u­lar-Posts below with sim­pler mod which degrades more grace­fully when plu­gin is updated. Used the built-in cus­tom HTML facil­ity and made 1 very simple edit to wordpress-popular-posts.php by adding an extra line…

  $thumb= get_the_post_thumbnail( url_to_postid($permalink), 'bones-thumb-40', array('class' => 'wpp-thumbnail') );

  <li><a href="{url}">{thumb}<b>{text_title}</b><br />{excerpt}</a></li>

18-Oct-13

• Out­go­ing mail was fixed pre­vi­ously, date unlogged.  Needs con­firm­a­tion though
• Refixed Word­Press-Pop­u­lar-Posts to match style of Pop­u­lar-Posts.  Only 1 edit required to wordpress-popular-posts.php line 1254
  Replaced

  $content .= "<li>{$thumb}<a href=\"{$permalink}\" title=\"{$title}\" class=\"wpp-post-title\" target=\"".$this->user_ops['tools']['link']['target']."\">{$title_sub}</a> {$excerpt}<span class=\"post-stats\">{$stats}</span>{$rating}</li>" . "\n";

  With

  $content .= "<li><a href=\"{$permalink}\" title=\"{$title}\" class=\"wpp-post-title\" target=\"".$this->user_ops['tools']['link']['target']."\">". get_the_post_thumbnail( url_to_postid($permalink), 'bones-thumb-40', array('class' => 'wpp-thumbnail') ) . "{$title_sub}</a> {$excerpt}<span class=\"post-stats\">{$stats}</span>{$rating}</li>" . "\n";

11-Apr-13

• Added styl­ing for author comments
• Added a word­press category
• Fixed CSS bug with search-form by adding miss­ing right-float and remov­ing line-height set­ting from normalize.css and apply­ing it just to the con­tent sec­tion instead of the body

25-Mar-13

• Fixed bug with anti-adb­lock­er code on down­loads page caus­ing all links to get mod­i­fied incorrectly

6‑Mar-13

• Added [int­link id=“3464” type=“post”]code[/intlink] to make edit­ing the par­ent of a com­ment easi­er.  Then used it to fix vari­ous com­ments which did­n’t have par­ents but should have had.

4‑Mar-13

• Fixed bug with CSS styles which caused extern­al link icon to be shown for files on CDN
• Fixed minor bug with google ads display

26-Feb-13

• Fixed miss­ing notice on adblocking
• Tinkered with google ads to optim­ise them, and to to reduce how obtrus­ive they are
• Added code to dis­play a mes­sage to adb­lock­ers when they down­load files.  Down­load­ing is still pos­sible, it’s just 1 extra nag

13-Feb-13

• Fixed issue with bug in W3TC mini­fic­a­tion caus­ing 404 errors (big thanks to Pothi Kalimuthu)
• Fixed bug with reply to com­ments — by using prop­er word­press com­ments func­tion instead of writ­ing my own form — details avail­able in [int­link id=“3374” type=“post”]this post[/intlink].

12-Feb-13

• Changed how ads are inser­ted using much more effi­cient PHP for faster page load­ing (see https://www.transformationpowertools.com/wordpress/adsense-ad-at-more-tag-fold)
• Removed sev­er­al redund­ant plu­gins: WP-Mini­fy and 5 oth­er minor plu­gins (Dean’s Permalinks Migra­tion, Health Check, High­light Author Com­ments, Hot­fix, Term Man­age­ment Tools)
• Replaced Jet­Pack with Slim JetPack
• Updated Word­Press core and 15 plugins
• Ongo­ing migra­tion to new VPS with fol­low­ing improve­ments: Var­nish cache in front of web serv­er, APC cach­ing with PHP, MySQL cach­ing by MySQL
• Bet­ter mini­fic­a­tion engines: CSS Tidy and Clos­ure Compiler
• Recom­pressed vari­ous images now EWWW is work­ing prop­erly with latest ver­sions of com­pres­sion tools.

02-Jan-13

• Tweaked a couple of forms to use new HTML5 types ’email’ and ‘url’ instead of just text

28-Dec-12

• Fixed ‘about’ sub­menu icons

27-Dec-12

• Cus­tom­ised “word­press pop­u­lar posts” so styles match “pop­u­lar posts” plu­gin.  Edits to the stylesheet, line 1124 of wordpress-popular-posts.php and added new func­tion around line 1176.
• Refixed word­press strip_shortcode_tag() bug — func­tion can­’t be over­writ­ten with fil­ter, so have to do this with every release of wordpress!

26-Dec-12

• Merged face­book pages — new page uses cor­rect name, has all fol­low­ers intact, and is cor­rectly linked into the face­book app which enables com­ments by people with face­book accounts to bypass e‑mail verification
• Fixed vari­ous issues with web­mas­ter tools, mainly by dis­abling sitemap for attach­ment pages which aren’t used.
• Fixed a few minor rich snip­pets errors — pub­lish­er snip­pet not on all pages and pages (not posts) miss­ing 2 pieces of rich snip­pet markup

23-Dec-12

• Tweaked styles of com­ment form sub­stan­tially — now much more like the nice form used by jet­pack comments
• Added word­press social com­ments plu­gin — com­menters can use social net­work details to leave com­ments — no 3^rd party serv­ers are involved so pri­vacy is maintained
• Updated to latest jquery (1.8.3)
• Added expand­ing text­box script for com­ment form

18-Dec-12

• Fixed vari­ous HTML5 code errors now HTML5 spec is finalised
• Fixed HTML5 error with yoast bread­crumbs thanks to a sup­port thread
• Added bread­crumbs to pages as well as posts

16-Dec-12

• Added thumb­nail type images to pages as well as posts
• Added a “most pop­u­lar this month” widget
• Cus­tom­ised the “mys­tery man” avatar
• Updated and retweaked wp-auto-affiliate-links
• Tweaked styles to high­light author comments

13-Dec-12

• Fixed com­ment redir­ect — only first-time com­menters get redir­ec­ted to thank you page
• Added auto­mat­ic link from first-time com­menters page to go back to pre­vi­ous article

12-Dec-12

• Replaced Syn­tax High­light­er Evolved with Cray­on Syn­tax High­light­er.  This is more up to date, allows line break­ing with code copy­ing and offers a way to insert code without the edit­or mangling it

11-Dec-12

• Update to Word­Press 3.5
• Fix incor­rect icons on main menu, and re-ordered menu slightly
• Dropped Jet­pack com­ments and went back to nat­ive com­ments — faster, and more customisable
• Added thank you page for first-time com­menters (which should work now that Jet­pack com­ments are no longer in use)
• Added Social Login to replace some of Jet­pack com­ments func­tion­al­ity — will tweak appear­ance and style over xmas holidays
• Added new Face­book app to hook into Social Login
• Replaced Face­book page with new page linked to Face­book app (have to wait 14 days for the old page to be deleted, before renam­ing new page)

17-Nov-12

• Added twit­ter card open­graph style metadata tags — thanks yoast
• Tweaked DNS to val­id­ate (with SPF) e‑mails sent from all A record addresses in my DNS — so mail from my web­host serv­er passes SPF checks — anoth­er yoast tip.

5‑Nov-12

• Added val­id HTML5 metadata for face­book open­graph descrip­tions for all pages
• Updated (and retweaked) wp auto affil­i­ate links plugin
• Fixed some HTML5 val­id­a­tion errors with ulti­mate-tag-cloud-wid­get by remov­ing style tags code (by com­ment­ing out lines 868–870 in ultimate-tag-cloud-widget.php)
• Re-enabled mod­ern­izr

2‑Nov-12

• Replaced DNS ser­vice from regis­trar with Amazon’s “Route 53” to speed up DNS and to enable sup­port for SPF, DKIM & DMARC e‑mail sign­ing capabilities

30-Oct-12

• Replaced email-to-face­book plu­gin with Hoot­Suite to auto-share con­tent to DIY­Medi­aHome Face­book page.
• Also enabled shar­ing to DIY­Medi­aHome Google+ page with HootSuite

23-Oct-12

• Switched from ran­dom gravatars to “unknown man” logo
• Added “most pop­u­lar of the month” widget
• Replaced built-in tag cloud with a more cus­tom­is­able one — set to only show tags which appear on at least 3 posts
• Set the 2 pop­u­lar wid­gets to include pages as well as posts

17-Oct-12

• Added rel­ev­anssi related posts when reg­u­lar related posts does­n’t find anything
• Fin­ished updat­ing all of our links on down­loads page to go via anti-hot­link script
• Added fea­tured images to all pages (as opposed to posts) so they look bet­ter when show­ing up in search res­ults etc.

16-Oct-2012

• Fixed 1^st of 2 prob­lems com­ment­ing.  Incom­pat­ib­il­ity between “bad beha­viour” and “jet­pack com­ments”.  Turn on “bad beha­viour” option “Allow form post­ings from oth­er web sites”.
• Also fixed 2^nd of 2 prob­lems com­ment­ing — the anti-hot­link­ing script was block­ing php links
• Added hot­link pro­tec­tion for image files
• Added auto trash cleanup to wp-config.php with “define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10 );”

3‑Oct-2012

• Fixed prob­lem with admin e‑mail address
• Updated down­loads script to deal with loc­al host and 2 mir­rors — Google­Drive and DropBox

26-Sept-2012

• Added EWWW Image Optim­izer plu­gin to bet­ter com­press all images
• Con­figured EWWW to use PNGOut
• Recom­pressed all images with EWWW
• Added suc­cess mes­sage to feed­back form submission
• Added anti-bot meas­ures from feed­back form to 404 page form

24-Sept-2012

• Tweaked con­tact us form more to fix some minor format­ting issues
• Added a honey-pot trap for bots to the con­tact us form — a hid­den field bots will com­plete but real users wont see pre­vents submission
• Changed code to strip HTML tags from con­tact form.  Links can still be sent in plain text

19-Sept-2012

• Restored VigLink now that titles are no longer linked — thanks to Bri­an Braun­lich of viglink tech support.

18-Sept-2012

• Tweaked format­ting of related posts on the 404 page
• Pre­ven­ted long titles in related posts over­lap­ping the box by set­ting over­flow: hidden;
• Tidied up the con­tact us page form

17-Sept-2012

• Tweaked the wp-auto-affil­i­ates-plu­gin so that instead of enter­ing full URLs in the admin page only the product code is needed.  Edit to line 326 to add in the rest of the url there
• Tri­al replace­ment of con­di­tion­al-captcha with “bad beha­viour” plu­gin as captcha isn’t user friendly or accessible
• Added code to pre­vent injec­tion spam­ming via con­tact form and 404 noti­fic­a­tion form.

13-Sept-2012

• Replaced built-in search with rel­ev­anssi which has much bet­ter match­ing of res­ults and orders res­ults by rel­ev­ance not date
• Added refer­rer page inform­a­tion to 404 error sub­mis­sion form so when a user sub­mits a broken address I can see where the incom­ing link is

30-Aug-2012

• Reor­gan­ised the “about page” by break­ing it into sev­er­al sub­pages.  Added info about hot­links, guest posts and a blogroll
• Replaced the com­ment sub­mis­sion form with the built-in word­press one which (via Jet­Pack) allows com­menters to log in via social net­work accounts

18-Aug-2012

• Fixed some bugs with con­tact form
• Cre­ated a new 404 page with related posts and an error sub­mis­sion form

12-Aug-2012

• Set up drop­box account and set Back­WPUP to sync backups to drop­box as an off-host backup.  These are then also synced onto home serv­er as an extra measure

26-June-2012

• Fixed bug with acronyms plu­gin by chan­ging doc­type declar­a­tion in header.php
• Fixed html valid­ity prob­lem with pop­u­lar wid­get by repla­cing spans with divs
• Fixed minor bug in pop­u­lar wid­get using spaces not com­mas every 3 digits in large numbers
• Replaced stats option (in Jet­pack) with hard­coded CSS to fix val­id­a­tion issue — instead of tick­ing option to hide smi­ley face, put code into theme css — img#wpstats{display:none !import­ant;}
• Re-fixed the strip_shortcode_tag() bug again since word­press 3.4 update
• Fixed subscribe2 short­code on about page
• Fixed default blog address to match domain name
• Cre­ated PHP redir­ect to google drive files bypassing prompts
• Imple­men­ted hot­link pro­tec­tion and added hot­link­ing inform­a­tion to the about page

17-June-2012

• Mul­tiple author entries for Jon’s com­ments merged and author inform­a­tion updated to be consistent

2‑June-2012

• Vari­ous updates and bug fixes, doc­u­mented in [int­link id=“2656” type=“post”]an art­icle on the site[/intlink]