Read the latest blog on our projects and new developments in areas like security, WordPress and Typo3. The team at Prater Raines write how projects have progressed with challenges that have been faced. We like to keep you informed in technology and security updates.
Come and join us for The Prater Raines Summer Party!
Over the August Bank Holiday weekend, Sandgate (where Prater Raines is based) holds an annual Sea and Food Festival. There’s free music, with a public fireworks display from the beach on the Saturday night. On the Sunday, there is a range of entertainment and food stalls.
Prater Raines are delighted to invite our customers down to visit Sandgate to join us for a few drinks, some food and fireworks on Saturday 25th August.
Nothing fancy: if the weather plays nicely, we’ll be on and around the beach: if not, in and around Sandgate & local pubs!
We’re proud to be supporting the HG Wells Short Story Competition in 2018, providing their website and giving Facebook support. It’s great to see that this year’s competition is going well (get your entries in by 23 July!).
We rebuilt their site onto our own WordPress hosting (including SSL support, daily backups, keeping WordPress updated with all the most recent patches and updates etc), and new for 2018 created the online entry process, replacing the former post or email entry system.
Prater Raines are delighted to be accredited by the Liberal Democrats as an Approved Supplier under their GDPR compliance programme. We’ve been supplying websites for the Party for over 15 years, so really hoped we would!
The accreditation is for our Lib Dem “Foci” website service as a “Website, Email, Campaigns and Social Media Platform”.
However, our WordPress installations and support are acknowledged to meet their GDPR compliance requirements as well. Our WordPress sites have UK hosting and always run on the latest version. They automatically upgrade on your behalf, ensuring data is stored within the local WordPress database. Additionally providing regular plugin updates and built-in SSL support.
An Apology
An ApologyAs website developers, we take a great deal of pride in the work that we do, and hope that we go the extra mile to keep our clients happy, and their sites well supported.
However, sometimes things go wrong. Yesterday it went badly wrong on the site of one of our long-standing clients – the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland.
It was our fault, and we’re mortified, but we wanted to also explain what has happened and what we’re doing to fix it as best we can.
The problem occurred when ensuring the Alliance website and emails match up to the standards required by the GDPR. The site then started sending emails we didn’t want it to and were not expected. By the time we identified the issue and stopped it fully at 10pm last night, it had already dispatched thousands of emails. Some users who had signed up to accept emails have received over 100 separate emails.
Sorry
This mistake was entirely ours, and not that of Alliance. Prater Raines wants to apologise to anyone who received those emails, and to them and the Alliance Party for the distress caused.
As of now, emails we send from all domains that we hold are signed with DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail.
We have been using SPF, Sender Policy Framework for some years. This helps prevent spoofing emails and is used to in detect spam and phishing emails. However, by using DKIM in addition to SPF it ensures our customers are getting better security. Domain Keys Identified Mail is an email authentication technique that verifies an email’s domain to help ensure that emails have not been tampered with during transit. We can then filter or reject email that fails the DKIM check.
This applies to all emails sent from email accounts and websites that we provide: just another built-in feature of our service!
Tendo Consulting approached us to make some updates to the Fair Tax on Flying site which was part of a campaign they were working on for a client.
There were a number of content changes to the site. A key new feature required was to rebuild the existing “Email an MP” functionality. This was designed to use up to date open source data and give the ability to look up the appropriate MP from a supplied postcode. Additionally, then providing different suggested email texts based on the user’s selections.
This we did, building our own WordPress plugins to add the functionality. This project involved updating an existing site on its own existing hosting. As the hosting was not provided by us, it did add some complexity to the project. However, we’re really pleased with the result!
We work with organisations and companies, understanding their needs and working with them. We can provide an “Email Your MP “functionality to your campaign.
It’s come to light this week that serious security flaws have been discovered in the processors of most modern PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cloud computers. These bugs allow programs to steal data being processed by other programs running on the device, and could be exploited to extract secrets from running programs, including passwords and personal files.
Nuff said: new WordPress site set-ups from £250 + VAT.
WordPress hosting and support just £20 + VAT per month per site.
Secure SSL hosting, DDoS protection and backups as standard.
Well this IS nice: an article on our local paper about the H G Wells Short Story Competition 2017, with Prater Raines named as a sponsor.
The Prater Raines team took on the running of their WordPress website for the competition in 2017, providing volunteer support to manage the site, update content and editing the site.
Now that we’ve set up our multisite WordPress network, the next problem is going to be moving the content from our multiple existing single site installations into the multisite network.