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.
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.
Last week I went into detail about how we’ve simplified our procedure for keeping WordPress up to date by using Composer for dependency management. Stage two in our process to clean up our many separate installations of WordPress is to create a single “network” where all the sites on our server share the same core code and plugins. Why update 19 installations when you can just update one?
Prater Raines launched our 19th WordPress website recently, a petition campaigning for justice for the marginalised children of Vietnamese mothers and South Korean fathers born during the Vietnam War.
Our support contract with clients always includes backing up their data and keeping their website secure and easy to modify in future by making sure it’s running the latest version of WordPress and any contributed plugins. This has been a fairly manual process for a while and it felt like a good time to streamline things a little.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
A customer recently wrote to us to tell us that they wanted to add an EU flag character (??) to an email they sent out from on of our websites but doing so resulted an error message.
It turned out to be a problem with the “utf8” character encoding in the MySQL database engine.