Happiness Engineer at Automattic
The last project I was working on before starting work as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic was a simple theme built on the Genesis Framework, incorporating elements of accessibility. I was working on this until around March of this year, but didn’t want it to disappear, forgotten, never to be seen again. So I’ve now revamped my site, using this new accessible theme, which I named ‘Easeful’.
The theme is available on Github – feel free to download it and try it out!
Original Source: https://happinessengineer.blog/2018/10/24/from-trial-to-jetpack-he/
Four weeks into my Happiness Engineer Trial I recall the moment I was pinged in Slack to have a ‘chat’ about whether or not I was going to be recommended to HR for a ‘HR chat’ – the next stage in the hiring process. It had been an intense four weeks – so much information to learn, so many interactions, experiences, and moments, all in the world of WordPress.com
A couple of weeks later and I was pinged again – this time I was told that if all went well I’d be heading to the Jetpack(JPOP) division!
So you want to redirect a PDF from your old site to your new WordPress site?
When you migrate your site, in order to maintain your search engine rankings you generally want to set up 301 redirects for URLs from your original site to the corresponding URL on your new site. Search engines are likely to continue to show your old site links in searches for some time, and you don’t want users heading to a 404 page.
Redirecting PDFs works in the same way as redirecting pages. In your .htaccess file, a typical 301 redirect section will look like this, for a site keeping the same domain name:
#Begin 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 /sub-page/sub-sub-page https://www.example.com/new-sub-page/new-sub-sub-page/
#End 301 Redirects
And like this for a site changing domain name:
#Begin 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 http://www.old-site.com/sub-page/sub-sub-page https://www.example.com/new-sub-page/new-sub-sub-page/
#End 301 Redirects
For PDFs, the process is exactly the same. Where it differs is when PDFs have been uploaded in the past with spaces in the file name (generally on older sites where the spaces have been retained in the file name). This means the original PDF URL was something like http://www.old-site.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/a%20fancy%20title.pdf. The problem is that the %20’s are not recognised when this URL is added to the .htaccess file. The way around this is to enclose the original URL in quotes, keeping the original spaces. Here is an example:
#Begin 301 Redirects
Redirect 301 "/wp-content/a fancy title.pdf" https://www.example.com/a-new-fancy-title.pdf
#End 301 Redirects
Note: This works on Linux servers. If you are using an Apache server and still having issues, check out this article.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a new EU regulation aimed at strengthening data protection laws for EU (and UK) citizens. This comes into force today, May 25th, and there are several key points that website owners should know about in order to make sure websites are compliant.
The main take-away is that you cannot now assume that consent has automatically been given when someone has visited your website (for example consent for cookies to be used or for information to be stored when submitting a form or purchasing a product). EU (and UK) citizens will now have more control over their personal data. This applies then to any website taking and storing personal data from EU (and UK) citizens, regardless of where in the world the website is hosted or the website owner is based.
Organisations that are found to breach the GDPR risk fines of up to 4% of their annual global turnover or €20 Million (whichever is greater) for the most serious of infringements.
In its most basic form, for individuals and small businesses, here are the main things you need to be aware of / implement:
Please note that this article is just intended to provide a brief, simplistic overview – it does not represent legal advice. The Information Commissioners Office has compiled a comprehensive guide to the GDPR which I recommend taking a look through in order to fully understand what will be required of you (including a 12 step checklist of steps to take now).
WordPress.com blogs are protected by the Akismet comment spam filter. Akismet is pretty good at catching spam, but it is always still learning.
You may receive spam comments, spam likes, or even spam likes on comments. There are steps you can take to resolve this. It’s worth noting that if you get a sudden spike of ‘spam’ comments or likes from a particular site or type of site, you may find others experiencing the same problem by checking out the WordPress.com forums. In this case, listing the usernames of the spammers can help staff to look into these accounts for suspicious activity.