Archives for December 2018

Make WordPress admin panel use HTTP

December 13, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Quick but super useful tip for WordPress development: when you’re coding your website locally on your desktop or laptop, this wp-config.php option will help you accept HTTP logins to WordPress admin panel:

define( 'FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', false );

Took me whole 5 minutes to figure out why local website worked fine but admin panel was not connecting.

Now it looks much better:

Screen Shot 2018-12-13 at 18.51.29.png

pS: if you’re using an old WordPress installation or just kept auto-updating it in the last few years without a full reinstall, the option name could be slightly different for you:

define( 'FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', false );
Filed Under: blog, wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

aHrefs SEO toolbar

December 12, 2018 by Leave a Comment

I’m testing the freshly released Firefox 64 and just realised that this means I can finally download and test the SEO toolbar from my search engine optimisation tool of choice: aHrefs.com

2018-12-12_10-34-38.png

The toolbar is pretty neat and does exactly what I expect it to:

  • shows backlinks to current page and root domain
  • shows number of referring domains (RD)
  • shows estimates of monthly search traffic (seems lower number than what I’m actually getting in my website stats)
  • highlights the number of keywords (KW) that the page is ranking for

Overall, pretty cool and a nice extension to the already awesome aHrefs toolkit. Keywords is a particularly useful thing – when clicked it opens an aHrefs dashboard page where I can select and bookmark certain keywords for later targeting.

In addition to the toolbar, this add-on seems to be updating Google SERPs with similar information – so when I’m researching a technical topic for my Unix Tutorial blog it should help to assess quality of backlinks much quicker:

2018-12-12_10-40-07.png

Filed Under: firefox, SEO Tagged With: , ,

True 2FA for Namecheap!

December 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Finally! 

Good thing Namecheap are flagging new features in their dashboard now and then, because I’m not subscribed to their blog and would have missed the big news: as of a week or two ago, it is finally possible to use a proper two-factor (2FA) mechanism like Authy for accessing Namecheap account.

It’s not that using SMS for 2FA is not secure. It’s also that it’s quite a pain: I work on laptop most of the time and don’t necessarily have my smartphone nearby. I’m a MacBook user and Apple have steadily improved handover functionality in the past few years: I can accept phone calls on my laptop if it’s on the same WiFi network with my iPhone. I don’t need to have the iPhone right next to me to answer an unexpected call.

Haven’t been a frequent user of Namecheap dashboard – but every time I wanted to visit it, I had to first find my iPhone. Now it’s a thing of the past – just configured and tested Authy for Namecheap TOTP 2FA and it works as expected.

 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , , ,