If you’re just starting out as a developer, and you’re learning PHP through WordPress, you might be intimidated by the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP), but the reality is you’ve probably already seen it in use. For example, have you ever retrieved the ID of a current post like this: global $post; $id = $post->ID; That’s object-oriented programing. You might not know the terminology, but what you’ve done in the first line is get the current post as an object of the standard class. In the second line you get the value of that class’s property ID. Another example of […]
Boost Sales and Customer Service by Integrating Live Chat
One of the key aspects of maximizing sales from you website is to reduce as many buyer objections as possible. Your sales copy is a great place to start, allowing you to pre-empt and dismiss any major objections. Does your product even work? Of course it does, and here are the graphs to prove it. How do I know the results are real? Well, here are ten testimonials from real users. What if it doesn’t work for me? We offer a no-questions-asked money back guarantee. You get the idea — a pre-emptive answer for everything. Well, not everything, of course: […]
Being User Centric in Web Design
Web design means much more than aesthetic web pages and flamboyant features. In fact, good web design means that you focus on the requirements and needs of the end user. Thus, web design should, always, be done with user experience in mind. User-centric web design strives to achieve two objectives: It should make the website in question more usable. It should make the website in question more useful. There are many ways in which we can make our websites more useful and usable: being mobile-friendly, focusing on good navigation and typography, having a proper color scheme and layout, offering accessibility tweaks, […]
The Ethics of Ad Platforms
A variety of advertising platforms such as Google AdWords and AdSense play a key role in bringing fresh traffic to WordPress sites as well as in monetizing many types of blogs. As these platforms grow in complexity so do various ways of gaming them in ways that adversely affect consumers, publishers, and advertisers. There are lots of ways of gaming the system, which, though legal, still raises ethical issues. AdWords and advertising networks play different roles in helping to drive traffic and monetize blogs. Google AdWords allows a Website owner to post ads that are listed alongside relevant search results, and represents the […]
Small Security Vulnerability in Disqus WordPress Plugin
As some of you may have heard, a number of CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) vulnerabilities were discovered in the Disqus plugin for WordPress by Nik Cubrilovic not too long ago. The biggest of these issues was unfiltered, potentially harmful data being passed straight to the database without proper sanitization. Though this was being filtered on output, Disqus’s debug mode could potentially be used to extract this raw data and inject harmful code. There were also some issues with nonce checks on various POST requests and a vulnerability in the plugin’s upgrade script. Luckily, the Disqus team moved very quickly to […]

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