Where did you grow up: Stop Favorite Color: giving First pet’s name: people Street you grew up on: your Favorite name for a child: personal Favorite sports team: information High school mascot: to Favorite food: guess What was your first car: your Mother’s maiden name: passwords First job: and Favorite band: security Elementary school name: […]
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Stop Giving People Your Personal Information to Guess Your Passwords & Security Questions
Dark Mode Theme Switcher, Redux
After publishing our tutorial on implementing dark mode at Mercury Photo Bureau, we saw an opportunity to improve the user experience by reducing dependencies and adding animation. We think the new solution is more semantic, too, so that’s a win. The new code removes the Fontawesome dependency and replaces the <button> element with a checkbox […]
Implementing Dark Mode at Mercury Photo Bureau
I recently read Dave Rupert’s article “Sass vars, CSS vars, and semantic theme vars”, in which the author makes that case that just because we have variables in CSS now doesn’t mean SASS variables are dead. In the article, Rupert describes how he used both types of variables to implement dark mode on a side project.
Side Notes and Margin Notes in Tufte CSS: a WordPress Shortcode
Our sister site Mercury Photo Bureau uses side notes and margin notes in the style of Edward Tufte. The notes are styled using a bespoke adaptation of Tufte CSS. Because the code to display the notes accessibly is quite complicated, we use a shortcode to simplify authoring. You’ll need to apply custom styles to the output.
Replacing WordPress Cron with PHP Cron on OpenLiteSpeed Server
We recently moved our websites from a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) server to individual OpenLiteSpeed servers. Hosting costs were one consideration, but it was mainly the performance boost that sold us on OpenLiteSpeed. One of the costs of moving is learning how to configure an unfamiliar server architecture. But then, learning new stuff can be beneficial as […]
New Plugins: WP FOFT Loader & Five-Star Ratings Shortcode
Messenger Web Design is pleased to announce two new WordPress plugins: WP FOFT Loader & Five-Star Ratings Shortcode. WP FOFT Loader implements and automates Zach Leatherman’s “Critical FOFT with preload, with a polyfill fallback emulating font-display: optional” to optimize and speed up web font loading and improve UX by minimizing Flash of Invisible Text, Flash […]
WordPress: How to Add Search Speech Recognition
Overview I’ve had voice search capability on my photography website for several years. When I decided to revamp the website with a new WordPress theme, I discovered that the HTML5 Web Speech API had changed and my old code no longer worked. A little research showed me the correct way to get speech recognition working […]
Foiling Cryptomining Supply Chain Attack on Your WordPress Site
Security researcher Scott Helme recently discovered a new type of attack that could affect most of the world’s websites. The cryptomining supply chain attack affected the UK Information Commissioner’s office, UK National Health Service websites, an Australian provincial government website, and many others. Since the exploit was discovered there has been a steep rise in […]