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Transcript of Episode 500 WP Plugins A to Z

All Googly Eyed It's Episode 500 - We have plugins for Bitcoin, Animated Menu, Getting Sticky, Media Organization, Crypto Conversion, Multi Currency ....., and ClassicPress Options. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #500 here.


All Googly Eyed It’s Episode 500 – We have plugins for Bitcoin, Animated Menu, Getting Sticky, Media Organization, Crypto Conversion, Multi Currency ….., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #500

 

John:                All right. First off, ClassicPress options. What do we have for you? Well, I don’t really have a lot in ClassicPress options this week. Nobody was kind enough to send me a review. So just the usual stuff for it is the ClassicPress resource links, and that ClassicPress does still exist, and it is still crawling its way along at its current pace, and it’ll probably sit at its current pace for probably a year or two until it gathers some momentum again. And I don’t have the ability to jump on the ClassicPress train right now.  When I jumped on it before, I had more ability. Right now, I don’t.  So anyway, I look forward to it coming back to life and doing something. In the meantime, I will still continue to keep it in as part of the show.  WordPress segment though, we do have some WordPress stuff for you. And this week here, you want to tell him what you’d plan for this, but, of course, I blew it completely out of the water.

Amber:            I had initially planned that we find the longest titles possible, and see who could find the best longest titles. But unfortunately, you couldn’t find anything longer than like three words though.

John:                Yeah, I know. I was having a hell of a time finding long title, the ones for some reason, I’m searching — what if I go search for short title ones, I’m guaranteed to find long. If I search for short or long ones, I’m guaranteed to find short. So I just surrendered and said to hell with it. But I looked at it and it turns out that Amber has done a great job. But the first one I’ve got for you, it’s not very long, but it’s more than two words, and it is the Animated Hamburger for Elementor. And this is just a cute little plugin.  Basically, this just adds a little bit of pizzazz to your mobile menu by making it a bit animated and providing some eye candy for the Hamburger menu. It’s not too bad overall, but I suspect it’s going to be just another design fad similar to the one I encountered the other day. This was with a client I was doing some work with, helping them out, and he’s taking over a website, and he’s doing some marketing for it, and it turns out the website was built using the fad of single-page — everything on one front page using a menu that you can’t adjust and all the content in one spot.  Now, it was a great fad. It turned out to be very piss poor for SEO. So at any rate, I expect this is just another design fad that’s going to flow through.  It is kind of cute, makes the Hamburger jiggle around, and pop a menu up for you when you use it in mobile devices, but I didn’t find it overly exciting — simple enough to use, but not overly exciting. Go check it out. If you’re interested The Animated Hamburger Helper — I want to call it the Hamburglar. For some reason, I look like I want to call it the Animated Hamburglar for Elementor. And I give it a three-dragon rating.

Amber:            Okay, so my first long title one is All-in-one Floating Contact Form, Call, Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs – My Sticky Elements.

John:                Wow! Say that all in one breathe one more time.

Amber:            Yeah, so this is actually a pretty okay one. If you need a Contact Form with style and many options to it, this is actually a pretty good one. Once you activate it, you go on to the option on the left, My Sticky Elements. It’s amazing how they can condense that huge long title into just My Sticky Elements — and then you get to set up. The form looks pretty good. And in the free version, they have a decent amount of options, including MailChimp and MailPoet for integrations. In the title itself, they claim to have over 50 social icons, though you only seem to be able to have use of them if you go pro. So that was a little mean of them. And it’s a little odd when you go into the dashboard of this plugin because they have this pop-up video. And once you press play, it just continues to play even when you press the X. That was weird. And there’s a little, like, interaction bubble where you can talk to someone online immediately. That was also kind of weird. And they have a section with just their plugins for you to get to, and then, of course, the upgrade part, but — it was interesting that they have an entire section added to their little menu there for you to look at all their plugins. I don’t think I’ve actually seen that before. Is that like a common practice I just haven’t noticed maybe?

John:                It might be. I don’t know.

Amber:            Okay, well, I just thought those were kind of weird things. I’ve never really seen those two things on a little dashboard menu before for a plugin. But in general, it’s a pretty good plugin. Go and check this crazy long name of a plugin out. I rate this at four dragons.

John:                Very nice. Okay, the next one I’ve got for you; nice, simple, and short, Accept Bitcoin. Everyone should accept Bitcoin. Well, it turns out I’m finally going to have to get around to reopening my Bitcoin wallet. Yes, I created one of those ways back in the day and made the mistake of not buying Bitcoin when it was three cents each when I first created my Bitcoin wallet. God, do I regret that now?

Amber:            Lots of people do.

John:                Yeah, well, I created the wallet. I meant to go buy some coin. It was actually I don’t think it was three cents. I think it was like 15 cents each. And because I did see it was useful, but then I started examining. I’m thinking, well, I can’t figure out how to get people to pay me, how to use it, and then, I set it aside, and I pretty much forgot about it. But I didn’t trip across my paperwork because back in those days — in fact, I still do it for some things when I need to protect something, I will print out the information and stick it in a file because you can’t destroy paper while you can destroy digital stuff easy — paper you have to burn it. So anyway, I found all the information on how to recover my Bitcoin wallet, so I won’t have to go create a new one. So I’ll create my Bitcoin wallet and get it opened up again. Well, this is a really simple straightforward plugin to use on your WooCommerce website that allows you to accept Bitcoin payments without having to use a third party. It just takes the money, the Bitcoins from wherever people want to send it and pay you and sends it directly to your Bitcoin wallet. Very easy and straightforward to set up. Very simple plugin, which, of course, you know, allows you to start accepting Bitcoin. And yet for the good and the bad that it is, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and they’re starting to be used. I don’t know when they’ll actually be used for payment purchases. Right now, people are just using them for a store of wealth, but you will get the occasional person pay you in Bitcoin or donate Bitcoin to you. So if you’re looking for a simple way to set up your WooCommerce site for Bitcoin, go check this one out. It is Accept Bitcoin made by the anonymous Bitcoin guys, and I give it a five dragon rating.

Amber:            All right. So this is my longest title that I was able to find, Multi-Currency for WooCommerce – The best free currency exchange plugin – Run smoothly on WooCommerce 4.x

John:                Wow! That sounds .

Amber:            Yeah. It’s actually quite an amazing plugin if you’re using WooCommerce. And you find yourself with the need to translate between various currencies. In the free version, there are a lot of different currencies, and you can choose more than one at a time for your customers to switch between. It shows up on the front page as a little sidebar, and the customer can choose which currency to exchange the prices to, and can also check out with that currency, which I thought was a pretty cool little addition. You can set up to auto-detect where the person is from so that you don’t even have to put up the option on the front-end for the customers, but I personally think that it’s a great idea to have the options up there on the front-end for the customers — because even my phone can’t always tell where I am, whether I’m in Canada or the US because we’re so close to the border. And I know, I’m often tripping over American sites is that Canadian ones even while I am searching specifically Canadian sites. So I think it’s a great idea. The premium version offers up a lot more options, though the free version can get you started pretty well. I can see a lot of usefulness in this plugin. Go and check it out. I rate it at four dragons.

John:                Very cool. It’ll be useful to have something to help your website convert currencies for people so they can figure out what they’re going to pay, and if they end up paying in their local currency. Thinking of the currencies while we’re still in that before I hit my next one, which is similar related.  A couple of comments we had here. It looks like — we’ve got a note from myself here. I’m an amazing typist, and when I’m not looking — as of January 1, 2021, the $1, the $2, the $25, the 500, and the 1,000 bills from every Bank of Canada series are no longer legal tender. So they have retired all those bills. And, of course, you made the comment. We used to have $25 bill. I’ve never seen the $25 bill myself. I didn’t even know it existed.

Amber:            Neither did I.

John:                That’s kind of cool. All right. So let’s roll along — continuing along the lines of Bitcoins, the last one I’ve got here for you today is called the Crypto Converter Widget. And this is a really simple one you can pop on your website. And once you install it, what it does, it allows you to determine what is the denomination of any cryptocurrency as far as US dollars go or in some other dollars. We’ll go with the US dollar one here. You could get the Bitcoin one, which was as of right now is $48,000, or Ethereum, which is the next most popular cryptocurrencies $1500. But they got them all, man. They even got Dogecoin. I don’t know why everyone keeps calling it Dogecoin. It’s either — it’s Dogecoin, actually D-O-G-E. They call it dogcoin for some reason, but it’s at five cents, which if you bought it like two weeks ago, before — or three weeks ago before it went insane, you could have bought it at 0.000007 cents.

Amber:            Oh, wow!

John:                You know, as what it would have been worth. So you could have bought a couple of bucks of them, and now you’d have 10 bucks in your hand. So, at any rate, that’s just a little fun of it, really cute little one. If you’re into Crypto’s and you want to have something to while the people like what’s your crypto worth, go check it here. Throw this plugin your site, slap this on your website somewhere, and people can figure out what cryptocurrencies are worth. And it’s a really cute plugin and I kind of like what it does. And because cryptocurrency is all the rage right now, I’m going to give this one a five-dragon rating.

Go check it out.

Amber:            So, I think I can explain why people call it Doge. Since about 2016 —

John:                Nobody could pronounce anything.

Amber:            — the word Doge, instead of dog or dodge, it seems to be interchangeable for doge and dog, but especially for dog, people say doge they’ve been doing it a lot, especially people who about my age and younger, it seems to be some kind of fad. I don’t really get it.

John:                Oh no, that’s them trying to change the world. Bitcoin diamonds, they’re worth a Dollar for. All right. Move it along.

Amber:            All right. So the last one I’ve got is Bulk edit image alt tag, caption & description – WordPress Media Library Helper by Codexin. That one is a bit of a tongue twister, I had to practice that. So I feel like you actually covered this one. I’m not sure — I wasn’t able to find it when I went searching, so —

John:                I don’t remember this.  I’ve probably covered something similar to it.

Amber:            So, I’m thinking, probably something similar, not this one exactly. What this plugin is designed to do is to edit a large number of your media’s alt text and meta at once, or to delete all at once. It’s really quite simple, you just activate it, go into your dashboard’s media settings under your library tab, open it up in the list mode, turn on Edit Mode. And once you’ve done that, you can work on everything either all at once or one by one in a straight line on down the list. Although be sure to turn off Edit Mode off once you’re done, so it doesn’t get all mucked up. I could see how this could save a lot of time. I’m pretty sure that just about everyone out there is guilty of putting on like 10 to 20 pictures before they find and decide on the right one and then moving on to the next bit of the site. And this could be pretty useful for cleaning all that up or organizing someone else’s mess that was left behind on the way.

John:                Oh, absolutely.

Amber:            And best of all, this is entirely free. I highly recommend. You know, you go and check this one out. I rate it at five dragons.

John:                Very cool. Okay. After this, we’ll get into some old-timey show stuffs. This show currently still brought to you by

 

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John:               Absolutely. High-quality web hosting that everybody should be investing in. And I got to go find something that I was looking for here because I want that link there opened up. And then, we got one piece of customer feedback before we jump into, and we’ll have to practice this for the next shows because I’m pretty sure we didn’t do it entirely at all during this show. This is some listener feedback. It goes, “Hey, Amber and john, I just wanted to make a small request in how you announce the plugin scores. You guys currently say, “This plugin, which I gave a four to, this plugin, which I gave a five to, it sounds weird when you say two after the numbered score because it sounds like you’re announcing another number.  I would like to suggest this plugin, which I rate it four dragons, or this plugin scored five dragons. That’s it. Keep up the great work, Jay.” All right, Jay, greatly appreciate it. I’ll endeavor to try and do that. I’ve read this a couple of times before putting it in there, and I was going to try and do that this show, but my brain still didn’t change. Okay, I got 500 episodes of habits to break here, so we’ll see what I can do. What about you, Amber?

Amber:            How did he suggest? Can you say it again?

John:                Well, instead of saying, I gave a five-dragon to instead of, you know, this plugin which I gave a five to, and that would be at the end, which —

Amber:            Oh I see, okay.

John:                And instead of saying that say the plugin, which I rated a four-dragon, so using be more precise in the words is what it boils down to. All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the history of WP plugins A to Z. This is a milestone episode, and every milestone episode I’ve done something like this. You can go back to Episode 100, 200, 300, and 400, and you’ll find some of this stuff. In fact, some of the stuff I’m going to play here, I stole from Episode 300 or 200 because I couldn’t figure out where I put the original stuff. Now, one of the things we got to put in here, it may get me in trouble or may not, but I’m going to play a bit of it. This was the original opening for WP plugins A to Z, and it lasted for about 100 episodes give or take.

Dragon has come to our village today.  We have asked him to leave, but he won’t go away. And now he’s met with our king and they’ve worked out a deal. No homes will be burned and no crops will he steal.

John:                There you go. I may or may not get —

Amber:            Actually a pretty neat opening.

John:                Yeah, well, I used that from about Episode 15 or 20 to somewhere around Episode 100. Yeah. And every once in a while, I pull it out of the fire and play it up. Here’s a little snippet from episode number one. “What we’re going to be doing, of course, as the title says WordPress plugins from A to Z is we’re going to be covering WordPress plugins. Now, with over 11,000 plugins available for WordPress now, it’s not that hard to find enough plugins to cover every single letter of the alphabet at least a few times over. So I reckon I’ll have episodes to go for week after week after week for quite some time to come.” Imagine that. There was only 11,000 plugins. The other thing is I just realized while I was listening through my headphones, I don’t know if anyone could hear it, did you hear the Musicbed underneath?

Amber:            Yes.

John:                Yeah, I was just like really-really? What the fuck was I thinking? Oh my god!

Amber:            At least you didn’t drown yourself out with the Musicbed.

John:                But I also had that nice NPR voice that sounded subtle and, you know, sexy close to the microphone. It’s kind of soft — and it’s like oh, wow. It’s like holy shit. But basically, I was in radio mode when I did that because I was still — 10 years ago, I was only 10 years out of my course on the radio. So I was still using the stuff I thought I’d learned from when I took the radio training, which was always kind of fun. All right. Here we go. We got another clip from Episode 21. This was with my first guest host, Laura. She was on the show. So we’re going to play a little bit of this one here. “One, two, three, four, five; five plugins total, that we’re going to cover and talk about. I’ll say a little bit about it. Laura can say a little bit about. And we’ll see if we come to heads on whether we agree on that. How’s that sound to you, Laura? Laura:        It sounds good. John:      All right. So, the first one on the list is Ad Manager. Do you research this one, Laura; tell us what you found on Ad Manager? Laura:          This one was really easy to set up. It just had a setting for it and just created over in the settings for the Ad Manager, and you just put the Ad code. I went to ClickBank and made a couple of just quick easy ads and put in there, and it would show it either at the top of the ad or at the bottom. You could put it at the top or the bottom or both, or — and then above and below the buddy press. And then, it had a floating one down at the bottom that would just pop up in the bottom of the screen and that one was kind of interesting I thought. John: Yeah, that –“

John:                There we go. Wow! And I’m listening to that, and I’ve gone holy crap, the noise. The noise — not the background noise, the TV in the background, the other stuff, the static — it’s like — oh, it’s horrendous. But it was great, and Laura used to do a really great job. She was a co-host with me for about 30 or 40 episodes, and it was really kind of cool. But this gives you an idea on where the show has come from when you listen to it. And even now when I listen to the sound, is not always 100% perfect, but I work very hard to give good high-quality sound now so that it doesn’t sound so bad in that. The background noise — like there’s still background noise here, but I finally learned what a noise gate is and how to use one.

Amber:            Hemdian said, yeah, but you need a mic shield because of the plosives.

 

John:                Of the plosives — explosives maybe. Oh, the pop filter, P-filter. Well, I’ve got a P-filter on my mic. That’s all. It’s for the pop open when you say, “P, P, P.” That’s a sudden burst of air. If you don’t have the little foamy thing on your microphone, it comes through as a pop. All right. Here’s the final one. I pulled this from Episode 42. This was my opening bit on episode 42. “We are now on Episode 42. And for you true geeks out there, everyone knows what 42 is. It’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Yes, this is the show that is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But what is the question?”

John:                There you go.

Amber:            That’s you?

John:                That was me.  Isn’t that horrid?

Amber:            You sound so different there.

John:                That’s because the microphone and the recording was really piss-poor. It wasn’t recording my true voice. I listened to —

Amber:            That sounded so different. I barely even recognized you — and you’re my dad.

John:                Yes, well, the problem of recording with, I was probably using like a headset microphone and straight to my recording software. I wasn’t running it through anything, and I didn’t have it through a mixer, and I didn’t have it through filters or anything else. I just did just straight to it. So that’s really all I was able to pull because I forgot to pull this stuff last night. I was pulling this morning, and I was getting sidetracked. I had other things to do, and there’s so much more. If you want more entertainment, just go check out some of the early shows. The entire back catalog of WP plugins is available over at johnoverall.com, wppluginsatoz.com didn’t get created until around Episode 170 or so. And so that’s only got episodes 170 forward on it, but for all 500 episodes, you can find them all over at johnoverall.com. They’re buried, they’re not up in front center anymore. They’re still on the site, though. No, we really don’t want that stuff going out there. And sooner or later, somebody is going to try and use that stuff against me. But I just wanted everyone to know, it’s like this has been quite a journey for me because I’ve been doing this show since October 2010, and I’m coming up on 11 years of doing this show, and I really have only taken off the occasional week here or there. I think there was one point where I skipped two or three weeks in a row, and that was due to conflicts of life, health, or other things were wrong at the time.  But for the most part, it’s only been a week here and there.

 

This show here was the second WordPress podcast to start; it was the second podcast to get listed in iTunes for WordPress. And every other shows that came after me, there were several that started within weeks of me creating mine. The first show was the WP Tavern podcast back when it was owned by — I can’t remember the guy’s name now — back when he owned a tavern — and he had a great idea — and he was more energetic than me. He was single and had the ability to go from word camp to word camp interviewing people. In fact, if people got scared — because he was such a good interviewer — because they got scared when he showed up if he was going to interview him because he was so good and poignant about his questions, and his early shows were just brilliant. They were a great inspiration, but he ran in troubles and he ended up shutting down his podcast for several years. And then, he started to back up, started a tavern backup, and then, he sold the tavern off to Matt Mullenweg because his life changed, and he needed to go in a different direction in his life. So that leaves me as the longest continuous running WordPress podcast. Because while it’s been focused on plugins, we’ve also brought in other things — lots of other things — and I’ve done interviews. In essence, I’ve done more than 500 episodes because I have 75 numbered interview shows, and I have numerous other interview shows that are not numbered. So I have over 600 plus episodes that are related to this show alone. So it’s been a really-really great long-term thing. And it’s been — the reason I started in beginning was to get my business off the ground. And this is part of the reason why I continue today is to keep it in so people know what my business is.

Amber:            It is a pretty awesome little podcast that you had going for so long. I really like it.

John:                Well, it’s time to get for you to make it your own. Try to get more stuff in it and wrested away from your old man. Okay, well, this is it. That’s all we got for the history and the trip down memory lane for WP plugins A to Zed. If you want to catch more of it, go listen to the older shows. Let’s bounce around here and go along to —

Enter for free, the contest from WP plugins A to Z. And what we got this week, we’re still on the simple giveaway — oh, not a simple giveaway, the unlimited — brain cloud reverse, give me a line — all right. our contests are powered by the simple giveaways plugin. These guys are kind enough to provide us with the premium plugin to run our contest. So thanks a lot to them. We have a contest that is being carried over for another week, and this is due to we haven’t gotten the next one written up yet. Hopefully, soon, I do like to thank Charlie for coming to aid of the show and getting these contests brought to life, and providing them week after week. And right now, this contest could use a few more entries into it. So I decided to extend another week out for folks to give them another chance to enter.  Get a few more entries into it. I’d be excited to see it. Remember, folks, if you haven’t already entered the contest — I know a few of you from last week have entered. Please enter it this week and sign up for the contest.  Yes, you’ll be signed up on our email list, but we don’t send out a bunch of junk. It’s only the weekly newsletter. We haven’t quite figured out how to do our marketing yet and flood you with emails until you unsubscribe or buy everything we’re selling, whichever comes first.

This week’s contest is the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker Pro plugin, really great plugin. It’s a comprehensive accessibility scanning tool that allows you to scan your post to see if it’s accessibility-compliant on your website, the ADA and WCAG 2.1 compliancy, really great plugin.  The license for this is an annual license. It’s valued at $149. And you’ll want to check it out. If you want to find out more about this plugin, go check out the interview I did with Amber Hind from Equalize Digital where we talk about what this plugin does and why it was created, and how it helps people out. So go check it out, and remember folks, these contests take time for us to track down the plugins, authors, get the plugin author to agree to send us a license to get the contest written up to get it promoted, all of that takes time and effort. You don’t have to send us money, but at least send us your support by subscribing to the contest. Even if you don’t need that plugin and you don’t see a need for that plugin, maybe you can give it away, maybe you can return it back to us; we can use it again. Up to you, but hey, show your support for the show by entering the contest. All right. The plugins we covered this episode were — I covered up the Animated Hamburger. I still want to call it the hamburglar, The Animated Hamburger for Elementor for which I rated it a three. The Accept Bitcoin for which I rated it a five. The Crypto Converter Widget for which I rated it a five. How’s that?

Amber:            Oh man you did awesome, but I’m just I’m dreading saying all of my titles in a row.

John:                It will be entertaining. I’ll go grab a cup of coffee and a quick nap, and you’ll be done by then.

Amber:            So, All-in-one Floating Contact Form, Call, Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs – My Sticky Element. I rated it at four.

John:                . It sounds so dirty.

Amber:            Multicurrency for WooCommerce. The best free currency exchange plugin run smoothly on WooCommerce 4.x. I rated it at four.  Bulk edit image alt tag, caption & description – WordPress Media Library Helper by Codexin. I rate it at five.

John:                Very good, very nice. All right. A couple of quick reminders — I said it. I actually caught myself saying them. It’s been so long since I’ve been in that bad habit. It took me a long time to break the um habit. All right. The next thing I got here for you is a reminder — and there is no meetup plan at the moment. I’ve still got — I think I should go get a refund on the room or figure out how I get the room. I’ve got six sessions of a room I prepaid for that was taken away from me last year about this time. So they still owe me money or owe space in the room, so I got to figure out what to do with that. Anyway, no meetups planned at the moment. And I do want to let everyone know that I am looking at a combined meetup for mid-summer some time that will combine the Tavern, No Agenda, and WP plugin. So I will announce it to all of them, so there will be a limit on the number of people, and it’s probably going to be held up at the Oasis. So keep that one in your brain. There is an event happening real soon, though, and it’s coming from the Hike Club for men, and you can go check that out. It’s a hike around the lake, and it’s on March 14th, Sunday, starts at 11 am. And it’s a hike around Thetis Lake, so it’s for those local here in the Victoria area. So anyone that like to join, make sure you register for it and let me know. I look forward to seeing anyone show up there. All right. That’s all we got there. It is time for us to head off into:

 

It’s question and answer time.

John:                With Amber. All right. This is question and answers with Amber. And remember, we’ll split this right in the middle, and half of it goes into YouTube. The other half is where we close out the show. So, off you go Amber, with your first question today.

Amber:            Before I get to the questions, I always start out with a note that if you have any questions, and you would like to have them asked on here, please send them in to me, and my email is amber@wppro.ca. I’ll read them out, give me credit if you want. I won’t give you credit if you don’t want, but I can read them out on here, and my dad can answer. So my first question is, security plugins work for your site, but what if one of your registered users has malware? Can this affect your site, or does them not being an administrator save your site from getting this?

John:                Okay, I’m not fully comprehending the question in that, you know, security plugins are protecting your site from malware getting in, and registered users have no administrative access to do anything or add anything to your website except in certain instances. Now, registered users may, if a plugin has a flaw in it and hackers use this, they register on your site, there’s a flaw. They use the flaw to gain themselves administrative access, and then, insert the malware into your site. So, a registered user would usually protect your site. The security plugin may or may not protect you from a plugin with a flaw that can be used to compromise a site. I did have it. It happened earlier this year. One of the membership plugins I use had an unknown flaw that was discovered that allowed someone to register for the site, then run a piece of code, a command somewhere that up their permission level to administrator and allow them to screw with your site. So it’s your kind of a double edge thing here is, security plugins are there to protect your site, allowing people to register on your site is a risk. It’s always going to be a risk anywhere, you know, as far as hackers are concerned because they’re always trying to find ways to bypass them, and they’re always looking for flaws.

Amber:            Well, when I thought of this question, I had been thinking about how — if you go on to the website and it has issues, you can catch the malware and whatnot from going on to that site and bring it onto your computer. And I was thinking about whether or not go the other way around?

John:                Oh, if their computer is infected, well, that can infect your site? Well, it shouldn’t. And even malware on a website infecting your computer is not directly easy. The program has to be downloaded and installed on your website. It used to be easier, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. It’s gotten a little harder to do.

Amber:            Okay, well, I remember screwing up computers when I was younger by going to not exactly safe sites (crosstalk) free music.

John:                It used to be easy to install malware onto people’s computers, and viruses on the computers. It’s gotten a little harder with the firewalls that are used, and the antivirus programs that are used on computers right now. It’s harder, it’s not impossible, but it’s harder, you know. And it will never be impossible because a determined hacker, like a determined thief, will always get through the lock. Because locks only slow them down, it doesn’t stop them. And antivirus software and anti-malware programs, they only slow them down, they don’t stop them. Anyone who’s truly determined will get through, whether they get through before they’re caught is another thing. That’s the big thing is usually when they’re forcing something like someone trying to bashing your door, you genuinely hear they’re coming, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re forcing their way in. It’s not as easy to slip in the back doors because there’s fewer and fewer backdoors left. So it’s one of those things that you can try to be worried about, but you just have sleepless nights trying to worry about something that may or may not be out of your control.

Amber:            But I was mostly curious as to whether or not it was possible. But keeping people from signing up to your site, say, like, you just had is a view-only site, does that make it a little safer then? Like, a little harder to —

John:                Well, that makes it safer, but is your site meant to be interactive? Such as, you know, WP plugins and the ability for users to upload artwork. That makes it interactive, whereas, previously, they had to upload the artwork with just a form. That was an absolute protection. Now they can upload the artwork to the site, though I have put limitations on what can be uploaded, and that will prevent a lot of things from happening.

Amber:            Really good to know, or have a better idea on how it doesn’t does not work. Okay, so my next question. How does one protect their pictures from being grabbed up other than watermarks off their site? I’ve come across sites that simply — they just don’t allow you to save the pictures on the site. You can’t right-click, and you can’t do anything.

John:                Yeah, they’re deluding themselves.

Amber:            I mean, there’s always a way to take a screenshot.

John:                No. You got to remember one of the interesting things that these people seem to forget — and most people don’t know this to begin with, which you probably don’t know because you’re asking the question. Every time you visit a website on your computer, your browser, your browser downloads all those images to the cache file on your computer. So you can actually go into the cache file for your browser and find those images. The other thing that can be done is you can go into virtually any site up there and show people real quickly, let’s help people do that. If you go up — if you use a browser such as Firefox where you can add the menu up at the top for the File, Edit, view history, bookmarks menu, the old-fashioned kind of menus, there’s a thing under the file that says, ‘save page as’. And when you click ‘save page as’, you can save that page to a folder on your computer, and it will download every asset that is needed for that page. That includes all the Java scripts, all the jQuery’s, all the images, all the CSS files, everything. It downloads all the assets that are needed to build that page. It download more right to a file — including if they’ve got — I use that when I subscribe to a few things where they put up this video and you can’t stop the video, you can’t fast forward, you can’t do anything because they give you a blade control.

So, usually, what happens is , I save page as, save it to a folder, and then I go into the folder, and I go find the video, and then I play the video online on one of my local things, so I can fast forward-moving to do what I want. So you get everything. They can’t stop it. They’re deluding themselves. There is no way to stop anyone from downloading those images. Watermarking is the only thing that will help protect your images to an extent, you know. And the thing is like a determined thief will just clean out your watermark from your image because it can be done. So you can’t — they just can’t stop it. It’s impossible to stop. I used to try and do this stuff because, for some reason, I was under the delusion that I could protect my stuff with copyright, and I realized no, I can’t really. So finally, I just went okay, screw it, take what you want, have your fill at it, you know. If it’s something really valuable, you don’t put it on the Internet. It’s like photographers selling their images. They put up a really piss-poor quality image for people to see, and if someone wants to high-quality one, they got to pay for it. And that’s the only way to do it. You just got to protect the high quality, and you put up piss-poor quality.

Amber:            Hemdian said there’s a plugin to stop grabbing pics by novices, then no right-click images plugin.

John:                Yes, that’s all it is. It’s just by novices. People who don’t know what can be done because anyone who learns what can be done fully realizes that everything on the Internet is available. I used to have a program. I don’t even know what I did with it, but I had a program that was a web page scraper, beautiful program. I used to use a lot. I’d send it after a website, and I could scrape the entire content of their website and put it into a file, and basically — I could clone their website by visiting their website. I could clone every single page — and I used to use it a lot to collect data. I’ve got hundreds of web pages from way back when which has since been wiped from the Internet, but I can’t remember what hard drive I stored on — as we were discussing earlier me and my data storage problems. So, yeah, there’s really nothing that can be done. You can’t protect it.

Amber:            All right. The last question; it looks like it got split into two.

John:                Oh, this is the — these are two questions or one question here? It looks like two.

Amber:            That’s because I want to add a little background first as to why have this question.

John:                Well, then, you ask the question, and then, we’ll close out the show and come back to it.

Amber:            All right. First little background; the other day, I learned that no Walmart was able to properly connect to Western Union — and that this had been an ongoing issue for a while now. And it seems to me like there are a few systems out there right now that can’t figure out how to shake hands properly. I’ve seen mentioned that this could be due to PHP transition, or is this just a regular sort of issue that large companies like Walmart and Western Union have more often than we little people know about?

John:                Okay well, I’m going to close out the show. We’ll come back, reiterate the question and talk a bit about it. So those of you out there, make sure you tune in to the YouTube channel for this great answer coming up, and I’m going to let my girl take us out of here and enjoy my shot.

 

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John can also be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.

Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.

 

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