Internet Explorer’s version 11 was released more than seven years ago. At present it is used by fewer than 1% of all internet users and that figure continues to decline.  Indeed many, if not most popular websites no longer support Internet Explorer and this incudes Microsoft Teams.  Microsoft’s own apps and services will cease support of Internet Explorer later this year.

If you are one of the very few still using Internet Explorer, the time has arrived for you to move to another browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge or (our current favourite) Opera.

We’d like to say “Hoorah” but this miserable episode does not deserve even a small pat on the back.  Nevertheless FINALLY – after some eight (YES EIGHT) weeks, Book A Bach’s technical support people have managed to fix the fault in their website which caused our client’s booking synchronisation problem. Not much more to say really – certainly no praise is due.

It is now more than seven weeks that our client has been patiently waiting for Book A Bach’s solution-challenged technical support department to fix their bookings synchronisation problem.  How bad can it get? Not much worse than this!

Still our client waits for Book A Bach to resolve a technical issue reported to them over six weeks ago.  (See previous post).  Either they are totally uncaring or out of their depth.  How can they live with themselves?

We now have been waiting more than four weeks for NZ holiday home listing website BookABach.co.nz to fix a fault on their website which is preventing the synchronisation of bookings made on our client’s website with the availability shown on Book A Bach’s website. Book a Bach have confirmed that they do have a problem but unfortunately, after two failed attempts, they still have not fixed it and have given it low priority! In the meantime, we are unable to complete our client’s bookings page, which affects their business and also impacts upon our reputation – but sadly Book A Bach appear not to give a damn about this. By a wide margin, their’s has to be the worst support and customer care that we ever have encountered.

Presently there is an ongoing global attack on WordPress installations to crack admin accounts and inject malicious scripts. Once an admin account has been compromised malicious scripts are being uploaded into the directories.

This attack is taking place at a global level and since the attack is wide-ranging and most of the IP’s used are spoofed, it is difficult to block all malicious data.

To strengthen the security of your website(s) you should (if not already done):

• Update and upgrade your WordPress installation and all installed plugins etc. to the latest version.
• Consider installing a security plugin such as the Better WP Security plugin which you can find here.
• Ensure that your admin password is secure and contains a mix of upper and lower case letters, digits and symbols. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER use recognizable words, names, dates etc as passwords.
• Also make your admin password longer than the commonly-used eight characters.
• Use a user name other than the standard “Admin’.

The more technically minded and able could also consider the following:

• Remove README and license files which may expose version information.
• Move the wp-config.php file up one directory level and change its permission to 400.
• Restrict access to wp-admin only to specific IPs.
• Apply strong additional password protection to /admin directories.

Other ways of hardening a WordPress installation can be found at http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

Some other useful plugins are wp-security-scan, wordpress-firewall, ms-user-management, wp-maintenance-mode, ultimate-security-scanner, wordfence.

Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. Do you sometimes need to clear out dead, old, unused etc files? We have discovered this little gem ‘TreeSize Free‘ and are happy to spread the word about it.

TreeSize Free tells you where precious disk space has gone to. It can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The Explorer context menu is supported within TreeSize, as well as the usual drag & drop operations.

If you have valuable intellectual property (basically a creation of the mind) you must be prepared to communicate your legal rights and defend them via legal action if necessary. You should establish your ownership and rights to such intangible assets, which could include musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries, inventions, designs, symbols, logos etc. Methods of protection include copyrights, trademarks, patents etc. Your lawyer will guide you and advise which is best suited to your needs.

The importance of copyright is demonstrated by a recent discovery by our client Tim Ambler, who learned via a third party that one of his compositions had been recorded in Italian and was being freely broadcast on Italian State Radio. We understand that this was not a deliberate infringement of Tim’s copyright in that the singer genuinely believed Tim to have died and his rights to have expired. Nevertheless, Tim was able to establish his copyright and the matter was amicably settled. Read the full story here.

If you enjoy writing and want to tell the world about yourself or your website, why not start your own blog – an online record of your news, views, events and photographs. We recommend WordPress for your blog and if you need assistance, we can help you to swiftly set up your new blog site.

This can be monetized if you wish allowing you to generate additional income through (for example) advertising or affiliate marketing

We are often asked how the name ‘blog’ came into being. Well, it’s simply an abbreviation of web log.