Cookies Required in WordPress

How often have you as a WordPress User gotten this demand in any browser – Chrome, Firefox, Opera? Too often or hardly at all? My question is what causes the message. And does the “Get out of Jail ” link [taking you to a legitimate sign-on startup screen]  always appear when you encounter the screen. […]

Benchmarking Breakdance, Bricks Builder and Oxygen Builder

It is  interesting times in WordPress Frontend Development as UI vendors contend for developer loyalty by offering new Layout frameworks [Flexbox, CSS Grid, 3D Float, etc] , more templating features/flexibility,  novel plugin consolidations and better runtime performance. Yes,  developers and agencies, you have a lot on your  decision plates as WordPress UI vendors contend for […]

WordPress ThemeBuilders Under Stress

Our MasterWP.guru blog recently posted WordPress Under Duress, a report underlining multiple signs of pressure impacting WordPress. The WP Tavern Posting acknowledged several signs of stress. The article cited intensive competition from other CMS systems  such as SquaresSpace and Shopify, increased complexity throughout the rapidly changing WP Core and profound shortcomings in both the Gutenberg Editor […]

Elementor Flexbox: A MVP Achilles Heal?

Elementor has reached the pinnacle of WordPress Frontend tools  – a PageBuilder become ThemeBuilder that has 10million active user websites, has just released a Elementor Cloud Hosting Service [to mixed reviews and runtime performance concerns], and is undertaking a massive shift to Flexbox CSS Framework as the core of  its UI Interface. It is the […]

WordPress World of Change

Like the World in  general, change is taking place at an accelerated pace in the World of WordPress. And WordPress Developers can see it in the first downturn in WordPress market share in 10 years. And one of the biggest drivers of change in the WordPress World is the  rapid growth of its CMS market […]

Are Gutenberg Editor’s Speed Results A Big Lie??

Within the past year there have been  many reviewers  claiming Gutenbrg Editor delivers faster web pages than popular PageBuilders – see Metabox*, WordPress.com[ is blind to theWYSWYG gap in the Block Editor], Jack in the Net*, Jack Cao Tests*[fails to use normal caching and media optimizations]. In sum, there is a common factor of limited information […]

Hiding Nuisance Notices in WordPress, etc

Okay, Nuisance Notifications [aka Nags] are not exclusive to WordPress. You may also be plagued by unsolicited notices in the lower right-hand corner of your PC screen as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and just about every app you have bought now presume to have the right to popup unsolicited  PR notes at random moments […]

No PhotoPea in Advanced Image Editor

The Advanced File Manager plugin has two nagging probles. First, its Dark Mode theme titling disappears on hovering over a file. Second, Advanced File Manafger promises PhotoPea image editing But PhotoPea fails to show up. Trying to open the advanced edit, users right-mouse click on an image to open image processing options. The Open  and […]

WebP with WordPress

Controling your website’s image sizes has become a top priority among Web developers Here is the reason why: As of  2017 end , HTTPArchive.org reports that images comprised 54% of the total page download size. And since response  time is inversely related to page load, developers wanting to achieve 2 seconds or better response time […]

Banned WordPress Plugins

At a recent WP Meetup about Database plugins I was faulted for not citing which of the plugins being reviewed had been banned by WordPress or other vendors. Yes, I am aware of banned plugins. But I had never deliberately searched for them. However, a Securi note that 78% of hacked websites used WordPress confirmed that […]

What is the True Cost of Shared Hosting?

CMS systems  for small and medium scale sites using  WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others mostly use shared hosting. That is where your website shares a CPU & Supporting Software,  memory, diskspace and Internet bandwidth with 2-4 other websites on the same machine in which all  of these  assets are “time-shared”. This has been and currently […]

Thinking Styles and UI Widgets

There has been a revolution in thinking over the past 50 years. How rationalizations is colored. The dual nature of Decision making. And better processes for thinking in general. The following set of presentationa and talks highlight some of these thinking insights. But there is also a revolution in creating smart UI interfaces in WordPress. […]

GDPR Key Requirements and Rules

There are two very useful studies that examine the nature of GDPR. The first is the Enterprise approach of IBM which has a five point plan that is matched to the GDPR regulations on both data protection as well as data privacy. There is a strong opening Assessment/Audit of the current usage of personal data throughout an organization’s web […]

Agile, Scrum and WordPress

Agile Methods using the Scrum Process seem built for WordPress Development Agile methods have a manifesto and development methodology which is gaining traction not just in software development but broader project planning. Agile methods are geared to handling the rapid change required in modern project planning but also to accomodate fast changing tools and methods […]

Whose Muckier – Windows 8 RT, Apple iOS, Google Android?

Google Plus is a great place for discussing technology trends. Here is an example: ZDNet’s Steven Vaughn-Nichols picks up a Wayne Rash post who in turn is commenting on how eMail support may be one of the reasons behind Windows 8 Surface RT [the ARM version of Windows hardware ] flagging sales and relatively high return   […]

The Nature of Open

This Ted talk by Don Tapscott on the fundamental attributes of Openness is illuminating: [iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/jfqwHT3u1-8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen] Don waxes highly hopeful, but Spain and much of Southern Europe and the MidEast have 20% or much greater unemployment. The crux of the problem is also covered in the lecture. Note how much his GoldCorp […]

The Web as Revolutionary

When Time magazine was rumored to make the Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year, Ye 5th’s Editor thought that another Media “Academy Award” was a little too much. But with the revolt in Tunisia and the outbreak of dissent and protests in Egypt, both largely organized and propelled by social media including Facebook […]

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on Censorship

The Guardian and Financial Times in England have been covering the China vs Google story much more closely than US media. So when the Guardian published a story about Bill Gates reactions to the conflict , curious, I took a look: After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft […]

Bing’s Advantage

The following NYTimes story shows the impact that Microsoft’s newly re-relaunched search engine, Bing, is having in the search engine wars. Instead of being a hapless me-too, Bing brings real innovation and a competitive advantage in search results display to BING over Google. But the writing was on the wall – Google’s frugal search result […]

“Most IT pros not planning on Windows 7 rollout”

“Most IT pros not planning on Windows 7 rollout” is the headline of an article at the IT scoop site, theRegister. The story is based on a survey done of 1100 business users by Scriptlogix. This survey goes counter to what Microsoft has been saying about users reactions to Windows 7. A number of factors […]

Science Buffs Rejoice

This party has been saying for a long time that Google and Wikipedia as models for how inteligent search should be done … well they leave a lot to be desired. Enter Wolfram Alpha. Yes, the makers of Mathematica have created a new search engine that is “computationaly smart”. Or as Wolfram phrases it – […]

Pay for Information?

The old adage “you get what you pay for” is getting a real workout as two philosophical viewpoints on the Internet vie for dominance in the Web  marketplace. First, there is the journalistic community which is arguing it cannot rely on the current payment  model which cnow uses primarily advertising and a few special services […]

IBM Stream Computing

Just two weeks ago, our report on Semi-Structured data processing had a major gap – no real IBM presence. True enough, the IBM/Cognos, IBM FileNet and other IBM BI offerings certainly dealt with some aspects of semi-structured data ,particularly FileNet’s positions in Content Management and Record Archiving. But the integration across platforms through semi-structured data […]

Health IT: Government Produces Positive Change?

There is an article in today’s NYTimes about the profound changes that are occurring in the Health Record business now that the Obama government has added incentives of $40,000 per physician for adopting electronic health records. Players like  Google, IBM, and Microsoft have tossed their Health Record technologies into the ring. But the most important factor is […]

Return to Pay Per Web View

Time magazine confronts the problem which is plaguing the publishing industry and now spreading to all media – the model for charging for your work breaks down in the face of computing and particularly the Web’s ability to copy just about any work with absolute fidelity at no cost. The current model for getting paid  […]

BI Road Blocks ?

BI has had mixed success out in the IT marketplace and Information Week is documenting that. Just 19% of business technology professionals report succes in using BI to support business performance. As a BI supporter I was frankly aghast at the lowness of this number. But the survey cited a number of barriers: 1 – […]

Kindle 2: The Book That Can Run Out of Power

Jeff Bezos is delivering the second version of his allegedly very popular Kindle (I suspect Amazon  of Positive Impression Management equal to or better than Redmond in its hay daze, circa 1995). And I keep asking myself why I would want to buy a grayscale-only book (or even a book store) which runs only in […]

Linux, the Desktop Whimp?

If you read comics books from the late 1930s thru to the mid 1960s (think Archie, Batman, Captain America, Fantastic Four, Superman, Wonder Woman … oops, am I revealing too much ?), you undoubtedly recall the Charles Atlas Body Building comic book ads. The ads were of various size (see the full length one above […]

Tamil Tiger Toronto Tale of the Web

There is a demonstration by supporters of the Tamil Tigers of NorthEast Sri Lanka at the Toronto midtown corner of Bloor and Yonge Streets. It is notable because this is a continuing series of ever more heated protests so the police and TV media are out to “cover” the protest each in its own ways. […]

Flash Turnover

I have been maintaining that the rate of change in the computing industry in both hardware and software technology is just increasing slowly, surely and stressfully. I would like to use Flash from Adobe by way of Macromedia as an example. But just take a look at Visual Studio, Oracle DBMS or Intuit QuickBook versions. […]

Web Goes the Way of SQL

On theOpenSourcery.com, I have been doing a revamped series of reviews and tutorials on CSS. One of the facts that is emerging is that W3C standards like CSS, DOM, and DHTML JavaScript are being abused, ignored or delibrately bypassed and thwarted by browser vendors despite having close to ten years to deliver on a very […]

7 Dimensions of Information

Information is multi-dimensional and dynamic which in turn makes IT difficult to manage well over time. Here are some of the dimensions of information: 1)It is model based. This means information is not one isolated fact but rather several datum points that are the attributes/properties of a model. That model helps to describe and predict […]