Chris Burgess

Open Source, Standards and Platform Enthusiast - Melbourne, Australia

Shopify at the Melbourne SEO Meetup

Last night, as part of the Melbourne SEO Meetup – we ran a quick “site clinic”, where a few of us take a look at someones site and offer some constructive criticism on how they can improve their marketing results.

When we started crawling the site that was put forward to us, I noticed it was an ecommerce site running on the Shopify platform. Luckily one of regular members – Peter Macinkovic – has spent a lot of time working with Shopify, so we took the opportunity to have him take the floor and offer some of his general Shopify SEO tips.

Shopify at the Melbourne SEO Meetup

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Is My WordPress Site Hacked? – Melbourne WordPress Developer Meetup

With information security being one of my passions, it was great fun to present at the Melbourne WordPress Developers Meetup this week. The topic I chose was “Is My WordPress Site Hacked? Identifying a Compromised WordPress Website“.

There’s already a good pool of information on hardening WordPress and preventing attacks, as well as post-hack checklists, but I wanted to do something different. So, I thought I’d tackle the topic of how you can reliably detect security incidents before things turn bad. It covered a few tips on why you shouldn’t be complacent when it comes to security, and how you can spot early warning signs.

The saying is “if you can’t prevent, you must detect“. We already know there’s no such thing as absolute security, so detection is an essential function for the operation of any mission critical website.

Melbourne WordPress Developer Meetup

With WordPress being the platform of choice for a growing number of web development projects, it’s now being used for many more types of websites than what most people may think. Long gone are the days of WordPress being only used for blogs and CMS-centric websites.

WordPress is now the core component for a variety of types of website, including ecommerce, digital distribution, membership, learning management, community (forums using bbPress and social glue using BuddyPress) and much more. From form processors capturing all sorts of data, using all types of custom workflows, to Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) where developers are building things we’ve never imagined, you can appreciate why WordPress security is such an important topic.

And don’t forget the WP API, this opens up WordPress to an even bigger audience of developers and applications.

 

I wanted to give a shout out to the team at Automattic and their VIP partners, Tony Perez, Daniel Cid and the rest of the Sucuri team, Jeff Star from Perishable Press, and Mark Abela from WP White Security. They’re some of the people I’ve long followed and keep learning from. You can find a lot of them on WPSecurityBloggers.com.

Big Digital Adelaide 2016 Live Blog

The Big Digital Adelaide conference kicked off this week – from June 7-8, 2016 at The Science Exchange. Below you’ll find a few of my highlights and resources.

If you want to follow along on Twitter, the hashtag is: #BigDigitalADL

You can check the official Big Digital Adelaide conference website and conference schedule.

Big Digital Adelaide

Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) interviewing Gary Illyes (@methode) at Big Digital Adelaide

 

 

Day 1, Opening Keynote – Rock Your Super Heroes: Melanie Spring – Sisarina

Melanie Spring opened Big Digital by jumping into how to think differently and build motivated teams. Melanie’s passion was contagious! She gave the audience plenty of homework, critical stuff if you work in a team – you’ll know how important it is to be happy! 🙂

If was a brilliantly inspiring talk, check out more about Melanie Spring from Sisarina:

http://sisarina.com/

Get the Game & Rock Your Team:

http://sisarina.com/humans

Melanie’s Podcast: Adventures in Branding:

http://sisarina.com/adventures-in-branding-podcast

The Internet is People! Optimising for User Experience: Woj Kwasi – Kwasi Studios

I’ve been following Woj for a very long time, his session covered how important it is to focus on the user.

He talked about users, context and covered some great real world examples, as well as a bunch of great tools:

  • FullStory
  • Hotjar
  • Lucky Orange
  • CrazyEgg
  • Mouseflow
  • Inspectlet

And more..

This talk should be mandatory material for all web developers and marketer. Awesome stuff!

How To Use Google AdWords Without Throwing Your Dollars Down The Drain – Karen Dauncey

Understanding the Art of Link Earning – Dan Petrovic

Dan talked about the value of tapping into current news.

  • Rising Topics
  • Controversy
  • Research, surveys, data etc.

He explained why earning journalist attention is hard (and why it should be hard). Dan gave an example of how gets data using Google Consumer Surveys, to collect your own data to compile it using the best representation.

Remarketing, it’s more than just Cart Abandonment – Amy Who?

Social Media Pay to Play – Simone Douglas

Plan To Create Content That Matters – Joshua White

Joshua talked about the importance of being strategic when it comes to content.

A few of the key takeaways were:

  • Know your message
  • Know your objectives
  • Know your audience

Local Search in the Land of #Oz – Casey Meraz

Paying for SEO: A Blueprint for Determining Good Review Sites & Paid Lists – Garrett Mehrguth

Winning Paid Traffic With WordPress – Peter Mead

Redirection – WordPress plugin for managing redirects:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Insert Headers and Footers – Help using tracking code, or adding code into headers and footers:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/insert-headers-and-footers/

Google Tag Manager – Help implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM) in WordPress:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/duracelltomi-google-tag-manager/

Google Tag Manager Chrome Extension:

https://support.google.com/tagassistant#topic=6000196

Talk to the Spider – Dawn Anderson

Mobile Visibility to the Max! 2016 Edition – Aleyda Solis

Why The Hell Should We Care About CRO? – Bryant Garvin

https://twitter.com/zviko_masiiwa/status/740046823058857984

Tackling Attribution Across Paid Media – John McGowan

Why Analytics Is Your Easy Win – John Clayton

Why Featured Snippets Are Good – Jennifer Slegg

Investing In Digital ‘Real-Estate’ – How You Can Buy Websites And Get Instant Traffic, Rankings And Cash-Flow – Matt & Liz Raad

Matt and Liz Raad talked about how to think about digital or virtual real estate. They presented some of their own purchases of established sites and gave examples of some reported sales. With a background in buying and selling brick and mortar businesses, they applied the same methods to digital assets.

Keynote – I’m Gary Illyes, Ask Me Anything

 

 

Day 2, Keynote – Real Australian Business And The Ideas Boom – Fred Schebesta

https://twitter.com/silbus/status/740326421650755584

Forget the Fairy Dust – Joel Klettke

https://twitter.com/ThemAdvertising/status/740335574276440066

A Not-for-Profit Perspective on Digital First Thinking – Tania Cavaiuolo

Everything You Need to Know about Panda – Jennifer Slegg

20 Content Marketing Tactics To Make Your Business Blog Go BOOM! – James Norquay

Site Symbiosis – Leveraging Content Development, SEO and Social Media – Danica Barnack & Kimberly Brown

Penguin Taming for Real Time Results – Sha Menz

Million Dollar Style On a Hundred Dollar Budget – Mike Esordi

Personalised Search and Content Delivery Just Got Real – Stelios Moudakis

That’s All They Wrote – Gary Illyes

Blog Better, Blog Less – Kate Toon

https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

http://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

http://tweakyourbiz.com/tools/title-generator/

Head Slapping WordPress Security – Chris Burgess

I’ll be putting together a separate post on this one with more resources, based on the feedback from those that came along – stay tuned! My slide deck is below, if you have any questions, let me know! 🙂

Harnessing The Power Of Archetypes For Your Marketing – Gianluca Fiorelli

Visualisation: A Data Journey – Sam Daynes

Cheers To Podcasting! – Luke Robertson & Dave Ellis

App Indexing Lowdown – Mariya Moeva

  1. Traffic to site & app is not a zero-sum game
  2. For content apps, you can you drastically increase re-engagement and discovery
  3. Build a unified mobile strategy

30% of online shopping purchases happen on mobile

For more info on App Indexing: g.co/appindexing

  • High app engagement and quality, it can lead to ranking boost
  • More than 10,000 apps are using App Indexing
  • There are 200B deep links
  • 40% of searches on Android returns at least 1 deep link

Closing Keynote – It’s Paid Search Jim, But Not As We Know It – Michael Verghios

Michael covered what’s around the corner for search. He talked about IoT, with an interesting stat of an estimated 21B IoT endpoints available by 2020.

Michael also talked about voice search, plus the future of digital helpers — the following stat drove this home: currently, 25% of search on mobile is voice.

 

 

 

This post is a work-in-progress. If you have any changes or corrections, just ping me @chrisburgess. Massive thanks to everyone who tweeted, the event organisers — and most importantly the speakers!

Search Marketing Summit Sydney 2016 Live Blog

The Search Marketing Summit (SMS) is currently being held in Sydney, Australia from 1st June – 2nd June 2016. Advanced Workshops were also held on 30th May, 31st May 2016 and the 3rd June 2016.

Aleyda Solís presenting at the Search Marketing Summit

Aleyda Solís presenting at the Search Marketing Summit

 

Search Marketing Summit is run by Barry Smyth who has been the person behind the Australian SMX events for a decade. This leading Australian conference brings together online marketing professionals from all around Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific to keep up to date with the latest news and best practices in the search engine marketing industry.

Thanks to Barry and the crew at No Drama Media for organising such a great event with a fantastic line up of expert speakers from both around the world and locally.

This year I’ll be doing a live blog of the event, so please bear with me as I’ll be updating this post as I go. I can only attend one track, but I’ll try my best to cover both of them. If you have any changes, please ping me on @chrisburgess. A huge thanks to Nishanth Stephen and Jennifer Slegg for their super useful tweets 🙂

You can also follow the official updates:

There are a few hashtags being used if you’d like to follow along:

Search Marketing Summit (#SMS2106) Live Blog – Day 1

 

Opening Keynote: That’s Irrational! Why Convincing To The Logical Brain Won’t Get Results

Tim Ash, President & CEO, SiteTuners

Having followed Tim and SiteTuners online, and also having read his book on Landing Page Optimization, it was a pleasure to meet and attend his workshop this week (which will be the topic of another post!).

Tim kicked off the SMS conference with his opening keynote which focussed on neuromarketing and how to market to the primitive brain.

He encourages us to think about consumers having 3 brains: Reason, Feel and React.

Tim moved on to talk about how the primitive brain really only cares about the four F’s: Fight, Flight, Feeding and Fornication.

Keeping it simple is a mantra that I try to remind myself on constantly, and it was great that Tim emphasised this by discussing how choice kills and that you need to reduce complexity by providing a series of simple selections.

Tim also urged the audience to make use of visuals to help with improving your call to actions.

What You Need To Know About Enterprise Link Building

Patrick Kajirian, SEO Manager, ESPN.com

Patrick from Disney Interactive, managing ESPN launched the SEO track talking about enterprise link building, and explaining what makes enterprise sites different. There’s usually a lot more to work with – which brings opportunities for SEO, as well as a unique set of the challenges.

Searching For Shoppers: How To Succeed With Feed-Based Product Campaigns

Frederick Vallaeys, CEO, Optmyzr

TBA

Link Building, Penguin, Digital Assets, Author’s, Tools, and More

Sha Menz, Lead Software Architect, rmoov.com

Sha is very active in the search space and she always does fantastic presentations which have some great actionable insights.

In this session, she focussed on Google Penguin Updates, Manual Penalties, tips on Disavow and ways to optimise your digital assets.

Taking Retargeting To The Next Level

Dennis Yu, CTO, Blitz Metrics

TBA

Content, Keyword Research & The Art Of Audience Engagement

Motoko Hunt, Japanese Search Expert, AJPR

In this session, Motoko discussed how to perform effective keyword research, thinking about the users journey and their needs to get better engagement and boost search results.

How Dynamic Ads Can Supercharge Your SEM Campaigns

Rachel Malone-Olson, Social Account Manager, aimClear®

TBA

How to Achieve Mind-Blowing Content Marketing ROI

Jeremy Cabral, Head of Publishing & Editorial, Finder.com

Getting Mobile Friendly To Survive The Next Mobilegeddon

Gary Illyes, Trends Analyst, Google

TBA

Writing the “Right” Content: Highly Searchable, Keyword-Driven and Relevant Content

Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant, ORAINTI

Google Now, Microsoft Cortana & The Predictive Search World

Cindy Krum, CEO and Founder, MobileMoxie

TBA

Building Links With Content Syndication

Greg Boser, President, Foundation Digital

Greg started off by stating a fact that should hit home to anyone that works on content and digital production: “The web is littered with great content that nobody has ever linked to or seen”. He used a few examples in the Australian real estate space on how you can use your favourite tools to gain valuable intelligence on what type of content really works.

How Apple’s Changing Up Search: From Siri To Safari To Spotlight

Emily Grossman, Mobile Marketing Specialist, MobileMoxie

TBA

Keeping Things Lean and Mean: Crawl Optimisation

Jason Mun, Co-Founder and Search Director, Bespoke

I’ve seen Jason present several times at various industry events, his topic of crawl optimisation is critical – especially for larger, enterprise and ecommerce sites.

Using APIs To Automate Marketing Tasks

Rob Kerry, Chief Strategy Officer, Ayima

The Internet is People! Optimising for User Experience

Woj Kwasi, Head Honcho, Kwasi Studios

The Advanced PPC Search and Social Mashup: Expertly Curate Owned Audience Cookie Pools

Rachel Malone-Olson, Social Account Manager, aimClear

Closing Keynote: Hacking RankBrain: The 4 Robot-Destroying Weapons You’ll Need To Survive SEO Judgment Day

Larry Kim, CTO, WordStream

Larry started off by saying that the content of his talk was very much talking about experimental areas (not from any Google press releases etc.) – with a Terminator theme.

He explained the difference between heuristic hand-coded algorithms and a machine learning algorithm.

Google has numerous APIs and platforms that use machine learning – includingAdWords – has been a machine learning system for 15 years. Facebook EdgeRank switched over to machine learning, Twitter uses it for their ads.

In summary, machine learning is everywhere.

RankBrain is only used on long tail queries, not on head terms. Larry discussed how *he* would build RankBrain if he was doing it and then did some digging into results where RankBrain was at play and those that weren’t.

Search Marketing Summit (#SMS2016) Live Blog – Day 2

Voice & Local Search, how the two intertwine…

Michael Motherwell, Co-Founder, Wave Interactive

Michael has been presenting at search events for years and I always look forward to hearing him speak. He covered the relationship between local search, how local search in constantly changing, and stressed the importance of getting your local SEO right.

He also dug into some of the unique differences in local, using the Moz Local Search Ranking Factor report as a reference.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Gary Illyes, Trends Analyst, Google

I’ve seen Gary present a few times, and being very much into mobile optimisation, I was looking forward to some of the latest info on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

AMP is made up of the following components:

  • HTML5 (AMP HTML)
  • JavaScript (AMP JS)
  • CSS3
  • Global Proxy Cache (AMP Cache)

Gary then explained a little more on the components and libraries, talking about widgets and embeds. The AMP Project is open source and hosted on GitHub if you want an even deeper dive.

Quality not Quantity: How to approach digital marketing when not all of your leads are equal

David Lawrence, CEO & Co-Founder, The Web Showroom

TBA

Facebook Growth Hacking

Dennis Yu, CTO, Blitz Metrics

What Advanced SEOs Should Know From The Google Raters Guidelines

Jennifer Slegg, Founder & Editor, The SEM Post

Jennifer went through the core concepts of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines. She has covered this topic in depth at The SEM Post, if you have checked it out, I’d recommend doing do. The latest 2016 updates and highlights can be found here.

Jennifer ended her presentation to summarise with the following:

  • Give users high quality, high E-A-T content
  • Be aware of signs of low quality, including ads
  • Get mobile friendly
  • Be aware of YMYL

SEO Diagnostics for the Skilled Search Mechanic

Patrick Kajirian, SEO Manager, ESPN.com

TBA

Q&A with Google’s Gary Illyes

Gary Illyes, Trends Analyst, Google

—

More coming soon! Stay tuned 🙂

Big Digital Adelaide 2016

As a lover of all things tech and marketing, Adelaide’s newest and most exciting digital marketing conference was definitely something I was keen to get involved with.

UPDATE: I’m live blogging the highlights from the Big Digital Adelaide event if you’re interested.

Big Digital Adelaide will run on July 7th and 8th at the Science Exchange in Adelaide’s CBD, connecting industry experts and attendees as they share their knowledge on some of the biggest ideas in marketing and tech today.

Adelaide River Side Landscape

Topics will span every aspect of marketing – from search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search tactics and tools, and social media marketing, right through to blogging and content development.

I was excited to be invited to present on the topic of ‘Head Slapping WordPress Security Hacks’ in the afternoon of Day 2 of the conference. Here’s the blurb on what I’ll be presenting on below:

With WordPress powering more than a third of the web, it’s easy to see why it’s a popular target for attackers. The costs associated with recovering from a security incident can be devastating to your sales, reputation and daily business operations if not properly managed. Luckily though, professional marketing operations is within your reach. The massive user base of WordPress also supports an equally massive ecosystem of both free and paid tools and services to help keep our websites clean, secure and running like clockwork. In this presentation, we’ll explore the risks associated with common web security issues. We’ll also cover some practical real world preventative measures you can use to protect and monitor your website right away – so you can get back to doing the work you love!

The conference will feature a number of streams. The first of which is ‘Organic Search and Social’, which will see discussions surrounding the latest tactics across the entire industry of free and organic social media and search. In today’s day and age, it is impossible to avoid having an online presence. It is all about minimising your costs, wile maximising your results. You will learn everything from standard SEO skills (such as keyword research and link acquisition) to understanding app indexing and Googlebots. The best thought leaders in the world will be on show, giving attendees the chance to learn as much as they can.

The second stream is ‘Paid Search and Social’. The link between regular PPC channels and paid social media is becoming more and more intertwined. Leveraging paid search and social is one of the most integral skills that a business can have, and learning how to do this is a key to achieving those all-important KPIs. Attendees will have access to experts across all the paid channels, who can easily teach you a thing or two about how the industry stands today and how to maximise your efforts.

Last, but by no means least, there is the ‘Blogging and Content Development’ stream. So, if your business is blogging or content marketing is a substantial part of your role, then you’d best get along to a few of the presentations. Speakers will cover a range of topics, such as WordPress SEO and security, as well as more content-related topics, like how to write compelling copy.

The conference organisers have made a conscious effort to include various networking opportunities throughout the event. Opportunities to meet speakers, sponsors and other attendees will be possible for all ticket holders, with long breaks between sessions. Making connections is so crucial in this industry — it seems that the organisers of Big Digital really have thought of everything.

A two-day pass for Big Digital includes 4 Keynotes from Gary Illyes (Google), Melanie Spring (Sisarina), Fred Schebesta (Finder) and Michael Verghios (Nimbull) alongside 32 individual sessions which span every imaginable facet of the digital landscape, presented by both local Australian and International speakers.

UPDATED June 2: Tickets are available to purchase online now (just $449 AUD + booking fee $9.95) and there’s only a few days left before the conference kicks off so don’t miss out: http://bigdigital.events/tickets/

Quite a few of the Melbourne SEO Meetup regulars will be there. If you’re there, look for the nerd on his laptop near a powerpoint and say hi 🙂

What Do You Know (WDYK) Melbourne

Last night John and Rosemary from the Web Directions team held the event What Do You Know (WDYK). Web Directions run several cool events for the web and digital industries.

The Web Directions events are aimed at designers, developers, product managers, creative and art directors – and pretty much anyone interested in digital tech. I’ve been attending their events for many years and couldn’t recommend them more highly.

A few of their upcoming events are worth mentioning:

Respond 2016

http://www.webdirections.org/respond16/

Respond is Australia’s Responsive Web Design Conference happening over 2 days in both Melbourne and Sydney.

Transform 2016

http://www.webdirections.org/transform16/

From the team behind GovHack, Transform is Australia’s Digital Government Conference. Digital technologies are “transforming” governments world wide. The term “Digital by Default” is something you’ll start hearing a lot more about. If you’re interested in this topic, you’ll love this event.

WDYK Presentations

I thought I’d publish my notes from the evening for anyone interested in the event that might have missed it. It’s hard to do all of the presentations justice – they were all excellent. If you’re a speaker and want something corrected or changed, please get in touch.

Web Performance: A Functional Guide to HTTP/2

Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson (@pwcc) – Human Made

The first talk of the night was by Peter Wilson on the topic of Web Performance HTTP/2, titled “A Functional Guide to HTTPv2”. He started the talk with a demonstration of the current page load time, “in awkward silence”, which was very effective at driving home how long the average page takes to load.

Pete will be also presenting at Respond, his talk alone is a good enough reason to attend if you’re in Melbourne.

Slides: TBA

Lessons from alm.tools

Basarat Syed

Basarat Syed (@basarat) – alm.tools, and That TypeScript Guy

Bas is the creator of alm.tools, he’s an enthusiastic developer and chances are you’ve come across his work.

He’s doing a lot of interesting work, check out his website at: http://basarat.com/.

Slides: http://slides.com/basarat/lessons-from-alm-tools/

Semantic Release/Versioning

Leonardo Correa

Leonardo Correa – Odecee

Leonardo explained how semantic release will change your life forever. It’s a big call, but he gave a passionate live demo on his cz-customizable codebase and Travis CI to prove and demonstrate how it works.

You can check out Semantic Versioning (semver.org) for more info.

Summary:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Some of the things it can automate is detecting if a release is necessary or not and checking for vulnerable NPM packages. It can figure out the next release number type based on commit messages (major, minor or patch), generate changelog and bump package.json.

The motto of Leonardo’s talk was to work smarter, not harder. Something always worth focusing on!

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r1-aKXx5RrtZc9HOW4ggEnowHgdKP3OyGFYDg7DRlzs/edit?usp=sharing

The Agile Buzz

Daina Price

Daina Price (@pricedaina) – NAB, a muse design

Daina gave a solid explanation of why Agile Development is much more than a buzzword and how it’s about adding value.

She covered some background of Agile, how to embrace “agility”, The Agile Manifesto (and much more):

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

(Reference: http://agilemanifesto.org/)

The essence of Daina’s presentation was to reach the goal of “making better software” – which is what it should all be about.

Slides: TBA

8 Actionable On-Page SEO Tips

Jamie Gemmell

Jamie Gemmell (@jwbg19) – Search Jam

Regular attendee and speaker from the Melbourne SEO and WordPress Meetups, Jamie gave a brilliant list of actionable on-page SEO recommendations that can be used on all projects.

He broke his talk into 8 sections, noted below:

1) SEO plugins

2) Separate Keywords

example.com/some-keyword-here

rather than

example.com/somekeywordhere

3) Keyword Rich URLs

4) Keyword in Titles

5) Meta Descriptions

6) Labelling media correctly, use file name, ALT tag and descriptions

7) Content

If you think it’s spammy, it probably is..

8) Time

Give things time.

Search is a topic I’m quite passionate about myself and I always pick up some new tips listening to Jamie.

Slides: TBA

Discretely Responsive

Simon Knox

Simon Knox (@psimyn) – Kogan

Simon covered the topic of being practical about moving towards a goal incrementally (think components rather than entire pages), one step at a time.

His talk was very entertaining and he talked about making changes where you can get real wins without the overhead of change management that can stifle progress. The main thinking is to move gradually to responsive, not major cosmetic changes, so this is something that *can* be done gradually.

A good point that was made was to not be afraid to make changes to existing code.

Your code is bad, and that’s ok. — Proverb

Simon offered several practical code tips, but ended up by saying that this type of work is never finished, so don’t expect an end date. You should always be cleaning things up and improving.

Slides: TBA

Closing Comments

John Allsopp hit a cord with me when he talked about Australian Boards being under represented by tech folks, and how we, as a community need to take responsibility for this. Skills like writing and speaking are critical to this, they’ll always be an incredible benefit to you – and an important step towards taking on these responsibilities. There are plenty of events looking for speakers and websites sites looking for writers!

It was the first time I’ve been to the Zendesk offices in Melbourne, it’s a very nice setup.

What Do You Know (WDYK) Melbourne

It was an awesome night, I’d recommend getting along to one when you have a chance!

WDYK was put on by Web Directions and Zendesk, so a big thanks to them both, and an even bigger thanks to all the speakers.

How to Test for the DROWN Vulnerability

The “DROWN Attack” is the name given to a recent vulnerability impacting on some servers running SSLv2. This page contains information on how to test for the DROWN vulnerability, with a list of further reading.

The word DROWN comes from “Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption”.

DROWN Test

You can quickly test your site (it’s not just web servers, it’s any service using SSLv2) for DROWN by visiting test.drownattack.com (as shown above) or by using the following URL:

https://test.drownattack.com/?site=example.com

You can also get a copy of a python utility that scans for the DROWN vulnerability here:

https://github.com/nimia/public_drown_scanner

(make sure you read the documentation, it only scans for common scenarios)

If you don’t run your own servers, your web hosting company should be addressing this for you. Estimates are that this vulnerability impacts up to 33% of the Internet. Here’s a sample of some of the top sites affected by DROWN:

  • yahoo.com
  • alibaba.com
  • buzzfeed.com
  • speedtest.net
  • groupon.com

You can see the full list of the top affected sites here.

Here’s what the results look like if a site is vulnerable to DROWN:

Test for Drown Attack Vulnerability

Here’s a list of sites with more information on DROWN, I’ll update this post in the coming days to cover as much information for webmasters and system administrators as possible:

https://drownattack.com/

https://drownattack.com/drown-attack-paper.pdf

https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2016/03/01/an-openssl-users-guide-to-drown/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DROWN_attack

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/more-than-13-million-https-websites-imperiled-by-new-decryption-attack/

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/01/drown-attack-breaks-https-on-33-of-websites/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dont-let-your-openssl-secured-web-sites-drown/

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

The Melbourne SEO Meetup took place tonight, with Sue Ellson talking about LinkedIn and myself talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages, Instant Articles and Apple News technologies – along with the steps on enabling and configuring AMP on a WordPress website.

Expect to hear a lot more about the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project and competing technologies, here’s the official definition from Google:

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”) Project is an open source initiative that came out of discussions between publishers and technology companies about the need to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone – publishers, consumer platforms, creators, and users.

(Reference: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html#what-is-the-accelerated-mobile-pages-project)

The talk covered the problem technologies like AMP is trying to solve, as well as the main WordPress plugin options for enabling AMP.

At the time of writing, it’s a fast moving target, so consult the second last slide for further reading on the topic.

WordPress, JavaScript and Melbourne Developer Communities on Triple R

Last night I was lucky enough to be invited on to the Byte Into IT show on Triple R to talk about the various local tech communities, Open Source, the Melbourne WordPress and the Melbourne SEO Meetup.

Melbourne Developers on RRR

As a listener of Byte Into IT for years, it was great to be involved and meet the amazing team who make it all happen; Vanessa Toholka, Laura Summers and James Noble.

I mentioned a few Meetups, here are a few relative to the topics we discussed:

We also briefly touched on Calypso, the codename given to the newly launched Admin interface for WordPress written in JavaScript. It’s also used as a base for a Mac OS X desktop client, and a soon-to-be-released Windows client. There’s a lot of talk in the WordPress community about this milestone, however a lot of developers have already been heavily (some exclusively) using JavaScript frameworks with their WordPress projects.

With the first phase of the WP API coming in version 4.4 (any day now), expect WordPress to be used in all sorts of ways you wouldn’t expect.

Here’s a screenshot of the OS X client connected to a self-hosted WordPress install, you’ll see all the normal features found in the standard admin interface. My first impressions are that it feels much faster and easy to navigate.

WordPress JavaScript

A self-hosted WordPress site, managed by the new Mac OS X desktop client app.

 

You can read more about Calypso here.

You can check out info on the Byte Into IT program and the podcast below:

It was great fun, I hope to do it again 🙂

WordPress Security at the Melbourne WordPress Meetup

WordPress Security was the topic of focus at the local Melbourne WordPress User Meetup.

Amelia Briscoe covered .htaccess and Tristan Penman covered an Introduction to SSL (I’ll add their slides here when they’re published).

My talk was on WordPress Security Basics, here’s the slide deck for anyone interested:

If you’re just after the resources, below is a quick summary.

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)

Not only is Google Search Console useful for SEO, it’s a complete health dashboard for your websites. In addition to outages, spam and crawling errors, if Google detects your site has been compromised you’ll get an alert – so it’s another reason why you should be using it.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report

Each year, Verizon releases a report called the Data Breach Investigation Report that can be a real eye opener and help build a business case for resources and for improving general security awareness. An executive summary is also available.

http://news.verizonenterprise.com/2015/04/2015-data-breach-report-info/

WordPress Security Documentation

The official WordPress documentation servers as a great starting point if you want to learn more about basic security, as well as how it applies specifically to WordPress.

https://wordpress.org/about/security/

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week: Bloggers and SEO

Next week, I’m set to be part of the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week calendar of events. For me, a Think Geek tshirt is as fashionable as I get 🙂

Melbourne Fashion Blogging Event

So, how does a web and technology enthusiast and the world of fashion go together, I hear you ask? Well, let me explain.

I’m one of a panel of specialists speaking at Fashion Forward. This two and half hour panel will take a look at how fashion bloggers (or any type of blogger really) can best promote their personal brands online.

The session will cover the most effective online marketing techniques to help fashion bloggers promote themselves to fashion labels and readers. I’ll focus on search engine optimisation techniques (SEO), and how getting found in the search engines will organically bring more traffic to your blog, as well as search engine marketing tactics, such as the use of Google AdWords and other paid search options.

Apart from myself, the panel members will include:

  • Alyce Cowell (Westfield Insider): Alyce is a blogger, stylist, writer, presenter and media commentator. As the Westfield Insider, she creates content for Westfield’s site, runs their social media channels and hosts events. She also appears on Mornings and The Today Show, and writes for Cosmopolitan and WHO.
  • Danielle Castano (stylesnooperdan.com): Danielle works in the Social Media industry, blogging for a leading Australian retail outlet. She holds and Interactive Media degree, and is also a self-taught photographer.
  • Liz Tehan (setthat.com): Liz is the founder and director of brand new social commerce website, Set That. The website aims to bring together people and products, thereby making online shopping easier and more inspiring.

Fingers crossed, all attendees will take away some practical hints and strategies on how to build a more commercially successful blog.

All the Event Details:

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