• Worried about WordPress and GDPR? Start Here
• GDPR: What Does the New Data Regulation Mean for Your Website, Business and Data?
• How to make a WordPress website compliant to GDPR
• Automattic and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• GDPR Compliance and WordPress Forms: Everything You Need to Know

Have a nice read!

Please, note: I am not a lawyer or your Legal Department, it all merely comes from my reading and my understanding.

Deployment

Cookies

First step (normally, this should be in place for quite some time already, since this started a long time ago): Add an informative message to inform visitors that you are collecting cookies.

I simply used a small plug-in (you can find others too) : Cookie Notice from dFactory.

Pros: It is working in various languges (and in English), it has been tested on more than 500,000 sites before mine, it starts in less than a minute.

Contact form

For many reasons, you will need to have a decent contact form (including to be able to answer GDPR-related requests). I recommend a simple and small (and free) forms editor like Ninja Forms.

In two minutes, you will have a working contact form. Don’t forget to add the checkbox with “By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website” (This should be present on all your forms).

Then, you need to create a “Contact” page in WordPress. You will include the specific code to include the form you just created with the following shortcode:

Small GDPR support: Ninja forms allow you to setup forms without storing any data on the web site, reducing the load to comply with GDPR in simpler forms.

But, don’t forget to enable the sending of the confirmation message to the comment author (all the more because the post-form message includes mention of this confirmation – be consistent).

On top of this, if your web site includes a comment system (quite common fact), I recommend using a plugin to include the standard reminder checkbox: WP GDPR Compliance from Van Ons. Bonus: It makes some recommendations on various GDPR-related cases.

Data Protection Officer

Name somebody (with an email address) as the internal interface for all private data issues. It is not compulsory (for smaller teams) but it is so much clearer (and recommended) that somebody feels i charge of this (even the CEO). This person will be contacted bu visitors willing to know what data you collect and how to remove all their personal data from the web site (these are legal requirements).

Make sure that this person is reachable through a very easy interface (including the contact form or some other form).

Privacy policy

Above all, you must make sure that you can explain simply what are your intentions about private data you will collect (private data include email, name, IP address, etc.) and how you intend to comply with your legal obligations. This page must tell it all simply.

Try and write it right on the first attempt. You are legally bound to inform all your users any time you make a change (even simple ones)…

This is a WordPress page, rather than a poost (it must stay readily available and easily reachable by all even in the future).

I recommend to -more or less- follow the GDPR themes (it’s easier):

• Existence (or not) of a Data Protection Officer, in charge of the whole process of personal data handling
• Definition of data collection, handling, storing, transfer and removal processes
• Creation of a process to notify any data breach
• Explicit consent to data collection
• Right to access (and removal) of personal data

Access to personal data

You must give full access to any user’s personal data stored on the web site. This is realtively easy using a plugin (GDPR compliance from Scribit) and a specific page where you will only write the shortcode:

[gdpruserdata]

Of course, you can add some more details (refer to the plugin help information for more options).

Then, you can direct the requests to this page which will display the full breadth of personal data. As this is not a very nice page (rather dry reading), I recommend to keep it masked (I don’t feel it is necessary to show it permanently to all – answering requests should be enough).

Annoncement

Maybe not the worst or the most complicated, but I finally added a small message on the web site to announce the deployment of this whole process. Explaining is better than waiting for people to ask. And the message is positive: You care about your users and visitors.

As a matter of fact, there is no obvious difference for the casual observer. I just verified the correct operaiton of my web design production environment (you couldn’t probably care less) and I modified the geographical coordinates of the web site (latitude and longitude) that you probably don’t see but which allow Google and others to locate me on Google Maps (at least, as soon as it will be taken in to account by Google, of course) in the Courbevoie city where I live now.

If you really want to know how I did this, I just added (or, rather, updated the following HTML code snippet in the page headers:

Actually, I am trying to make sure that you will get much more than you can swallow here: tens of thousands of character fonts. Not only a bunch of them, but two sources of the nicest kind.

FontPark is nothing less than a 70,000-font archive. You can search, dig, drag, drown into it.

But this is really an organized archive, which makes it quite usable even from the pro designer. and did I mention that most fonts are freeware or free for personal use?

But there are other sources for your character fonts. I found an interesting one because they are free and very accessible while containing real good quality font-ware. Google has built its own web font store: Google WebFonts

What is really special about Google WebFonts is that it comes with an API that most web sites can use to collect the fonts and use them when designing a web site. Actually, it’s as easy as using standard CSS style commands. As in the following example:

body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
}

Definitely good news for the web designers.

If you did not notice, this is a Firefox, not an Opera house nor a Chromium orb.

Google Analytics screen copy:

As you can see, really, the million award came only because, last week, there was a sharp peak of more than 80,000 visits in a day (I kept oscillating between 900,000 and 1,000,000 visits but could not jump this symbolic barrier). And it comes with nearly 1.5 million printed pages (another deeply symbolic figure to reach).

What is funny is that this load peak (perfectly handled by the OVH web server) just came a few days after the personal experimentations I was mentioning here to optimize Roumazeilles.net and YLovePhoto.com performance. As a matter of fact, the actions that I applied were really representative of what must be done to have a web site doing much more than the usual web business card:

• A small dedicated server (much better than the shared web hosting services which are really cheap but stay very limited in case of a sharp traffic increase);
• WordPress in a recent version (here, version 3.0.1);
• The W3 Total Cache plugin to optimize the cache and the performance of the WordPress web site (my analysis of W3 Total Cache);
• Reducing the less-than-important operations through the search for low performance using the performance analysis tool of your web site;

But on top of the technical face of the case, I am not a little proud of having received more than a million visits.

• You cannot avoid mentioning the Google webmaster tools. They do a lot of things and contain a performance evaluation but it is very crude and updated at frequency that you cannot control (several days if not several weeks between updates).
• Pingdom: Full Page Test has the enormous advantage of being precise and not requiring anything more than your browser. Give it an URL and it will tell you what happens and how fast. Great.
• Using Firefox, there is a nice plugin to observe the load times and the detail of what is loaded: Firebug. It will produce the graphic display below.



• But if you want to go even one step further, you should complete Firebug with the Google Page Speed extension, which will provide precise recommendations about what you could do to improve your page load times.

After testing/evaluating the load times of the pages of YLovePhoto.com because the administrative tools from Google were indicating that they were really too long, I discovered that there was a lot to improve there.

photo credit: Viernest

Through a small search for data, I discovered that there was already a set of WordPress plugins all devoted to this low-visibility task. In the past, I had used PHP_Speedy, but it seems that it does not work well with the most recent versions of WordPress (the plugin is probably no longer maintained by its author). I needed a much better solution.

I chose W3 Total Cache and this is changing the life of my web sites: Some loading times were simply divided by 10! It is probably already very perceptible by some of the visitors and it now makes glaringly obvious the next weakness: The slow behavior of some external inserts like Facebook badges, Flickr blocks or external ads.

The only drawback of this plugin (W3 Total Cache) is the sheer number of options (which makes it utterly adaptable), but as far as I could judge the default options are very inteligently chosen and the help information or the installation automated messages are really written to avoid novice web admins to stay locked or blocked on falsely optimized options. Strongly recommended since I deployed it on Roumazeilles.net and YLovePhoto.com.

Today, I learned that Bloglines will close its doors and stop completely its services in the coming days (on the 1st of October 2010); I have to switch immediately to a new service.

I started to look into the available options, either an on-line RSS aggregator (Google reader comes immediately to mind), or a Windows-based aggregator on my PC. Dear reader, do you have some recommendations for me?

I found a good web site that will help you determine if you are color blind and which will support web designers trying to make their web sites better: WeAreColorBlind.com. They are even providing patterns that show how best to use colors in this context.

If you want more support, I also recommend a visit to Chrometric, a web site where you will be able to freely download a tool to test your web site against various kinds of color blindnesses (you know that not all people have the same kind of insensitivity to colors, don’t you?) and allow you to test various solutions or improvement you may have designed.

For example, my other web site, www.YLovePhoto.com as seen by 6% of the male population:

Opera just announced that, while they are not the larger player in the browser field, they cornered a nice piece of turf: 100 million users of Opera (about 50 millions on the Desktop, and a 50 million chunk on the mobile phone).

This impressive position in the mobile phone market is probably going to get a serious boost with the other announcement from Opera: Apple just approved the Opera free browser on iTunes for application on the iPhone. Up to now, the iPhone user had no other choice than Safari (from Apple), but it seems that the competition will now be open with Opera mini which is generally considered as the best mobile browser (at least on the Windows-based phones).

I started to test it as early as this morning on my own iPhone 3G-S and I can tell you: it feels great.

• Installation and configuration in a whizzzz (near instantaneous (including the synchronization of bookmarks and Speed Dial with my Opera on PC Win7)
• Overall feeling: Very fast browser, a little jumpy. Sometimes, it even feels more nervous than most iPhone applications, but the operating mode is still 100% consistent with the rest of the iPhone apps, so it feels right)
• Screen surface well used and very good rendition of all the web sites I could rush to.

Highly recommended up to now.

When you design a web site, it happens that you need to create graphs or technical charts. But this is quite difficult if you don’t spend a life drawing little charts or if you are not satisfied with the charts out of Excel (or OpenOffice Draw). For this, you need to have a good chart/graph package.

I found two of them that I want to share with you:

• amCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages. I like the final appearance even if they could have more of a designer touch.
• Chartle provides simple and interactive charts, maps, plots and diagrams. It’s still in beta right now (beg of 2010) but the results are quite good.

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

The program will recognize the shortcut, then automatically replace it with the correct text. Type “win“, see “Windows” appear. Type “HTML” and see a full block of selected HTML code appear (I use such shortcuts to create blocks of HTML code on this site, reducing typing time and avoiding typos).

For this, you need to be supported by a small program. I found two interesting ones :

• AutoHotkey (for Windows) allows to write very simple scripts (examples are provided); I use it everyday (it works perfectly on a Windows 7 installation, by the way).
• Some people would prefer to explore Texter and TextExpander, too.
• If you are on Linux, you will prefer to have a look at AutoKey which is freely inspired by AutoHokey (copying is a form of flattery)

Update: I just learned that Internet Explorer 8 is now becoming the web browser most used in the world. Even if there is a lot of other good competition, Microsoft is still holding its position (from DownloadSquad).

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

It’s worth noticing it if you are using Opera. I had a difficult-to-solve issue recently.

While playing with the idea of starting to use IPv6 on my main PC, I tested the waters by validating this option in the network configuration of my Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera is already fully ready for IPv6 but my router box is not. So, the first effect it had is that Opera decided to enforce the use of IPv6 for all web sites that mentioned IPv6 capacity in their DNS (not many of them, but Google and Free.fr my ISP are already in the list). The immediate effect was that Opera tried to connect to them in IPv6 but failed (because the rest of my home configuration is not 100% IPv6). For 99% of all web sites, there was no difference…

It took me several days (and some Googling – using Safari and Chrome) to understand that this is a known issue and to remove the (still) useless IPv6 Windows configuration.

I’ll have to upgrade my router and try again.

I just took one part of the simplest category: Rain drops.

I’m sure that you will find whatever you need for your web site, for your Windows desktop or any other icon-based application.

Then, I checked for Roumazeilles.net itself, and I noticed the same situation:

It appears that Firefox is moving very fast. Who would have thought -a few years ago- that Microsoft’s world domination would be toppled like that?

It’s new version, Safari 4, is just out. Faster, still as good and powerful, but Apple is now claiming the crown for the “fastest” web browser. It could well be possible when Snow Leopard OS-X becomes available later this year. Running natively as a 64-bit Mac application, it could gain 50% from today’s already powerful base of Safari 4.

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.