Friday, December 2, 2016
Idylle
by Rob Hope via One Page Love
Keybase: Sending, Receiving and Sharing Encrypted Messages
Given the ever-increasing concerns over data security, there's a growing interest in the options for data encryption. But encryption isn't new. Looking back at history, we can find that one of the most notable machines for encryption was Enigma, a machine used in World War II. Going back even further, we find the Caesar cipher, used by Julius Caesar to encrypt messages.
Essentially, encryption involves hiding a message inside another message that usually contains gibberish words. Today, in our digital world, you can see encryption being used in many different areas, such in our browsers, our file systems, emails etc.
Encryption can be a bit difficult in the beginning, especially to non-technical people. But encrypting information is a concern for everybody, and not just people in tech-related fields. (Consider investigative journalists, for example, for whom data protection can be critical.)
In this article, I'll review a tool that makes encryption easy, and I'll demonstrate how to send an encrypted text message.
Introducing Keybase
Keybase is an open-source platform for encryption that works as a social network. It tries to make encryption easier, breaking down the barrier of technology and adding a social aspect to it. You can start encrypting by just using a social media username.
On Keybase, you can look up people and follow them just like on Twitter. Keybase also maps your identify to your public key: you can link your other social accounts such as Reddit, GitHub, Twitter to your Keybase profile.
Keybase offers encryption via a web-based client, but also offers local, command-line clients for all major operating systems.
Getting and Setting up an Account
At the time of writing this article, Keybase is still in its alpha phase, and you need an invitation to get an account there. (I do have invitations, so ping me on Twitter if you're interested.) You can also sign up via the form, but there is a queue, so you may need to wait a while.
Quick tip: You may find a lot of people sending invites on Twitter.
Setting up Your Profile
Once you have got an account on Keybase, you should create your profile. Then head over to the downloads page. Keybase supports all three major operating systems, and there’s also source code. Follow the installation instructions for your operating system.
Once you've done that, you can run Keybase:
run_keybase
Yay, we got a squirrel. This confirms we have Keybase ready to encrypt.
Verifying your profiles
Keybase also tries to build this "web of trust" platform by linking your accounts to your Keybase profile. Since Keybase also offers a command line application, I’ll use that to verify my profile later, but you can also use the web version.
Continue reading %Keybase: Sending, Receiving and Sharing Encrypted Messages%
by Ardian Haxha via SitePoint
Boost Productivity with 5 Tools for WordPress Automation
Although WordPress is an ingenious platform, you need to spend a lot of time and energy in making your site look outstanding from all perspectives. You always need to make sure that the changes you make to your site work in your favour. However, analysing each and every WordPress task becomes difficult, but with the help of WordPress automation tools and plugins, you can achieve your goals with ease.
Fortunately, WordPress offers a plethora of tools and plugins that enable you to automate your WordPress tasks in minutes. By allowing your WordPress site to do all the heavy lifting by itself, you’ll be able to concentrate more on other imperative aspects that can boost your productivity and efficiency.
Here’s a list of some of the best WordPress tools and plugins that will automate some of the key tasks of your website.
Continue reading %Boost Productivity with 5 Tools for WordPress Automation%
by Lucy Barret via SitePoint
Using GDELT 2 with PHP to Analyze the World!
Are you interested in political world events? Do you want to play with one of the world's largest databases? If you answered either of those questions with a yes, keep reading - this will interest you!
This article follows up on the promise to use GDELT with PHP.
I will show you a simple example of how to use GDELT through BigQuery with PHP, and how to visualize the results on a web page. Along the way, I will tell you some more about GDELT.
GDELT
GDelt (the "Global Database of Events, Language and Tone") is the biggest Open Data database of political events in the world. It was developed by Kalev Leetaru (personal website), based on the work of Philip A. Schrodt and others in 2011. The data is available for download via zip files and, since 2014, is query-able via Google's BigQuery web interface and through its API, and with the GDELT Analysis Service.
The GDELT Project:
monitors the world's broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, emotions, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world.
Online Experimenting
All GDELT data has been made available through BigQuery. This "big data" database has a web interface that allows you to view the table structures, preview the data, and make queries while making use of the autosuggest feature.
In order to experiment with the GDELT dataset online, you need to have a Google account. Go to the BigQuery dashboard.
If you don't have a Google Cloud project yet, you will be prompted to create one. This is required. This project will be your working environment, so you may as well choose a proper name for it.
You can create your own queries via "Compose query". This one, for example:
SELECT EventCode, Actor1Name, Actor2Name, SOURCEURL, SqlDate
FROM [gdelt-bq:gdeltv2.events]
WHERE Year = 2016
LIMIT 20
Continue reading %Using GDELT 2 with PHP to Analyze the World!%
by Patrick van Bergen via SitePoint
Using Color Schemes in Mobile UI Design
According to Kissmetrics, a product’s visual appearance is the number one factor influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions. Nowadays, it is common practice among marketing managers to hire color consultants to get assistance in determining a color (or colors) that would attract their customers. They understand that colors are an important marketing tool. Mobile app developers have many useful things to learn from them.
The color wheel based on the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) has been used by artists for centuries. The first color diagram was developed by Newton 350 years ago.
The color wheel used nowadays includes primary, secondary (green, orange, and purple) and tertiary colors (yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green, and yellow-green).
Continue reading %Using Color Schemes in Mobile UI Design%
by Tatsiana Levdikova via SitePoint
7 Reasons Your Website Needs WhoAPI
This article is sponsored by WhoAPI. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Completing a professional, functional, attractive, award-winning website is not the end of your problems — it's the start. You must also...
- find a suitable and reliable host
- register a domain and configure DNS entries
- purchase and install Secure Socket Certificates
- configure your server and deploy your site or application
- create and populate databases
- define email addresses and management options.
If everything goes perfectly, your site is live on the web and serving visitors from all over the world. Will it stay that way? Consider what would happen if:
- your site becomes very popular very quickly
- you have a problem with your software stack
- your application exceeds allocated disk space
- your host fails or goes out of business
- there are problems with your domain or certificates
- your site is targeted by unscrupulous entities!
You should be aware of problems before your users, but that's unlikely unless you're using your site or app all day, every day. Fortunately, services such as WhoAPI provide robust monitoring facilities which alert you before serious problems occur.
Here are seven ways a monitoring service can help your site and sanity...
1. Ensure Your Domain Name Never Expires
It's easy to snatch an expired domain. There are several services which do the hard work for you: you enter a domain owned by someone else and a bot will purchase it on your behalf the moment it becomes available.
Domain registrars normally alert you before expiry but there's no guarantee you'll receive it. Perhaps you initially signed up with an old email address or the message was marked as spam. Staff in larger organizations may presume domain renewal is someone else's responsibility and ignore the warnings.
Domain expiries can happen to the biggest and best of us. There are plenty of scare stories such as the time Microsoft forgot to renew hotmail.co.uk.
A good monitoring service will nag you to renew your domain before it expires. The WhoAPI whitepaper provides more information for domain owners.
2. Ensure Your SSL Never Expires
Like domains, SSL certificates are normally renewed every year. Unfortunately, you will not always be warned about expiry and users will be faced with a scary security warning even if there's nothing inherently wrong or insecure about your site or the technologies it uses.
A good monitoring service will alert you before SSL expiry becomes an emergency.
3. Be Notified of Website Failures
Failures can occur for numerous reasons and any fault can lead to unexpected downtime or usage difficulties. If you're running a WordPress-powered website you've inevitably encountered the dreaded "Error Establishing a Database Connection" page.
You can build fault tolerance into all your systems but it's difficult to cater for all eventualities and it can only go so far. There's little you can do to prevent business or hardware-related issues.
Make sure you are the first person to be notified when — not if — a failure occurs.
4. Automatically Backup Your Website Files
I hope I don't need to remind you about the importance of backups? Unfortunately, the majority of computer users never consider backups until it's too late and that could include your client or boss. Backups can still go wrong even with a robust archiving strategy...
Continue reading %7 Reasons Your Website Needs WhoAPI%
by Craig Buckler via SitePoint