wordpress

Pressidium Cookie Consent plugin review

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Screenshot of the home page for the Pressidium WordPress cookie consent plugin

Someone anonymously emailed me recently to advise that my cookie consent banner was not compliant with current privacy regulations, and so I’ve swapped it for the Pressidium Cookie Consent WordPress plugin.

To date, I’ve been using the cookie consent banner component of the Toolbelt plugin (my review). As much as I like Toolbelt, it’s getting a bit old and it’s been almost five years since its cookie consent module was updated. As such, it basically says that ‘this site uses cookies, deal with it’, rather than giving users a choice to opt-out.

I’m a relatively privacy conscious person, to the extent that I tend to browse the web in Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled alongside Privacy Badger. This extends to this web site – where possible, I avoid using third-party services. Indeed, the only cookies that you should experience are session cookies whilst browsing, that are deleted when you close your web browser, and Pressidium’s own cookie to remember your consent. For analytics, I use Koko Analytics (my review), which doesn’t need to set any third-party cookies.

Setting up Pressidium Cookie Consent

I deliberately went for this cookie consent plugin because it’s lightweight, and doesn’t need to use a third party web application. I’ve previously tried the CookieYes WordPress plugin, which is much more powerful and will auto-detect cookies to add to its consent forms. But it’s a big plugin designed for big sites that use lots of third-party tracking scripts. And as mentioned, I don’t.

Once installed, Pressidium Cookie Consent is relatively easy to set up and configure. You get a moderate amount of control over how the pop-up appears, and in turn the Cookie Settings box that users can view if needed. I like that it defaults to ‘accept all’ and ‘accept necessary’ – it annoys me when sites make you go through settings to reject all cookies and have you ‘object to legitimate interests’. In terms of its appearance, you can have it appear as a box or a strip, and control the colours.

In terms of specifying the cookies that users can consent to, this is where you’ll need to spend some time browsing your site in Private Browsing with Developer Tools open. Unlike the aforementioned CookieYes plugin, there isn’t a way of automatically detecting the cookies your site uses. Cookies can fit into four categories: necessary, analytics, targeting and preferences. Unfortunately, you can’t hide these categories, even if your site doesn’t use targeting cookies, for example.

If you use Google Tag Manager, then you can integrate this – I don’t. You can also include translations of the cookie consent popup and settings, and if you have API keys for OpenAI or Google Gemini, then it can use AI to generate these for you.

Free and open source

As it runs locally on your own WordPress instance, Pressidium Cookie Consent is free with no premium tier. The source code is on GitHub under the GPL 2.0 licence, and it’s in active development with a recent release for compatibility with the latest WordPress 6.9 release. Whilst it might not be as powerful as some WordPress cookie plugins, it should at least make your site compliant with GDPR and the like.

WordPress Wayback Link Fixer plugin

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Screenshot of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

Link rot is a major problem for long-established web sites that link to other sites. It’s a particular problem for blogs – the word ‘blog’ is, after all, a shortened form of ‘web log’ and the original blogs were links to interesting things the blogger writing it had found.

I’ve been blogging since 2002, and in that almost one quarter century, lots of the things I’ve linked to have gone missing. Companies close, web sites change and decide not to preserve their URLs, or are sold on to new owners. As such, many older sites are full of links that no longer point to anywhere useful.

This is where the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin for WordPress comes in. Once installed, it pro-actively scans outgoing links from your blog posts on a regular basis. If any no longer work, then, where possible, the plugin will amend that link to point a cached version of that link on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That way, people following the link will still get to see something, rather than a dead link. It’s an official plugin from the Internet Archive that has been developed with support from Automattic.

Backup to the Wayback Machine

But that’s not all! Once installed, you can opt-in to have all of your blog posts automatically backed up to the Wayback Machine. So, if your WordPress blog ever goes dark, all of your posts and pages should be available there for others to find.

Normally, the Wayback Machine uses a crawler which usually scoops up most web pages in time. But it can miss those that may only be online for a short time, or not linked from a web site’s home page. This is a problem I’ve faced myself; I lost all my blog posts in 2018, and over the past three years I’ve been slowly reinstating old posts. Alas, some are missing from the Wayback Machine and are therefore (probably) gone forever. Whilst making sure that the Wayback Machine has copies of your blog posts is a good thing, you should also have your own backups and I now use UpdraftPlus for this.

So, if you’re a WordPress user, and care about preventing link rot and the sharing of information, go and install the plugin. Thanks to Matt for the head’s up, and maybe consider donating to the Internet Archive as well?

Recent sidebar additions

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Screenshot of the additional sidebar widgets

I’ve added a couple of extra WordPress widgets to the sidebar, which appears on the right of blog posts if your screen is wide enough. For smaller screens, it’ll be at the bottom.

The first is a list of the five most read posts over the past 30 days. This is provided by the Koko Analytics plugin, which I use for analysing visitor statistics. Generally speaking, these will be the posts that seem to rank highest when people use search engines. My post about a free-standing CarPlay unit is perennially popular.

The second is a list of posts written on this day in the past. When I was a Movable Type user, I used Brad Choate’s OnThisDay plugin to achieve something similar. On WordPress, I’m using the Posts On The Day plugin instead.

Both plugins make a widget available to insert wherever widgets can go in your WordPress theme. They’re classed as ‘legacy widgets’ but are customisable in the WordPress user interface.

This does mean that, on shorter posts like this one, the sidebar is now significantly longer than the content. Oh well.

Answering the blog questions challenge

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Whilst I wasn’t tagged, I saw Matt Haughey’s ‘Answering the blog questions challenge‘ and decided to give it a go. It’s been a while since I did one of these.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I started blogging in 2002 as I could see people that I followed also starting to write blogs. I used to read Chris Pirillo‘s Lockergnome email newsletters, and saw that he and his then wife had both started blogs. Whilst I had run various web sites on Geocities and the like, having a blog that was easy to update quickly seemed like a good idea.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

Like most of the blogiverse, I use WordPress. In my case, it’s the open source self-hosted version, running on a virtual server that a third party hosts for me. It’s the most popular platform and highly customisable, with many plugins and themes available and lots of guides for how to do things. For now, it continues to suit my needs.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yes. I started on Blogger, using some free hosting – I started blogging at age 17 when I didn’t have a bank account or was allowed to sign contracts for hosting. Within 9 months I’d switched to Movable Type, as I was 18 and could pay for things online myself.

I continued to use Movable Type until 2011, when I switched to a fork called Melody. However, Melody never really took off, and so I moved to WordPress the same year. I’ve used it ever since.

On other blogs, I’ve used ExpressionEngine before, and my final year project for my Computing degree in 2005 was to write a simple blogging system in Perl and PHP, to compare the two.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Just using the standard WordPress web interface. Years ago, I used w.bloggar, a Windows app which is still available on GitHub and is now open source. I have the WordPress app on my phone but mostly just use this to upload images.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Most of my writing is done at weekends – this is being written on Saturday evening. During the week, I don’t really have the time, but if I’m sufficiently inspired then I may write the occasional post on my lunch break from work. Generally though, I write the blog posts for the forthcoming week at the weekend. If I know I’m going to be busy then I’ll try to write more in advance.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

It’s rare that a blog post will go live on the same day that it’s written. Generally, I write in bulk and then schedule the posts to go live every other day throughout the forthcoming week. However, if something urgent comes up, I may shift things around.

I don’t have any drafts saved – generally, I write and then schedule each blog post in one session. Of course, I have the opportunity to tinker with each post before it goes live. I also have a note in Simplenote with blog post ideas, but these are usually single bullet points.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I like to share interesting places that we’ve been, and, if I’ve recently solved a problem, writing about how I solved it. I also write quite a bit about home automation and occasionally about transport.

Who are you writing for?

I know there are a few regular readers, but also for myself – on more than one occasion, I’ve followed my own guide to solving a problem when it has happened again.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I remember A new dawn for trains in the North taking quite some time to write, as did Is the Waterloo & City Line Step Free? It’s Complicated. Both required some research and I’d consider them to be almost journalism.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Just to keep it going. I may change the theme at some point but only to another simple and lightweight one. I quite like the fact that it’s quick to load.

I imagine I will stick with WordPress for the foreseeable future, unless a better fork comes along.

Who else do you want to tag?

I’ll tag Kevin and Dave2, since I read their blogs and I’m pretty sure they read mine too.

As I was writing this, I saw that Ben Tasker had done so too. Ben notably uses a static site generator called Nikola for his blog, rather a dynamic system like WordPress.

Bringing back more blog posts from the archives

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An AI generated image of a phoenix rising from the flames of a browser window

Over the Christmas break, I spent quite a lot of my time off work going through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to bring back more old posts. I started this in November 2023, after deciding that I would bring back more popular or interesting posts.

I’m not going to link to every single post that I’ve reinstated, because that would take forever. Indeed, so far, I’ve reinstated 445 old blog posts, compared to the 242 new posts that I’ve written since I restarted blogging in 2022 (including this one). My main starting point has been my year in review posts (see 2024 in review as an example) where I have gone through and reinstated most of the blog posts linked from each of these reviews, going back to 2009.

It’s been a big job; I reinstated 78 blog posts from 2014 alone. My focus now is on blog posts from 2008 and earlier, my aim being to have at least one blog post from each month reinstated going back to when I started in 2002.

Reinstating blog posts isn’t a simple copy and paste job. For each one that I’m bringing back, I am:

  • Making sure any links still work (and leaving them pointing at the Wayback Machine if they don’t).
  • Re-adding images – many of these are just links to Flickr, but some need uploading again.
  • Checking spelling and grammar, because I’ve found lots of mistakes that I’d never previously spotted.
  • Reinstating any other missing blog posts that are linked, if needed.
  • Checking and adding tags – older blog posts especially did not have tags, or only had one or two.
  • Any blog posts from before I switched to WordPress in 2011 also need re-formatting.

It’s also worth noting that some blog posts were not individually indexed by the Wayback Machine, and so I have to try to find them in other ways, such as checking older versions of the home page.

My original aim was to reinstate between 1 and 2% of my old blog posts, and at present, I’m on around 1.5%. The quality definitely declines as time goes on; in the early days (mainly before Twitter), many blog posts would be one or two sentences at most but with several posts in a day. I’ll bring some of these back, but there are also good reasons why I won’t be reinstating everything. You can find these in my Finding peace post from October 2023.

If you want to take a look back at my old posts, I’ve reinstated the Archives page, which lists every single blog post split by year. This is generated using the Simple Yearly Archive plugin for WordPress.

Koko Analytics – a stats plugin for WordPress

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A screenshot of the Koko Analytics dashboard running on WordPress. There's a bar chart showing daily visitors and page views, the most popular pages and referrers.

Back in March, I stopped using the Jetpack WordPress plugin, and replaced it with Toolbelt, which replicates many of Jetpack’s features. I’ve been concerned about the direction Automattic, and especially its founder Matt Mullenweg, have been taking, and so I’ve wanted to stick to self-hosted alternatives. Whilst Toolbelt does a lot, it doesn’t offer stats, and so I’ve recently starting using Koko Analytics.

Compared to Jetpack Stats, Koko Analytics, at least in the free version, is a little more basic. You’ll get to see how many visits and page views there have been, and also how many page views within the last hour. You can also see your most popular pages and blog posts, and which web sites have referred visitors to you. And you can import and export your data too.

For me, the main benefit of Koko Analytics is that all the data is hosted locally. With Jetpack Stats, you are uploading data to Automattic’s servers, which needs to be mentioned in your site’s privacy policy. Koko Analytics is therefore more respectful of the privacy of your visitors, by not sharing their data.

Koko Analytics Pro

There is also a paid-for upgrade, which costs €49 per year per site (about £40 at present). This also allows you to track what links people click on whilst browsing your site, receive weekly reports, and export data in CSV format. The cheapest Jetpack Stats plan is currently £50 for the first year, rising to £84 in subsequent years, and only for sites with 10,000 page views per month or less. Whilst, as an individual, I can use the free version of Jetpack Stats, I’m currently on around 8000 page views per month. Overall, Koko Analytics is significantly cheaper than Jetpack Stats.

I found out about Koko Analytics through this blog post from Terence Eden, where he has a guide to importing data from Jetpack Stats using some Python scripts. Thankfully, since that was written, the Koko Analytics plugin now includes a Jetpack Stats import tool which is much easier to use.

Whilst it’s basic, the fact that Koko Analytics is lightweight, and that it keeps all its data on your server, makes it a strong recommendation from me, if you need a stats plugin for WordPress.

WordPress, and conflicts of interest

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There’s been quite the to-do in the world of WordPress in recent weeks. Matt Mullenweg, one of the two people who forked b2/Cafelog to create WordPress in 2003, has had a public spat with WP Engine, a WordPress host.

Matt’s arguments are that WP Engine should be paying to use the WordPress trademark (or offer development time to the WordPress project in kind), and that it disables features in WordPress such as post revisions (which allow you to revert a blog post or page back to an earlier version). He’s used his platform to publicly call out WP Engine, including at a recent WordCamp event where he was the keynote speaker – an event supported by WP Engine.

Before I go into much more detail, please take 5-10 minutes to read If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed by Josh Collinsworth, which sets the scene pretty well. You can then come back here to continue reading.

Matt is basically the same age as me – he turned 40 a few months before I did. But in the 21 years since WordPress became a project in its own right, he has accumulated a huge amount of power and responsibility. He’s the founder and CEO of Automattic, the commercial enterprise that runs WordPress.com – which is a WordPress host and direct competitor of WP Engine. But he’s also one of only three board members of the WordPress Foundation, which looks after the WordPress open source project (aka WordPress.org), and, seemingly the only active board member.

To me, this is a massive conflict of interest, and means that a massive amount of control over WordPress is held by one person. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Matt deserves to be on the board of the WordPress Foundation, but not as the only active member. And we’re seeing the impact of this control, with WP Engine’s access to the WordPress plugin and theme directory cut off.

Though there’s been a temporary reprieve, this is an abuse of power. As Josh Collinworth says in the piece linked above:

Matt’s actions have ensured his hosting companies are now the only WordPress hosts that can guarantee something like this will never happen to their users.

Whilst I don’t use a dedicated WordPress host, should Matt have a beef with my host for whatever reason, this could cut off my access to security updates for plugins. I mean, there would be ways of downloading updates manually, but this would also require regular manual checks. Not really feasible considering I have 28 plugins installed.

I hope Matt backs down, and comes up with some kind of agreement with WP Engine so that their users won’t lose out. But I also think that some change needs to happen at the WordPress Foundation, to stop a single board member to act unilaterally like this again. And Matt needs to take a long hard, look at his actions from this year; first there was the transphobia, and more recently selling out content on WordPress.com to train AI models. This is why I no longer use the Jetpack plugin on here.

To recluse oneself from making decisions where a conflict of interest may occur is a core principle of most professional membership organisations, and good leadership. I’ve taken a step back more than once at work, where I’ve had a conflict of interest regarding a decision for someone that I know outside of work. Matt needs to do the same.

Modern Image Formats plugin

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A screenshot of the Modern Images Format plugin in the WordPress plugin directory

I’ve recently started using the Modern Image Formats plugin for WordPress, which automatically converts any images you upload to the WordPress Media Library to the new WebP and AVIF image formats.

Both formats offer better image compression than GIF, JPEG or PNG, and AVIF is particularly good. Mozilla reckons it’s the ‘next big thing’ for images on web pages. All modern web browsers support it, and have done so for a couple of years; it was added to Firefox in version 93 in October 2021.

I’m old enough to remember when PNG images were the next big thing, and were expected to overtake the GIF format which was limited to 256 colours and encumbered by patents. Suffice to say that GIFs are still alive and well in their animated format.

If you have a WordPress blog, consider giving the Modern Image Formats a try. It works in the background, and should make your images smaller. That way, they’ll take up less disk space, and download quicker – especially for users on slower connections. It won’t convert every image – sometimes, the original JPEG or PNG may be smaller, and so it’ll leave these alone.

I’ve been using it for some time now and no-one seems to have complained that the images aren’t working yet.

Cross-posting on socials

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An AI-generated image using Microsoft Copilot showing a stack with the WordPress logo surrounded by smaller stacks with social media logos on them

I’ve recently updated the Feeds page to list ways other ways that you can follow this blog, besides subscribing to the RSS feed. To summarise:

  • There’s the weekly email
  • Any Fediverse app (e.g. Mastodon, Friendica) can follow the blog directly using ‘@nrturner’
  • There’s now a dedicated Facebook page
  • I’m automatically cross-posting links to new blog posts to X/Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky

The Facebook and X/Twitter integration is being done via Buffer and the WP to Buffer plugin. This is because Buffer is one of the few services that still has write access to the X/Twitter API. It also means that I am using my X/Twitter account again, but only to link to my own blog posts. I’m not logging in to interact with other users or post anything there that isn’t a link out to something I host. At least, not until Elon Musk inevitably gets bored, bankrupt or both and sells X/Twitter to someone better.

I think I used to have a dedicated Facebook page for this blog in the past, but I must’ve deleted it at some point. Anyway, there’s a new one which has been around for a couple of weeks and has had basically zero interactions in that time. If you want to very occasionally see my blog posts on your news feed, when the Facebook algorithm deems me worthy, feel free to give it a ‘Like’. I won’t be incorporating any of Meta’s cookies or adtech into this web site, don’t worry.

To cross-post to Mastodon, I’m using the Share on Mastodon plugin. It’s simple but configurable, and does the job well. For Bluesky, I’m using Neznam Atproto Share, which is also simple but configurable. I quite like relatively simple WordPress plugins that just do one or two things, and don’t try to take over your dashboard.

Whilst I have a Threads account, Meta hasn’t opened an API for it yet, so no auto-posts there. Mastodon remains my primary public social media presence, but I do scroll through Bluesky regularly too.

Sign up to my newsletter

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An AI generated image of a postal worker delivering an email newsletter into a mailbox.

It seems like everyone has an email newslettter nowadays. I used to have a simple form where you could sign up for posts by email, powered by Jetpack, long ago. Seeing as it’s the in-thing again, I’ve added an email newsletter sign-up box to the sidebar (if you’re viewing on a desktop) and also below each post.

If you sign up, you’ll get a weekly email on a Monday with that week’s new blog posts. It’s automated, and so there won’t be any additional content for newsletter subscribers. Of course, there’s still the good old RSS feed which has been available for over 22 years now. And you can follow this blog on the Fediverse using Mastodon:

Neil Turner
Neil Turner
@nrturner
968 posts
4 followers

Not ‘a Substack’ newsletter

It seems like the word ‘substack’ has already become genericised (as per this toot from @mathowie). To be clear, whilst this is an email newsletter, I will not be touching Substack. Just in case you’re not aware, Substack hosts a lot of nazis, and doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by this. A few of the worst offenders have subsequently been kicked off, but there are still many horrible people making money there. I actively avoid subscribing to Substack newsletters where possible, and certainly won’t pay for them. As well as self-hosting with WordPress like I do, Buttondown, Medium and Ghost are good alternatives, and many have easy import processes.

MailPoet

I don’t use Jetpack anymore, so instead I’m using the free version of MailPoet. There are lots of email plugins for WordPress, and most seem to offer full customer relations management features and detailed analytics. I don’t want that – I just want something simple where you type in your email address, confirm your subscription, and get a simple automated weekly digest.

MailPoet does have a lot of bells and whistles, even in the free version, but it is possible to just do what I want it to do. You can also manage it entirely within WordPress and don’t need to sign up to a third party service. Whilst it recommends that you use a third party email sending system, I’m sticking with my own. Unless I end up with thousands of subscribers, in which case I’ll re-consider.