Why Encrypt Websites?

This year, GCI implemented https encryption across most of its hosted websites. Most of these websites are pretty basic with simple information about a church or camp. There’s nothing really private on them. There’s no personal information collected to keep secure. Still, I had my reasons for wanting it and recent developments by Let’s Encrypt made it

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Why WordPress? And is it really safe?

Anyone who has in the past few years asked GCI to host a website for them knows that I push WordPress. And while we don’t force you to use any particular website hosting environment, there are good reasons why we recommend it even if it is more work for us. So here are some reasons:

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Using Images from the Internet

Internet tools like Google Images and Bing Images have made it very easy to find and download images from the internet. In the process, they also make it very easy to violate copyright law. Now we may think, “Our church is so small. No one will notice if we use a copyrighted image. And if

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Want Your Website To Get Hacked?

At least a few of you know that I push pretty hard when it comes to updating software that runs websites. I always refer back to the reason: old software is easier to hack. Today I ran across this article about a cybersecurity expert who got his website hacked. And why? Because he didn’t update

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The Power of Google Analytics

As promised, here is the presentation and notes from the “The Power of Google Analytics” workshop at the 2013 Denominational Conference in Orlando, Florida. The Power of Google Analytics PowerPoint The Power of Google Analytics PDF

Increasing Your Website Traffic Notes

As promised, here is the presentation and notes from the “Increasing Your Website Traffic” workshop at the 2013 Denominational Conference in Orlando, Florida. Increase Your Website Traffic PowerPoint Increase Your Website Traffic PDF

WordPress 3.1, Performance Changes & Stats

For those running on our WordPress-based easy web site service, we’re in the process of upgrading you all to WordPress 3.1. I’m also looking at your plugin list and replacing WP-SpamFree with WP-HashCash for performance reasons. And for those hosted on DreamHost (the majority of you), we’re upgrading to PHP 5.3 and adding the page

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