Recently the folks at Secunia contacted me regarding a vulnerability in my plugin Contextual Related Posts. Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed. The plugin comes with a tonne of options and inbuilt caching that can possibly increase user retention. This vulnerability was on the settings page of the plugin and opened up the blog to a potential cross site request forgery (CSRF) The application allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing proper validity checks to verify…

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In today’s day and age where most of our information is online, including banking information and more importantly emails, it is essential to think about what happens to this data in case of an untimely passing. Similar to making a will to bequeath your belongings to your near and dear ones, planning your digital afterlife is essential. Yesterday, Google launched a new feature called Inactive Account Manager that helps you in this regard, at least in the case of all things Google. You can now choose what happens with your data if your account goes inactive after a set period…

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If you’ve been running a multi-author blog like us, over a period of time, you’ll see your list of tags growing exponentially. When I reviewed the number of tags on Techtites today, I noticed that this was well over 1,100 tags! So, I went into the Tags interface and immediately realised that I’m going to spend an hour just deleting and cleaning up tags. There are a few WordPress plugins available that allow you to manage tags and categories, including Term Management Tools. However, there isn’t a good free plugin to delete and clean up tags. So, with a bit…

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Payback period in capital budgeting refers to the period of time required for the return on an investment to “repay” the sum of the original investment. For example, a $1000 investment which returned $500 per year would have a two year payback period. The time value of money is not taken into account. Payback period intuitively measures how long something takes to “pay for itself.” All else being equal, shorter payback periods are preferable to longer payback periods. Payback period is widely used because of its ease of use despite the recognized limitations described below. – via Wikipedia The Question…

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Many weeks back after much deliberation, I decided to give CloudFlare a shot. As they describe themselves… CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks….

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Way back in 2008, I wrote about using SUMPRODUCT to duplicate the functionality of SUMIFS which was introduced in Microsoft Excel 2007. SUMPRODUCT is a powerful excel function and is more commonly used to multiply two arrays. Let’s first understand the syntax of SUMPRODUCT. If you’re impatient, you can skip the tutorial and download the sample excel file from the end of this post. It contains solved examples with the related formulae. We’ll be using the following table in the example. Syntax: SUMPRODUCT(array1,array2,array3, …) Array1, array2, array3, …     are 2 to 255 arrays whose components you want to multiply and…

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Two weeks, we looked at the syntax of VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. Last weeks tutorial should have walked you through the basics of VLOOKUP. In this post, we’ll use a similar file from the VLOOKUP tutorial to find a value from the table using INDEX and MATCH. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please go through the VLOOKUP tutorial. Alternatively, if you’re ready to jump right into INDEX/MATCH, then let’s get started. Firstly, create the above table in Excel. I’ll be using Excel 2010 in my example. You can also download the examples file before you proceed. The file…

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Last week, I introduced you to VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. In this post, we’ll use VLOOKUP to find a value from the table. Firstly, let’s create the above table in Excel. So whip up the installation of Excel you have. You can use either of Excel 2003, Excel 2007 or Excel 2010. I’ll be using Excel 2010 in my example. Download the examples file before you proceed. The file contains a Questions sheet which you can practice in and a Solutions sheet as well. If you haven’t had a chance to review the basic syntax of the functions, please do…

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Yesterday, we told you how to get your Outlook.com email. Outlook.com adds a great new feature that allows you to easily recover messages that you have deleted and here is how you go about this. Step 1 Select Options > More Email Settings as you can see in the screenshot above. You’ll notice the little options icon in the top right of your browser. Step 2: Under Customising Outlook, select Advanced privacy settings Step 3: Select Let me recover deleted message. With these 3 steps, you would have configured Outlook.com to give you the option to recover deleted messages. Step…

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Excel has several  lookup and reference functions. The main purposes of most of the plugins is to lookup some cell or cells from a set of data (usually presented in a table). Of these, the most popular ones are VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. Usually INDEX and MATCH are used in combination as a replacement to VLOOKUP. This post will walk you through the basics syntax of the functions. In a future post, we’ll use them to lookup some values. VLOOKUP You can use the VLOOKUP function to look up the value of a cell from a range of cells, usually…

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