In the last two posts, you learnt the basics of Net Present Value (NPV) and how to calculate NPV using formulae. However, Microsoft Excel makes… Read More »How to calculate NPV in Excel using Functions
I’ve covered the basics of Net Present Value (NPV) previously. If you don’t know what NPV is, then please read that post first before continuing.… Read More »How to calculate NPV in Excel using Formulae
Continuing with our Excel Tutorials, in this article, I’ll take you through using Goal Seek in Microsoft Excel 2007. The function is same as that of earlier versions of Excel as well as Excel 2010. The screenshots below are taken in 2007.
You’ve come across the term CAGR and want to know how to calculate it in Excel? This post gives you three different ways to do so in Microsoft Excel. But, first, let’s understand what CAGR is.
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 the requests. This can be exploited to change plugin settings and e.g. insert malicious script to pages or posts when a logged-in administrator visits a specially crafted web page.
Since then, I’ve been scouring the web for material on this and you might also want to take a look this article on crunchify for a solution. In this post, I’ll tell you what I did to fix the vulnerability. But first, let’s understand what’s CSRF.
Read More »How to prevent CSRF vulnerability in WordPress plugins and themes
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 of time. You can choose to send it to a person(s) you nominate or delete your data.
Here’s how you go about using it.
Simply follow this link to Inactive Account Manager and login with your Google ID and Password. Hit the Setup link and you’re ready to begin the wizard.
Read More »5 Steps to setup your Google Inactive Account Manager
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 of googling, I came across SumTips post. If you have access to your database via phpMyAdmin or a similar tool then it will take you less than a minute to delete unused or unpopular tags.
If you proceed beyond this step, please be extremely careful. Playing with your database table is risky and can break your entire site!
Read More »How to delete unused or less used post tags in WordPress
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.
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.
CloudFlare offers both free and paid plans. You can check out a comparison between the various plans as well as see all that you have for offer. If you’re running a huge site, getting a paid plan is definitely a great option. It definitely works out cheaper than running your own server.
If you’ve decided to take the plunge, here is how you can go about speeding up your website. Note that you’ll need to be able to have access to change the nameservers for your domains, as well as add and activate a WordPress plugin (optional).
Follow my guide below to add your website to CloudFlare. I’ll walk you through how I added my site on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to CloudFlare.
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.