Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

A Bank Website on WordPress

April 15, 2015Personal, WordPressMatt

There’s a thread on Quora asking “I am powering a bank’s website using WordPress. What security measures should I take?” The answers have mostly been ignorant junk along the lines of “Oh NOES WP is INSECURE! let me take my money out of that bank”, so I wrote one myself, which I’ve copied below.

I agree there’s probably not a ton of benefit to having the online banking / billpay / etc portion of a bank’s website on WordPress, however there is no reason you couldn’t run the front-end and marketing side of the site on WordPress, and in fact you’d be leveraging WordPress’ strength as a content management platform that is flexible, customizable, and easy to update and maintain.

In terms of security, there are a two simple points:

Make sure you’re on the latest version of core and all the plugins you run, and update as soon as new version become available.

Use strong passwords for all user accounts. For extra credit you could enable a 2-factor plugin, use Jetpack’s WordPress.com login system, or restrict logged-in users to a certain IP range (like behind a VPN).

If your host doesn’t handle it, make sure you stay up-to-date for everything in your stack as well from the OS on up. Most modern WP hosts handle this (and updates) for you, and of course you could always run your site on WordPress.com VIP alongside some of the top sites in the world. If you use any non-core third party code, no harm in having a security firm audit the source as well (an advantage of using open source).

For an example of a beautiful, responsive banking website built on WordPress, check out Gateway Bank of Mesa AZ. WordPress is also trusted to run sites for some of the largest and most security-conscious organizations in the world, including Facebook, SAP, Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, eBay, McAfee, Sophos, GNOME, Mozilla, MIT, Reuters, CNN, Google Ventures, NASA, and literally hundreds more.

As the most widely used CMS in the world, many people use and deploy the open source version of WordPress in a sub-optimal and insecure way, but the same could be said of Linux, Apache, MySQL, Node, Rails, Java, or any widely-used software. It is possible and actually not that hard to run WordPress in a way that is secure enough for a bank, government site, media site, or anything.

If you wanted any help on this feel free to reach out to Automattic as well, we have a decade of experience now dealing with high-risk, high-scale deployments, and also addressing the sort of uninformed FUD you see in this thread.

If you’ve developed a major bank site in WordPress leave a link in the comments.

Starting with the results helps refocus the day, clear away busy work, and make sure your actions and time are being spent with an eye on the results you want to achieve. Results, not just work.

Sara Rosso writes Start With The Result.

John Oliver meets Snowden

John Oliver is pretty much always fun to watch, but you should especially send this episode to everyone you know, it’s important for people to see and understand it.

Getting out of our ocean to explore the islands of open source is one of the best ways that we can expand our horizons, strengthen our skill sets, and build better relationships.

Pippin on why giving back to open source has made his company better.

But one day, the company could “open source” the code that underpins the OS—giving it away for free. So says Mark Russinovich, one of the company’s top engineers.

“It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich says. “It’s a new Microsoft.”

From Wired’s An Open Source Windows Is ‘Definitely Possible’. In 2007 I predicted Windows will be Open Source by 2017, we’ll see if I end up being right on that one.

It would be nice to imagine your children won’t abuse any substances, but also unrealistic. The question is what to warn them against most strongly.

Aaron Carroll asks Alcohol or Marijuana? A Pediatrician Faces the Question.

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s link to the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, here’s a Washington Post story, Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow’s classic A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes.

Ever wondered how to win the U.S. memory championship?

Are you in or near Tokyo? I’m going to be in town and doing a meetup this Sunday, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with the local community. I’m told you can read about it on this link: WordBench東京 3月スペシャル『春のマット祭り』 – WordBench東京.

Meyer Sound Constellation

March 21, 2015PersonalMatt

The Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center has an awesome ambient sound system that sounds acoustic and full from every point in the 500-seat room.. Hat tip: Niall.

I’m very honored to be chosen as part of the
World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders class of 2015 alongside some really amazing folks. I spoke at Davos a few years ago and it was a very interesting experience — I think they snuck me in on a media badge, which is why I wrote a post about the fifth estate for them.

Jenna Wortham writes on Trying to Live in the Moment (and Not on the Phone). I’ve been using the Moment app recently too, here’s my past week of usage. (I think it might count phone calls as usage.)

Josh Kopelman on why raising a Series A is harder than ever, and how startups can adapt to survive the changing investment landscape. Fantastic essay, relevant for every company raising money at any stage.

Since the Title II ruling from the FCC there’s been a lot of partisan rhetoric about the government taking over the internet, even in the comments of this very blog. I just came across Brad Feld’s post, Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality and he does an awesome job breaking down and addressing each of the misconceptions.

Personally I can say that it was the Jetpack features that helped provide the defaults that got me hooked on WordPress. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Josh Pollock at Torque writes about Lessons we can learn from Jetpack.

Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:

I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.

Watching Television

February 28, 2015PersonalMatt

It wasn’t that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that I didn’t have any TV shows I was actively watching. Life has been busier than ever, but I’ve started catching up with shows instead of movies when flying. I’ve been blown away by the high quality of storytelling in the medium of television right now.

So I find myself actively watching a few different shows:

House of Cards (new season out today!).
True Detective.
Scandal.
Blacklist.
Empire.
West Wing.

There are some guilty pleasures in there, and there are probably a dozen shows that friends have recommended to me as amazing that I’ve never even started. (Hence West Wing, I’m watching it for the first time, somewhere in Season 4.)

This is the first time I’m watching things that are still “on” versus something like Firefly or Sopranos which are complete already. There’s definitely something fun about discussing the latest developments with other people who are also caught up, in the zeitgeist, and the anticipation of new episodes coming out, like what I imagine it must have been like with serialized novels back in the day.

Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.

I’m not sure the provenance of this quote, but I read it and it really resonated with me, and I’ve found myself repeating it frequently.

I enjoyed this Ars Technica look at USB 3.1 and Type-C, which is probably the cable/connection change people will notice the most over the next few years. (As I look with despair on my dozens of USB devices and cables.) I also dug their retrospective, A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. Remember serial ports?

Matt Mullenweg

Unlucky in Cards

Category Archives: Personal

A Bank Website on WordPress

John Oliver meets Snowden

Meyer Sound Constellation

Watching Television