Blog posts by Duncan Stuart

  • Goodbye Citrulu

    3 years ago we launched a product called Citrulu. It monitored live websites to check that they were working as expected. The idea was to go one better than simple uptime monitoring (which just checks that a site successfully responds with something) by letting users describe what their site looks like when it’s working, in natural […]

  • Talking snakes and mongooses at #bigwp

    Last night I gave a talk on plugin security at the Big Media & Enterprise WordPress London Meetup. It includes Indiana Jones (Why did it have to be snakes?!) and a cheeky plug for MongooseWP – our plugin security alerting service which will be launching soon. The talk seemed to go down well – at least […]

  • Keeping traffic flowing to your WordPress site after a big restructuring

    Any website which is around for more than a couple of years will probably go through some kind of restructuring – perhaps as part of getting a new theme, or reorganising and refining content for clarity and usability. Often this sort of process involves changes to the urls (“permalinks”) used to access individual posts and […]

  • Accountability Hack 2014 – A closer look at the data we used

    Last weekend dxw entered a team into the Accountability Hack run jointly by the National Audit Office, The Office for National Statistics and Parliament. Our hack – Right to Buy-Bye ended up winning both the ONS category and the Best in Show prize. We’ve already blogged about the process of building the hack, so in […]

  • WordPress Security – WPLDN follow-up

    A few weeks ago I did a talk on WordPress security at the WordPress London meetup (video, slides). At the end there were a couple of questions relating to our hosting platform which bear repeating and a bit of a follow-up. “Why don’t you use VaultPress?” There are a number of security plugins on the market […]

  • Rendering nothing on 404 in a Ruby on Rails api

    I’m working on a Json api for fetching reviews from security.dxw.com/, using the rails-api gem. When a plugin hasn’t been reviewed, the api (naturally) returns a 404, but what should the body contain?