Category: Blogger Tips and Reviews

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EU Cookie Directive – New Law Affects Websites and Blogs – 26th May 2012 – Possible £500,000 Fine for Non-Compliance. Do you know what it’s all about?

If all you know about cookies is vanilla cream, chocolate chip or maple syrup, you may be in trouble if you have a website or blog.

The Guardian asks the question.  “How will the new law on cookies affect internet browsing?”  I think it’s a topic we need to make ourselves aware of.

Cookies surround us whether we like it or not in our everyday Internet life.   I can bet that any one of us would come up with a sizable number of cookies if we were to check our Temporary Browsing folders.  The most annoying ones are those that seem to persistently refuse to leave our expensive gadgetry, no matter how often we delete them.

Webmasters tend to like cookies.  From putting one on our computer, they can check what we visit, and get information that we really don’t want just anyone to know about.  Think of the information that someone could have access to if they knew EVERY website and page that you EVER visited.  How targeted could the adverts and information be that show up as you browse the Internet?

I don’t mind saying that I regularly get freaked out with a capital F when I visit somewhere and get pop up adverts for Aberdeen and shoes I looked at the week before.  I won’t be sad to see the back of some cookies, and I’ll delete all affiliates from my websites.  Deleting affiliates and adding a direct link instead, means I stop any potential third-party cookies being put on my readers computers.

As Internet users, we could set our computers to not accept cookies, but then we’d lose the benefit of the cookies we want to keep.  We all like to keep some logins recognised, or even the items we put into online shopping baskets.  Ok, they might not know it’s ME, but I like to know when a cookie is being put on my machine.  I am in favour of the change of legislation to make the use of cookies more clear, but how to get it to work on small websites is another matter.

What is happening with cookies and why?

Last year, legislation was passed that means we have to adhere to the new cookie laws.  The UK was given a year of grace to get it’s websites to comply.  On the 26th May 2012 our year is up, and every website will have to inform its visitors that they use cookies.  Every visitor must be asked to consent to their use.

When you think about it, this could actually be quite challenging for small websites and bloggers, as I would guess that most webmasters have absolutely no idea if their sites use cookies or not.  A cookie testing tool is probably a good idea for all of us.

I’ve found a test tool at Attacat, which could help small website owners find out which cookies their websites are putting onto their visitor computers.  I am not endorsing the website, so you use it at your own risk.  Although it worked fine for me, it may not work the same way for you.  Make your own decision as to whether you should download it or not.

Websites and blogging software by default tends to set cookies for logins and stats.  Find out which ones your site is using, and if you come across any really fabulous tools that don’t cost a fortune to do it, let us know so that we can pass them on to webmasters with small budgets.

Aboutcookies.org gives an overview of what is needed, but I think many are going to struggle.  Given that the possibility of a fine is up to £500,000.00 for websites that don’t comply, I don’t think we can sit on our laurels and hope it goes away, even if we do get a warning first.

How can we ask users for consent?

At first glance this fills me with fears of dread.  I am not looking forward to the possibility of instant pop ups when we visit every site asking for us to agree to the terms and conditions of cookies.  It could also mean that our current privacy policies need an overhaul to ensure we are legally compliant, but will that be enough?

Websites will need to let their visitors know why they want the information and explain which parts of the website use them, and why.  As bloggers, our use of cookies is minimal as we don’t tend to use that method of gaining advertising revenue, but as small websites, the potential is there to cause us problems.  Informed consent technically means tick a box to agree consent.

What are the big websites doing?

The Guardian explained that some sites are indeed using the nightmare scenario of tick box on entry to a site to agree to cookies.  It may well cut the numbers of users accepting tracking, but I’d be irritated at a website asking me to tick a box when I don’t yet trust them.  I would be likely to just click away from their site.  New blogs, websites and businesses would struggle with this approach I suspect, but the big ones can afford to ride the wave.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for people.  They’ve chosen to deal with it by adding the box at the top of their page, but again is assuming that everyone with a website has the ability and knowledge to make this happen.

BT has put a notice on the bottom right of their website.  It takes the opposite view.  If you haven’t clicked it, you are agreeing to cookies.  I’m not sure that’s what the legislation is asking for, as it’s quite clear that people have to give informed consent.

With the BT approach, it looks like the box could easily be missed and cookies still downloaded without people agreeing.  I’m not completely comfortable with that.  I don’t have £500,000 I could risk by trying that approach out.  I hope their method proves sound as it’s the way I’d like to go when I know that there is no risk involved in it.

What about small websites and blogs?

Many don’t seem to have done anything yet, and are possibly waiting to see how everyone else is going to do it.

We are NOT exempt.  Although the directive could be implemented differently in our Country, in reality, we still have to get informed consent.  We really are all going to have to make some effort to find out if our websites are storing cookies.

I’d say this could also have some impact on affiliate campaigns, PPC and our stats and analytics packages.  The Directive does give some leeway to have cookies ie for logging in and shopping cart and deems those necessary.

Our advertising cookies, or analytics and other bells and whistles cookies that make our websites look fantastic are not covered under essential cookies.  Simply put, it really means that if your website could function without something, you have to get people to specifically agree to download the cookies that make it work.

I have absolutely no idea how I am going to react to this one yet, and I watch the news with interest on it.  I am likely to remove affiliate adverts, although I don’t take many, and I don’t do pay per click, so it’s just plugin and stats cookies that I will really have to check.

What about you?

I am testing a few different ways of getting informed consent and my favourite WordPress.org plugin at the moment is Cookie Control, which is now installed on my blog as a trial.  I don’t think it’s too intrusive and although is reported to be a bit sticky on Google Stats, it seems to be working fine with the other cookies.  It looks like the developers are working on it quickly.

I would expect a premium application will come out to cover this fairly quickly.  I’m guessing there will be thousands of non compliant websites on 26th May, but I’d like to to find my way forward for the future.

Yes, there will be problems, and allowing visitors to withhold cookies means that our stats could divebomb.  If they have to tick a box before we get to record the fact they’ve visited us, then we’re really going to struggle to know how many people visit.  I suspect this is the reason for the BT stance.  Initial indications show that stats could drop up to 90% in our dashboards even though the visitors are still there, so the BT model looks very attractive.

Maybe this new cookie law is what we need as bloggers and website owners.  It could be the final push to get us to take stats, throw them out of the window for good, and rely on interaction via social media as a bolt on to our websites.

If you have a developer or webmaster and haven’t had anything done about this, it could be time to get your skates on and find out more.  The rules seem a bit fuzzy and open to interpretation.  I suspect the chances of being prosecuted are probably very slim, but I’d rather take a little action now so that I have been seen to take it seriously in finding a way to meet my legal obligations.

It’s going to be interesting to see how far my stats fall this week with the plugin activated.

Would be interesting to know if anyone else is doing anything about it.

 

 

 

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WordPress Back Up Lesson – Do you back up?

With the possibility of losing my whole blog when I updated a plugin earlier this week, I had to make some emergency plans for backing up my whole website and not just my database which is all that my host will allow me to easily back up.  Looking for how to back up a WordPress installation was not as easy as I had thought, but I did just stick to one of the first things that I had found.

I can use some html, and with the database backed up, it would only take a few hours to get everything up and working again, but I decided that I didn’t want to have to spend that much time at some point in the future to fix my beloved blog.

I can’t tell you all enough how important it is to back up your blog.  I lost a lot of work when my first blog went by the way of bloggie heaven by not backing up properly when I moved from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.

Today, I spent quite a while working through what could work and what might to back up the whole website.  Yes, my posts, and comments are saved in my database, but what about the theme, plugins and settings??

This back up is for  self hosted blogs in WordPress.org.  I believe that there is an easy internal back up feature for wordpress.com.

What we have to do is back up BOTH  the database (posts, pages, comments and users) AND the Files from your File Manager which includes all your pictures and other files.

How to Back up WordPress.org

To backup the database, there are several ways it can be done, but I will just tell you about 2 ways here.

Database Backup 1
Simply go to your WordPress admin panel, and click on Tools and Export.  From there, it will download a word file to your computer and save it in a named folder.  If you ever need to upload it to your WordPress account if disaster falls, then you have one backup ready to go.

Database Backup 2
Your hosting control panel will provide a way to back up your database.  I use two hosts, and on one, I can back up my database and website in one fell swoop and then download it to my computer.  Sadly, on Godaddy, I can only backup the database, but considering the database is where most of the work is kept, then it is a pretty important thing to do.

Backing up from your hosts control panel can be tricky as they are all different.  Your hosting provider gives you a control panel, most likely it will be cpanel, but I  managed to find myself on GoDaddy for one blog which doesn’t allow me to back up my files, but I can back up my database by selecting my hosting account and choosing to manage my account, database and mysql – and click the pencil to back up the database.  When it is clicked, a message pops up to tell you that it may take up to 2 hours to backup your database and overwrite your current database.  I would say it is probably good to have 2 database backups at any one time – just in case.

Get the tools for the job for backing up your files.

Plugins, plugins, plugins – oh yes, did I say plugins.  I like to keep my plugin list small(ish), but there are times that an extra plugin or two are pretty necessary for the health of your blog (not to  mention your heart).  If you are lucky enough to have a web host that backs up your files, or allows you to download them as zip files, congratulate yourself on choosing wisely.  The rest of us have to search out a solution that fits nicely with what we need to do.

If your own host doesn’t have the facility to back up your database for you (and most do if you look under database management in the file manager of your control panel)  – then you need to look at a plugin that will back up your database easily and send you the result for you to keep for the future.

Any database plugin is going to be a life saver in the event of a blog disaster, so it’s not the end of the world if you do this and don’t go any further – you’ll just lose your plugins, your settings and contents of widgets / image folders etc and have to upload them all again.

There are lots of plugins that you can use to back up your files, but whether they are all perfect and useable is debatable.  Doing it the easy way is what is important and I would recommend that you keep all your images on a disk at worst and look through the plugins to see what could work for you to make  your life easier.

I chose to try the “Online Backup for WordPress” to try and I had a look at how it works.  The screenshot shows that it can back up the files and the database.  I have not had the need to reload the files so I am not sure if it would work as well as it should, but there are certainly many other plugins out there that can be used to help safeguard your work.   I liked the fact that I could send my backup to email with this plugin, but I was soon disappointed as the size of the backup meant that it couldn’t be converted to email and sent.  It was simply too large a file for the spare php that I had available in my hosting account.

I then tried backing up via the download to computer choice which was much more successful.

The zip file that downloaded was easy enough to do and it took up much less space than the email version that it tried to convert.   It did come up with one error.  My backup file came up at 210 MG and of course, I can’t upload it to see if it works the other way round as it is for emergency only, but at least I have my database backed up in three different ways so the worst that can happen is that I have to upload my photo file and reset my theme options

 

Look at all the plugins and make all your own decisions on which version you want to use.  I am not going  endorse any one plugin as I cannot know how you would use the information, or whether your server would be capable of completing the actions.  If you value your blog or your website, make sure you spend some time on it before problems hit your server.

I also have a copy of all my files in a folder that I have added to my control panel and named as a backup.  Even if my server goes down, the full website with files will be stored in the backup from a date that it all worked properly and if needs must, I could back up from there.

I am planning to keep a file on my laptop for safe keeping.  Then, I may just get paranoid and also save them to a spare disk, but then again, maybe that is just going too far.

The next time I decide to go for hosting, I will make sure that the host does full website backups as well as just the database.

Have you backed up your blog / website ??  Leave a comment, and if you have any better suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment and let us all know about it.