Sunday News.

Welcome to the first “Sunday News” post of many. Every Sunday morning starts off lazy in our house, before church, football and kids parties kick off its time for watching kids cartoons in bed with the whole family and browsing the net on my phone. It is my time to look over the week that was, and look forward to the week ahead. Im going to start sharing my ‘Sunday News’ items here.

Heres what happened in the world of digital web design and development this week.

1) Sunday news -Yoast SEO plugin security hacks!

What a nightmare. We had 30 client sites affected by this and it was a bit dicey here as we sat watching twitter and reddit for news of a fix, like most of the web world it seemed.

This was quite a scary moment for wordpress users and for sites that have an ecommerce, booking tools, social network capabilities and generally capture user data on a frequent basis. Make sure you update the plug in.

Oh just a quick note – update your woocommerce too!!

2) Sunday news – Apple iWatch dev tools released in Xcode along with simulators.

I want the Apple iWatch but probably like most of you I can’t decide between the €299 sports edition or the €18,000 gold version… to be honest with 5 kids and the need to remove it to shower, coupled with with the number of Apple chargers we have already wrecked in this house (at €20 a pop a little part of me dies every time my kids touch one) it’s not likely I will get one any time soon.

From a dev perspective when iPhone decided to launch the 6 plus it was a whole different ballgame, I had a lot of this from clients with the bigger screens:

 “Ian my website doesn’t look great on this device so please get it working”

After some tweaking and quick learning I’m happy to report we are indeed 6+ friendly.

So I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the iWatch currently at 38mm and 42mm screens, release smaller screens and plus versions. Cant wait!

For now the only iWatch I will have is on my Xcode simulator. I can imagine it is the 42mm gold  €18,000 version!

 3) Sunday news – Chinese internet giant Alibaba might be interested in Snapchat

This one caught my eye as I had a terrible experience with Alibaba 7 years ago and have avoided them since then. I was amazed to see this is not the first time these two companies have been linked with a deal. Bloomberg last July reported that the two sides had met regarding a potential investment valued to be worth $10 billion. Leaked emails from Sony — including those of Sony Entertainment CEO and Snapchat board member Michael Lynton — backed up that story, but no deal was done. There is a lot of speculation here, but with Alibaba having money to burn it is interesting to see how this one will play out. Snapchat continues to go from strength to strength. I’ll be following this story on techcrunch to see how it develops.