Open Book Canada

Links are among a website's most valuable components. They connect (that’s what the word “link” means, after all) different pages and resources, helping site visitors find the content they are looking for. Well-planned and formatted links are like a detailed, intuitive treasure map that sends visitors to the right destination.

Links are also critical for making your website accessible to visitors with visual or other impairments. A link that lacks important information can prevent some visitors from accessing all the treasures a website holds. Or even worse, it can send users to completely undesirable content and discourage them from exploring all your site has to offer.

In this post, I’ll discuss how to present links in various contexts, clearly explaining how they can create and inform powerful relationships between different pages and assets.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 has the reputation of being a pricey option for cloud-based hosting and compute resources. Certainly, that was our initial impression here at Mugo Web years ago when we began standardizing our hosting and site management business on a single cloud platform.

However, we quickly discovered that AWS is actually quite affordable. In fact, our monthly costs for a virtual machine using 8GB of RAM, at 100% usage, is predictably lower with AWS than with other virtualized or traditional data centers. That’s without aggressively tuning our resource usage, which is often the focus of how to optimize AWS pricing.

In this post, I’ll show you how AWS can be a cost-effective option for professionally managed websites. I’ll also take a quick look at some of the additional savings tactics you can employ to get more value from your decision to run on AWS.

In this blog post I am going to talk about several security best practices, particularly for configuring AWS Access Keys. Some of these practices are based on a project that we inherited which was compromised by hackers. Best practices are often learned from mistakes; and when the mistakes are someone else's, so much the better!

If you were used to the Open Source version of eZ Publish, you are probably familiar with the eZ Flow extension, which allows editors to build pages visually specifying the components based on a Layout, Zones, and Blocks system. Users that have migrated to the Ibexa OSS might have noticed that there is no such system available, only the Ibexa Page Builder, which is restricted to the Enterprise version.

At Mugo, we love to contribute to the Open Source community. After identifying this need, we decided to create a prototype for an alternative to the eZ Flow extensions for Ibexa OSS. With that in mind, we created the Mugo Page Bundle as a simple way to build page layouts.

Managing bot access to your website is one of the least sexy tasks a site manager handles. You just identify the bot’s user agent, edit robots.txt to allow or disallow access, and you’re done. Right?

Of course, nothing’s ever quite that simple when it comes to safeguarding your web identity. Sure, robots.txt is still the industry stalwart – it’s a tactic we often use for our clients here at Mugo Web when we want to block a specific bot for some practical reason.