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Excerpt: … for spammers, anyway. Upgrading WordPress often might just help!
On the other hand, you could still wake up and find out your blog looks like this after a zero-day attack —
That's probably a bad thing. But, in fact, many of us in the blogosphere have enjoyed this particular problem.
And it's not quite as much fun as the blue pill.
In the worst case, it's not just spam, it's badware or viruses. And then Google won't want to cohabit with you ever again.
Well, you'r…
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Excerpt: You thought cheap webhosting was a bargain. Maybe … but bad webhosting isn't just a bummer — it can get you delisted, added to badware lists, etc.
And it doesn't have to be your fault (directly, anyway).
Use IX Web Hosting | ixwebhosting.com web hosting at your own risk. One day you might just get hacked and/or defaced. Even worse, you might be — courtesy of some Turkish hacker — installing malware on users' computers by proxy. The hackers seem to be pretty good…
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Excerpt: PHP doesn't come with native support for making SSH connections via the libssh2 libraries. You must use the PECL SSH2 extensions. Installing them can be tricky, but Kevin van Zonneveld does a great job explaining how to install them over here. So I won't go there. The new version, 0.11.0, also seems to be compiling more reliably for everyone.
Unfortunately, the library is sparsely documented, and still buggy in some places. And most of the comments posted on http://www.php.net/ssh2 are j…
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Excerpt: WordPress is great. So are most other free and/or open-source applications. The only problem with these applications is that no matter how secure the other parts of your web site are, using such a popular application makes you an easy target for their widely circulated exploit scripts. There are lots of prying eyes on, say, WordPress. And exploiting popular open-source applications is interesting, because you get more bang for your buck. Upgrading helps, and of course we do it. But it stil…
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Excerpt: If you're using a newsreader, you may notice that I now have a set of social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every blog post. It looks like this in Google Reader: The rel="nofollow" I have on them is more than a bit unnecessary, but I forgot to remove it, and what the hey, it still validates using FeedValidator!Anyway, it's trivial to add. In WordPress, the most obvious way is to edit the "wp-rss.php," "wp-rss2.php," "wp-atom.php,&qu…
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Excerpt: So I got Dugg — but I'm convinced this trivial WordPress Plugin is part of what helped me top the Digg charts for so long. All it does is examine every incoming HTTP_REFERER, and if a Digg URL (of a specific Digg) hits a blog post URL, it assumes that it's a Digg of that post. Then the plugin automatically stores that URL and inserts the Digg button code. It's not perfect, but it should mostly work automagically. Just call the function within your template so…
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Excerpt: This is a terribly simple but useful WordPress plugin that puts an interactive counter-style Reddit interface on your blog — but only when someone has already bookmarked the URL. It looks rather lame when everything isn't bookmarked, but the JavaScript interface with the arrows is a definate enhancement over a simple icon. So why not show it only when applicable? I'll narcissistically bookmark this post to demonstrate. Just call the function "reddit_this()&q…
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Excerpt: Here are a list of my favorite WordPress plugins that are SEO-related. My install also includes quite a few hacks directly to the source, but only because I didn't do it the "right" way. These are the essentials:Chicklet Creator http://www.twistermc.com/shake/RSS-index.phpAdds feed subscription buttons to a WordPress blog.WP-Email http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.phpEnables users to send a post to a friend.Sociable http://push.cx/…
