SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: You've done it. I've done it. We've all done it. PPC can be hazardous if it's not carefully watched. Sure, you can hire a PPC management firm and dispense the buck and responsibility to a third party. But that doesn't actually dispense with any of the liability … No. That's just an illusion. You can fire the firm, but Google won't give you your money back. They might like your money so much that they send you some Google swag — but that's about all you can expect to numb the pain. Wow,…

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Excerpt: Getting hacked is a total bummer, right? Right. But you can stop it with this plugin — WordPress Firewall. It won't stop every determined hacker from zapping your blog — but it's definitely worth installing if you're maintaining more than a few blogs. After all, you simply can't upgrade every blog instantly every time a vulnerability is published for WordPress or any of the plugins you've got installed. So this plugin might buy you some much-needed time … and sanity. It investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. Here is…

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Excerpt: Circuit City was a terrible brick-and-mortar store, don't get me wrong — but is it just us that noticed they had one of the best online experiences of any electronics retailer? Great categorization. Search that worked. Faceted search that also worked (mostly). Checkout with pretty context-sensitive illustrations to let you know where your CVV code is — not a #@#$ link that bounces you out! It ran circles around BestBuy's online store for a long time. I think it was still better — but now it's dead. In fact, just last week when writing requirements for an eCommerce…

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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're still alive, and you're sick of getting attacked. We are, too. So, at least…

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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, if a little mean. Fix it, and then it just might happen the…

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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 just plain wrong! Kudos to Mike Sullivan for fixing some of the issues with non-blocking…

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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 still won't help for 0-day exploits, and it's not easy when you're managing…

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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," and "wp-rdf.php" files the same way you would do it in HTML.  Voila!Note: This change was suggested by someone to me, but I don't have…