Archive for the “WordPress” Category

Just an update on the wordpress virus.  After several hours of research followed by 3 or 4 hours of fixing, I’ve wiped out the virus and cleaned up the database.  I also implemented guvnr’s 10 tips to make wordpress hackproof.  (Ok if that’s not offering a challenge to all the hackers out there…)

The main advice everyone gives is obviously to update to the latest version of wordpress and all your plugins, but once infected it’s too late for that plan to help.  Other tips are to of course use a strong password and to disable the default admin user account.  But first I had to remove the ‘back door’ admin user – which was giving the virus access to my site. Then I went through the 10 tips closing up vulnerabilities where possible.

One place where I almost hosed myself was that somewhere in the process I accidentally reduced my admin account’s privileges to that of a normal author, without first creating a new admin user.  After that blunder, logging back in as admin was impossible – so there was no way to create a new admin user.  Ultimately I had to hack back in to my own site (via the mysql database) and create a new user with admin capabilities.  Ahhhh, technology!

Today I installed a new comment system called IntenseDebate. It provides better functionality for comments, comment threading, reply-by-email, commenter profiles, reputation points and comment voting.  It should be a bit more fun than the old system.  To take full advantage of the new system sign up for IntenseDebate by clicking on Comments below.

Someone also recently asked about commenter avitars. IntenseDebate allows you to either upload an avitar to your profile there or use a gravitar.

So go ahead and click “Comments” below to see how it all works…

WP-PostViews is a free plugin by Lester Chan that counts views for each post. Installing and activating the plugin begins the tracking, but it’s up to you to add code to your theme somewhere to display the view count. No offense to Lester, but the documentation left a little to be figured out. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t explain how it works or what it counts as a view. With a little testing I figured out that it only counts the view when someone loads the full post. Even if the entire text of the post is seen on the main page – meaning that you didn’t use the “more” tag – it won’t increment the view count unless the post is loaded by itself. This gives misleading results because if the entire post is on your main page it’s unlikely that anyone will click through. Therefore even a popular post could show only a few views. This is something that I might try to fix eventually. Read… »

Last night I did a bit of modding to my site (to my blog theme). For yesterday’s Dell Mini 9 post I was interested in tracking my traffic. I was also interested in using that subject to generate as much traffic as possible. So today and tomorrow I’m posting about two wordpress plugins that I added, tomorrow’s is to help get an idea of traffic, and today’s is to add the Digg icon to a post – which you see here to the right.

The reason I’m calling these ‘mods’ is that they were a little more difficult to install than a regular wordpress plugin and each required me to edit (modify) code.

In searching for a way to integrate Digg into my WordPress theme I first found a couple of plugins which will automatically add the icon to every post in your blog.  Then I found this article which basically says that WordPress already supports it and that all you have to do is add a [digg=...] tag. Well, after about 20 minutes of trying I realized that there is a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.  My blog is a WordPress.org site, meaning that I’m using their free software and it is hosted on my own server, not the WordPress.com servers.  Therefore, the Digg integration mentioned in that article didn’t apply to me because I didn’t have any plugins to support it. Read… »