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!

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…

Of course counters like this one are only good to give you an idea of traffic. They can’t be considered as technically accurate because of bots, self-inflicted views, and reloads. Some would argue that it’s just for the novelty of watching the number get bigger and feeling good that people are reading your blog. However, I’m using it as a metric to see overall traffic trends and see what types of posts are more popular.

Based on the documentation, the code to show the view count on each post has to be manually added to your theme. In your wordpress dashboard go to the Theme Editor under the Design tab:

The highlighted code above is what I added. It checks to see if a function called ‘the_views’ exists and if so it is launched. That function displays your view count based on the options you’ve set up. Where the count shows within your post block is determined by where you place this code. It is up to you to figure out the proper placement and will be different depending on your theme. It just has to be somewhere inside the main loop where posts are displayed. Through trial and error I’ve settled on placing it right below the tags and right above the comments link. I also put <div>’s around it so that it will be on it’s own line.

Of course this only places the count on the posts as they display on your main index (your home page). You also have to add this code to the script that is used for single posts and pages. For my theme they were called single.php, and page.php.

Now to the mod. The initial thing I didn’t like about the plugin is that if a post had zero views it showed “Views: 0″. It should be impossible to have zero views because you have to view it to see the 0. Even the first viewer should see “Views: 1″ as they are the FIRST viewer. Clearly it is incrementing the counter after showing the counter. Maybe Lester or someone else can chime in the comments and tell me if I’m doing something wrong. But from from what I can tell, since it only increments the counter when the full post is loaded, the value will be zero when seen on the main page until someone clicks through to the see the full post.

I don’t like seeing Views: 0 and would rather not see anything at all until it has a value. So the mod I did was to only show the “Views:….” if the count is at least 1. You could have it not show the number until it’s over 10 (or some other threshold). Not being an expert PHP programmer I just guessed at how to change the code.

Editing a plugin is done via the Plugin Edior found under the Plugins Tab:

Editing plugins can be dangerous. If you cause a program error the plugin will disable itself – which could have some repercussions that I don’t know about. The highlighted text in the above image shows the code I changed. Originally the highlighted code was only:

echo $output;

By adding the if($post_views > 0) { …. } around the echo I disabled the echo when the number of views is zero. If you wanted to only show the count when it reaches a higher number, just replace that zero with your threshold.

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.

Digg This

As I said, one of the plugins I found puts a Digg icon on every post in your blog. I guess it depends on how you view things, but I would rather have the ability to add a Digg whenever I feel that it’s appropriate. Not all of my posts are Digg worthy. HM2K.com has a plugin called Digg This which emulates the WordPress.com functionality so that you can use a Digg tag for integration on your WordPress.org site. It also allows you to add a digg icon that refers to a different article.  So if you’re posting about another article you can digg theirs instead of yours.

The problem is that HM2K doesn’t supply a link to the actual plugin. Instead they supply the source code, and give instructions on how to copy and paste it into your own PHP file and install it.  I followed these directions but their source code, because it’s on a web page, had non-standard quote marks and symbols which caused the plugin to crash.  I’ve since fixed it all and have posted an easier to install version of the Digg This plugin on my site for easy access.  Since HM2K is the actual author, if they come out of the woodworks I’ll comply with whatever. But for now I’ve posted it for your convenience.

UPDATE 12/3/08 – HM2K has finally posted it on their site and asked me to take down my version which I’ll gladly do. The above link now just takes you to the HM2K site – if you scroll down you’ll see the link.

To use it download the plugin, unzip it and place it in your wordpress plugin directory (ie: /home/user/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/). Then log into the wp-admin area, and activate it under the plugins section.

To use it simply put a [digg=....] tag somewhere in your post, where …. is replaced with a link to the actual digg post.  Then you’re good to go.  In this post the digg tag looks like this:

It can become a chicken and egg dellima because your Digg can’t be done until after your post is written, and you can’t add the digg tag to your post until after you’ve Digged it.  Just write the post, Digg it, wait about 5 min for the digg to post, copy the URI for the digg page, then go back and edit your post and add in the digg tag.

ANOTHER UPDATE 12/3/08 – I now use feedburner which give me the “Digg This! (4 Diggs) • Share on Facebook • Email this” at the bottom of each post.  Still, I like having both options so that when I’ve got something that it a hotter topic I’ll still sometimes use the Digg This Plugin so that you also see the Digg icon at the top of the post.  Both seem to work fine together.