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What’s Next For WordPress?

Justin Wright — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:58:58 +0000

Now that WordPress 3.0 has been released, many people are wondering what to expect next. Here’s a great video that touches base on some of the things we can expect from WordPress in the near future:

How to Protect Your WordPress Blog from Getting Hacked

Justin Wright — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:45:25 +0000

After you have found cheap WordPress hosting and you have launched your WordPress blog, one vital step you must never skip is to protect your WordPress blog from getting hacked. If you are new to WordPress security and Web security in general, you might hope that there is a thick book, which lists, in detail, everything you need to do in order to protect your WordPress blog from getting hacked and then you have the safest WordPress blog on Earth.

The bad news is that there isn’t such a book and it is not possible to write one. However, there are some steps you should follow in order to at least make your WordPress blog a bit more secure. WordPress is secure but some additional hardening is always necessary.

Minimize the Damage

As with many things in life, prevention is better than treatment but you should always be prepared to react in case the worst happens. One of the best medicines you have at your disposal is a backup. There are some WordPress tools, which allow to backup either the WordPress database only or the whole installation, so get one of them and start using it regularly. Many WordPress hosts, including cheap WordPress hosts, offer various backup tools, so it doesn’t require much effort to find the right backup tools.

Real-time backup is the safest option but in most cases you won’t need it, even if it is available. Weekly or daily scheduled backups are very often exactly what you need. Backups don’t take much time but they are a life-saver if hackers manage to bypass your security.

Peace of Mind with Anti-hack Measures for Your WordPress Blog

Once you get the habit to make regular backups, the next steps in securing your WordPress blog and your peace of mind can be grouped into the following categories:

1. Common sense security.

Security starts with the most basic steps many web masters tend to neglect. Some common sense security steps include the installation of patches and updates as soon as they are released, use of strong passwords (and their frequent change), caution about the places you log from (because if you login from an insecure location and your password can be intercepted, this kills all your efforts to secure your WordPress blog), etc. The careful selection of a reliable wordpress hosting provider also falls into this group of measures – cheap WordPress hosts can be secure but you need to double check.

2. Limit access.

Many hacking exploits happen because the web master was generous in granting access. You should always keep to the least privilege rule and grant permissions restrictively. For instance, if you impose IP restrictions to the wp-admin directory, this could stop many unauthorized access attempts. However, be careful not to cut your own access and lock yourself out! Additionally, you can make many files read-only and give privileges to selected users only.

3. Harden your web server.

Many exploits are possible not because of WordPress weaknesses but because of server vulnerabilities. This is why you need to harden Apache or whatever web server you are using.

4. Secure plugins.

Plugins are what gives power to WordPress but they are also responsible for many vulnerabilities. Sometimes it is the given combination of plugins that makes your WordPress blog an easy target, while in other cases it might be just a separate plugin. Anyway, make sure that you have followed the steps needed to secure your WordPress plugins.

5. When done, check with the WP Security Scanner.

It is naïve to think that it takes only 4 (groups of) steps to secure your WordPress blog – in fact, there is much more you can and should do. If you want to run a security check and see what the report includes, WP Security Scanner will give you an idea of what else you need to fix. The tool in the link is one of the best tools for the purpose, so download it and run it.

These 5 measures are just the beginning in making your WordPress blog secure. Don’t skip them, they are vital.

Laura Hayes is a full time Senior Writer for Web Hosting Search, one of the strongest guides for web hosting. She blogs about WordPress techniques and online marketing.

Photo Credit: CarbonNYC

WordPress for Android Now Available

Justin Wright — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:31:48 +0000

WordPress is now available for Android powered devices. That way you can upload new posts and manage your blog or website even while you are away from your computer. Best of all, it is free for download.

Here’s a video with a brief overview of all the features:

A Few Upcoming WordCamps

Justin Wright — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:46:46 +0000

As many of you know, we love WordCamps. They are a great place to learn new things about WordPress and get a glimpse of what’s happening on the development side. Plus they’re a great venue to meet local bloggers, developers, and WordPress fanatics.

Here’s some details about a few upcoming WordCamps:

WordCamp Boston

January 23
Boston, Massachusetts

WordCamp Indonesia

January 30
Jakarta, Indonesia

WordCamp Greece

January 30
Greece

WordCamp Miami

February 20
Miami, FL

WordCamp Fukuoka

February 27
Fukuoka, Japan

To see more details along with a list of all the upcoming WordCamps, check out the official WordCamp website.

New Features Of WordPress 2.9

Justin Wright — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:03:43 +0000

When WordPress version 2.9 was released, it added a few new features that some people didn’t notice. Here’s a quick video that goes through all the new features and demonstrates how to use them:

Our personal favorite is the new photo editing tool. It makes cropping, rotating, and editing images a lot easier now that you can do it directly in WordPress. Awesome!

WordPress 2.9.1 Has Been Released

Justin Wright — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:54:27 +0000

If you didn’t noticed, the guys over at WordPress released version 2.9.1 yesterday. It contains a few small fixes, as well as fixed the scheduling issue that a lot of people were having. We’re glad to see that this one of the problems they fixed, as we’ve heard from a few people that they were having issues scheduling their blog posts.

If you haven’t updated your WordPress website yet, we highly recommend doing it as soon as possible. Just go to the tools section and choose upgrade.

New Crash Course Affiliate Program

Justin Wright — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:50:37 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, we have relaunched our WordPress Crash Course and now offer two different packages. One of them is the online course while the other one includes a 3 disc DVD set. So far, we’ve had a lot of success with the course and hope to see it continue.

One of our customers emailed us asking if they could promote the course in exchange for a commission. Unfortunately, we did not have an affiliate program setup when we launched the course. However, we have since decided that it would be a great idea to add one.

Our New Affiliate Program

We’ve gone ahead and listed our online WordPress Crash Course in the Clickbank marketplace. Now you can promote our course on your website or blog. We’ll pay you a 40% commission every time you make a sale through your affiliate link.

To become an affiliate, you need to head over to Clickbank and sign up for a free account.

Once you create your account, all you need to do is send traffic to the following link:

http://YOURID.one1000.hop.clickbank.net

Make sure to replace “YOURID” in the link above with YOUR ClickBank Username!

Free Banners

We’ve also put together some banner ads that you can use for free on any of your websites. To access the banners and get more information, please check out our affiliates page.

We look forward to bringing you on as an affiliate!

Link Bait: Hook, Line and Sinker

Justin Wright — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:37:18 +0000

What’s it take to write good link bait? Look, I’ll level with you, seventeen monkeys in a corrugated steel shack writing on IBM ThinkPad’s with dead batteries could very likely come up with an article for a blog that would run up Digg quicker than you could say “Copy pasta.”

But can they do it consistently?

Rule One: The Hook

The appeal of a good link bait article isn’t what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it and what you’re saying it about. Yes, it has to be factual (usually), and it has to be well written (always), but most importantly, it has to be appealing and engaging. The most important thing is to hook your reader with the concept of your article first. A cursory glance at one of the more popular social link-sharing sites has an article on the front page lauding the “Greatest Fake Bad-Asses in Music.”

In the grand scheme of things the topic of this article and its information is unimportant, insignificant, and completely subjective. It is based on circumstantial evidence and observational humor. Here’s the thing, though: it’s not the New York Times, it’s the internet. The concept article is catchy: I like music, I like bad-asses, and I want to seem like a bad-ass. Would I rather spend five minutes scanning an article about how I may fake being a bad-ass or spend those five minutes collating the data in my .xls spreadsheet for this afternoon’s meeting? In other words, I’ve been hooked.

Rule Two: The Line

Unlike the bottom line, or the pickup line, this concept keeps with the ‘fishing’ analogy in the sense that if you don’t have the right line, you’ll lose the fish.
People browsing the web have little to no attention span. In fact, I’ll take a second to thank the three of you who have read this far, and in doing so, lose two of you.

The body of your link bait is your fishing line. Your article has to be engaging, it has to be well written, succinct and scanable. It has to be written with the reader in mind. You’ve hooked your reader with your concept of the ‘Nine Things You’d Hate to Find in Your Parent’s Room’ title. Good, that means you’ve gotten a page-view. Now get them to click that little social networking ‘Share this’ button by writing a good article and making it worthy of the five minutes and two seconds it takes them to read it.

The point of link bait is to draw traffic to your site with engaging articles, images, videos or audio. When it’s really engaging (note that I didn’t use the word “good”), it finds its way to the social news sites and from there, in front of exponentially more eyes each time a reader clicks ‘Digg this.’

Rule Three: The (you guessed it) Sinker

Here’s a cold, hard fact about the internet. It’s been monetized. We live in an age of misinformation. That article I mentioned before about the musicians pretending to be bad-asses? It’s for a site whose main demographic is white males, ages 18-24. The intent behind that article is to draw traffic to a site so a guy in an office with a slick silk tie can tell the new body-spray company executive how many page views their site gets so he can quantify (justify) the cost of his advertising space.

It’s about money. There’s your Sinker.

So the third rule is “Always Consider Your Reader.” Your article has to appeal (loosely) to the broader interest of the people who you want to visit the site it’s being posted on. You’re strengthening your ability to sell advertisements by focusing on your intended demographic. Bringing Granny to your site with an article about ‘How to Knit A Wig’ is fine and good if you’re writing for ‘Women’s World,’ but it may be drawing the wrong kind of traffic to a site dedicated to high end car audio.

Reeling It In

Promise, Perform, People: the three basic building blocks of solid link bait. Hook potential readers with the promise of a good article, perform to a standard where they’re proud to share it with others, and remember the specific people you are making promises to and performing for.

You know something? I’d read that article by the monkeys in the steel shack. I’d even post it on FaceSpace for my friends saying “check this out,” but it wouldn’t be long until I’d be on to something new.

Unless those monkeys can deliver consistently, then I might hire them myself.

Jake Walker is a freelance writer and has been working on the web on and off for the last 10 years. An avid blogger he has had many posts featured on major social networks and other news portal websites. He currently works as a search engine optimization consultant with the other smart people at SEOP.com

Photo Credit: L. Marie | CC 2.0

WordPress Version 2.8.5 Released

Justin Wright — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:38:31 +0000

If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to upgrade your WordPress installation(s) to version 2.8.5. The latest version was released yesterday and has a handful of security fixes. A few worth noting from the WordPress development blog include:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

As always, it’s important to upgrade as soon as possible to give yourself the best protection against attacks and hackers. So make it a goal today to get all of your blogs/websites upgraded to the newest version!

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Need Help With WordPress?

Justin Wright — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:08:06 +0000

If you haven’t checked out our WordPress tutorials yet, you’ll notice that we’ve created a bunch of video tutorials to help you with WordPress. The topics we covered include topics like themes, monetization, and plugins. We’re currently adding as many videos as we can to our collection and hope to continue in this manner.

However, we are currently on the lookout for suggestions as to what we should cover in our videos. Are there any things that you struggle with when it comes to WordPress? Do you have a certain plugin that you can’t seem to figure out? Perhaps you’ve downloaded a theme but cannot get it to work?

Regardless of what the problem is, we want to hear from you. So please leave any suggestions or questions you have as a comment on this post. We will then try our best to create a high quality video that answers your question (or solves your problem).

We really look forward to hearing from you!