Dreamhost up and down!

Dreamhost is up and down today- just like yesterday. When these sorts of things happen, I am always I glad I automatically backup my database using Wordpress Database Backup. It’s frustrating enough to deal with the on again, off again host. It would be worse if I were worrying about losing posts! Tags:Dreamhost plugins WordPress

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Blog Security: htaccess block

Reading Matt Cutts blog, I got a chuckle when I read a blog security tip I’d been using at my knitting blog for two years. Evidently, the tips is news to SEO blogging types?

(Which maybe means if you get your security tips from knitting blogs, you an avoid getting hacked the way Greywolf was in January of 2007?)

Anyway, since I know this can happen to anyone, I’m going to describe what the hackers do, and then describe two things you can do to increase security against these hacking attempts.

One will require you to deal with ‘.htaccess’ manually, but results in the most convenient set up while working at home. The other involves using a brand new plugin available at Ask Apache. That plugin is almost perfect. However, it could be improved. Because I got an error when trying to leave comments at “Ask Apache”, I’m going to suggest improvements to the plugin. (The developer asked!)

If he or she takes the suggestions to heart, this will be a truly awesome plugin. (It’s already very useful.)

So, now onto the meat of the article.

What do hackers do?

Click here to read more.
 

Tags:blog Blog Hacks blogging hacking htaccess plugins seo WordPress

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Lucia’s Linky Love:
New Features Available.

Lucia’s Linky Love(a dofollow plugin for Wordpress) now has new features!

• New! User can delay dofollow some number of days. Default is zero, and that’s what I plan to use. This was added to fulfill a request.
• New! Problem related to a call to a function that did not exist in PHP 4 is fixed. This is provided to fulfill a request.
• New! You can skip the do follow for a particular name. I use this on my name both to save CPU and to minimize the risk that Google might think I am Google bombing to gain rank on the mega-important word “Lucia”.
• Do follow url in “name” after a specified number comments from a particular visitor: Blogger can specify the number “N” in a range.
• Do follow urls left in comments after a specified number of comments by a visitor.
• No follow “names” with too many characters. Number of characters specified by blogger.
• No follow all comments left more than 14 days after a blogger stops blogging entirely. This prevents your blog from becoming a link farm if you get busy, hit by a car or whatnot. (The superstitious know doing this will actually prevent you from being hit by a car.)

I also made a few invisible changes to further reduce the cpu. These are technical things that have to do with when and how the database is called. Note: This program already calls the database less than 1/4 as often as the original Linky Love.

Future Plans

I am looking into a few other issues to see if there are other ways I can optimize the plugin just in case we discover the plugin is cpu or memory intensive at blogs that contain many, many comments in the database and/or are get lots of comments.

I will be developing an comments review interface that simplifies catch and delete old comment spam that may have slipped through in the past. In particular, I what I have nick-named “Daniel” spam. That is spam that sort of looks innocent the first time you see it, but turns out to contain the same phrase over and over.

For more information, visit

Summary

Download Lucia’s Linky Love. Upload to your plugin directory. Activate. Select your settings. Tell people about it.

Finally, leave me comments and trackbacks and let me know how Lucia’s LinkyLove works for you. And remember: I use this plugin. So, if you leave several comments, you’ll be dofollowed too!