Toba Joseph

iPhone Utilities Everyone Must Have
It’s easy to say that one of the best aspects of the Apple iPhone is the fact that you can personalize your iPhone based on your own personality.  True customization of applications is one of the greatest reasons why so many individuals are flocking to the iPhone.  However, it is with the near daily introductions of new applications that makes the iPhone so amazing.  If you are known for getting your point across, and not being afraid to say what is on your mind, than you will love the Marq application for the iPhone.
This application is low-tech, however, it promises to get your message across to anyone you want to.  The reason why this application is called Marq is because it simulates a marquee-style.  How this application works is by you typing in any message that you want, and then it is displayed in a powerful marquee-style method, which scrolls across your iPhone screen.
This is a great way to get your thoughts heard, and you can do so in a unique way.  You are given the ability to change the speed of the text, the colors as well as the message field.  The Marq application is a fun addition to any iPhone.  However, there are other iPhone applications that serve a more practical purpose.  One of these applications is the iRibbit, which is literally like having eBay on your cell phone.  This amazing application allows you to not only view items that are up for bit, but they let you actually bid on items as well.  If you are an avid eBayer, than you must have this application for your iPhone.
Many people are worried about using these type of applications for placing bids on eBay, especially if you eBay for a living.  However, this application won first place in the eBay International Widget Contest.  So, you can bid in confidence that you are getting the upmost in security, stability and simplicity.  Whether you just want to look for items to purchase, or if you want to run your entire eBay store through your cell phone, you can do so with this application.
Another great feature about this application is the fact that you can also manage your watch list, by adding and removing items.  This is a great application to have if you are not always able to be by your computer, but you want to make sure you don’t miss out on the latest Nintendo Wii auction.
Applications are a great way to customize your iPhone, as well as create a unique and powerful way to communicate with the world around you.  Whether you want to have an application that is silly and does nothing more than provide you and your friends with entertainment, or if you have a more serious purpose for these applications, such as running your eBay store.  No matter why you need an application, or what type of application, you can find practically any widget for your specific needs.  And it is this that makes the iPhone such an incredible tool in communication and productivity.

Making money writing and getting a solid income from it is enjoyable.  Did you know that there are writers who can earn 5 digits income monthly and still get plenty of time for their personal activities?

Writing for profit is an excellent money making Internet business.  First of all, there is a good demand for quality writers that can deliver projects on time.  Second, a writing career is very flexible.  You can become a freelancer, a contract writer, a news wire or magazine correspondent, or you can establish yourself as an independent author.

Indeed, making money on the net would be easier if you will maximize your writing skills.  So here are some lucrative options that you can explore to monetize your writing skills.

Making Money Writing Ebooks

There is a good deal of money waiting for you if you start self-publishing your works.  It is easier nowadays to become an author and a publisher by creating ebooks.  If you are good at writing fiction, then you can compile your short stories into an ebook and make it available on self-publishing sites.

You can also write manuals, how-to guides, and non-fiction resource ebooks.  Publish these ebooks under your name and you can surely build a good reputation as an expert author.  Just make sure to provide good value for your readers so you can develop a solid base of followers.

Making Money Writing as Freelance Professional

There are lots of freelance portals and networks where you can get projects from clients around the world.  Making money from outsourced writing projects is a good way to have a steady and solid monthly income.  In fact, some freelancers are working full time in such networks.  They can build a good client base that ensures a steady flow of income for them. You too can explore these freelancer’s networks and start taking lucrative writing projects.

Making Money Writing on Blogs and Article Hubs

There are many article directory networks that pay authors who contribute articles to their sites.  You can get a share from ad revenues if your articles become popular.  Some article networks will pay hundreds of dollars for each article that receives massive hits.

Your blog can also become a money making machine.  Keep your blogs updated with fresh and relevant content so you can attract more readers.  If your blog receives plenty of traffic, then your ad revenues will surely soar.  There are successful blogger-writers who earn 6-digit income by simply writing high quality content that are useful for their readers.

Lastly, you can also earn by submitting news stories or feature articles to online news services and e-magazines.  All you have to do is to send a letter query to editors and make a proposal for your articles.  Once you get the approval of the editors, you can now cover an event or write a feature column.  Publishers usually pay hundreds of dollars for each piece of article.

Making money writing is a good online business and there are many ways to monetize your writing skills.  You will surely enjoy a solid stream of income as long as you can produce good quality content.

This is  the second part of the WordPress plugins articles as put together by my friend, Arindam at ArindamChakraborty.com . You may want to read  part one, which laid the foundation first. Sit back and enjoy!

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A few weeks ago I wrote the first part of this article which you can find here. Hopefully this is lighter and less boring than the previous one! 

Most of the plugins I mention in this article are used by me personally. There are also a few that I don’t use personally but feel that they may help you; I list them separately in this same article. Note that not every plugin I mention here is used on this blog; I have a few other blogs as well where I use them. 

4. Comment Plugins: There are different types of plugins you can use for your blog’s comment form; some enhance the comment form’s style, others add anti-spam captcha code to it in order to stop hackers, and yet others offer SEO benefits (to the commenters).

Regardless of what plugins you choose to use, I suggest that you avoid the ones that ask you to manually add PHP codes to your core theme files. The one big disadvantage of this method is that you would never be able to upgrade your theme in future; if you do, you would certainly lose all the theme customizations you have done and you would have to redo them all again! Talk about big waste of time!  I have to confess that I have “missed out” on some of the coolest plugins out there, simply because they require theme code editing and I am too obstinate to budge! 

Instead, I would suggest that you look for plugins that work through widgets (best option) or shortcodes; while widgets work great in adding content to the sidebars (such as recent posts, calendar, archives, etc), shortcodes are great if you want to include “post-specific” stuff. For example, you may want to add a “Buy Now” button to some of your posts, but not all. In this case shortcodes can be of great help.

To add, you can find a huge list of plugins with “widget support” here.

One of the very first things you could do (and this is not specifically related to “blog comments” only) is to make all URLs in your blog content turn into hyperlinks automatically; this would save you tremendous amount of time that you might have otherwise spent on manually hyperlinking each URL.

There are basically two plugins for this job (as far as I know): Autolink URI (which works especially good on newer versions of WordPress), and Auto-hyperlink URLs (which can work on WordPress 2.0+, 2.1+, 2.2+, 2.3+, and 2.5+; I have not been able to make it work on a blog running on WP 2.9, but feel free to test it yourself; personally I am biased in favor of Autolink URI  ).

If you DO NOT want the links in comments to be automatically hyperlinked (you might want to do it in order to reduce comment spam), you can use the Remove Links in Comments plugin side by side. As an example,Youtube.com is one site which turns all links you put in the comment body into plain text URLs (AFAIK).

If you want all external links (applies to both the links in your posts and comments) to open in new browser windows, you can use the Target Blank In Posts And Comments plugin. I don’t think it has been updated for a while, but anyway it works fine even on my WP 2.9 blog.  If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that all external links of this blog (that is, links to domains other than ArindamChakraborty.com) open in new browser windows. 

WARNING: However, I ask that you read the web accessibility guidelines on NOT opening new windows and also make sure you know about your country’s laws on the same, BEFORE using the plugin! For example, recently I read on a public forum that in Britain it is illegal to design a site which is not accessible to users with a disability; if the disabled visitor wants s/he can sue you and you might end up paying a considerable fine…!

If you are a UK citizen you may also want to read the following:

The Disability Discrimination Act, 1995 (this act actually mentions what I just said above)

The Disability Discrimination Act, 2005 (this is an updated version of the above act; feel free to check it out for any amendments)

And, some web accessibility guidelines (in case you have to follow them):

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0

Worst case scenario, if you have to really remove the “target_blank” from all external links of your blog in future, it is as easy as deactivating the plugin! This is much better than manually replacing the “target_blank” attribute of each link in your post content with “target_self”. 

They say that honesty is the best policy (of course, reality is very different, but that is quite another story), so if you want your commenters to know how their comments could be used by you, you can use theComment License plugin. Despite the fact that it is supposed to be compatible only up to WP 2.5 (according to the plugin author) I have managed to make it work on a 2.8.4 blog; however, I am yet to use it on a 2.9 or 3.0 blog! 

Once you install the plugin it would add the following license text at the end of your blog’s comment form (in fact, if you scroll down below you will see the same text here as well, provided that commenting is not closed for this article  )

“By submitting a comment here you grant me a perpetual license to reproduce your words and submitted name/web site in attribution.”

Needless to say, you can change the above text in any way you like by clicking on  “Settings=>Comment License” in your blog, or just keep it “as is” 

Coming to SEO, Lucia’s Linky Love is a good way to reward your loyal commenters by removing the Nofollow attributes from their links once they have posted an “X” number of comments on your blog (YOU define the “X”). You can be very generous and Dofollow a commenter once they have posted a comment, or you can be a bad guy like me and ask for 3 nice comments before you give them the dofollow.  Pretty neat, and needless to say that I use it on this blog. However, note that this is anUNSUPPORTETD PLUGIN!

Later on I would discuss an SEO plugin which also includes the functionality of Linky Love (although I am yet to experience it in action, coz the blog where I use it is very new, with no comments  ).

BTW, one way to keep away comment spammers is by NOT rewarding commenters with DOFollow, haha => read this post from the author of that plugin.  .

Two plugins which can attract both spammers and genuine commenters (I used to get more spammers than genuine readers anyway, the reason why I stopped using them) are CommentLuv and KeywordLuv. Use them at your own risk! 

Don’t believe me? Just type keyword luv in Google. The following site should come up in the results page:

http://www.scratch99.com/wordpress-plugin-keywordluv/

Click on the link and you will see the following notice:

“COMMENT WARNING: Please read my comment policy below

This blog is no longer DoFollow

You are seeing this message because you arrived at this site from a webpage containing “keyword+luv” in the URL. Although this may be a valid, it may also be an indication that you are a potential comment spammer….”

Here is a screenshot of the warning, in case things change later on (click on the image for a larger view):

Now if you want to know the name of the plugin that blogger is using, then you MUST read this entire boring article!  However, one thing worth mentioning is that if the plugin author is facing the problem of spam, apparently because of that plugin, who are we anyway (kidding)? In my humble opinion, the easier solution is to nip the problem of spam in the bud by avoiding those two plugins. 

No Curly Quotes is one plugin which is a MUST-HAVE, regardless of whether you allow comments on your blog or not. WordPress has a bad habit of turning commas and double quotes into “curly quotes” (kinda like the smart quotes of Microsoft Word™, in case you are familiar with them).

These curly quotes not only deform the post titles badly, but also mess with the content of your posts terribly. This plugin helps you get rid of these nasty quotes! According to the plugin author, it is compatible only up to WP 2.8.4; however I have tested it successfully even on a WP 2.9 blog!

NoOldSpamLinks might be useful if you are “paid” to post on your blog (for example, paid product reviews). From the plugin author’s description:

“Today brings a flood of announcements that Google has knocked down many blog Page Ranks. This is thought to be due to a number of factors including excess numbers of paid posts. So, it is natural that I should hurry up and update “No Old Spam Links”, the plugin that lets you automatically “nofollow” sponsored posts after your contractual obligation to “follow” has expired. In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts has never commented on “Text links and PageRank” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?”

Personally, even I am not sure how far would this plugin help “save your website’s pagerank™”, but hey I have never actually used the plugin as “getting paid to post” is not my cup of tea! 

Install Subscribe to Comments plugin and let visitors follow your blog comments (whether or not they have commented on your blog). From the plugin’s description:

“Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!”

Note that this works only on a “per-post” basis. To see a demo, click here to comment on this article. You will find a checkbox on the comment form: “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail“. If you wish to comment AND also follow all the subsequently comments to this entry, then check that option!

On the other hand, if you want to follow all the comments of this post WITHOUT posting a comment, scroll down below and you will see the text “Subscribe without commenting” – enter your email address in the box located under that text and you are done! 

Personally I would appreciate if you post a nice comment on my blog before leaving, but it is really up to you! 

Already bored? Wait, I have many more things to tell you before I let you go! 

Have you ever thought of rewarding your loyal commenters? Sure you can manually count the number of comments posted by each commenter and list the top commenters on a separate page, but life becomes a lot easier for you if you automate the entire process by using the Top Commentators Widget plugin! 

How you choose to reward the commenters is up to you. To get started, activate the plugin, then click on “Appearance=>Widgets” option to find and add the widget to your blog’s sidebar. As soon as you do this you will be presented with a set of options you can customize according to your needs! Below I will tell you about how I have customized some of the options of the plugin:

a) Show in home page only?: No

Reason: Self-explanatory. I want each and every visitor to know about my loyal commenters, not just those who visit my blog’s homepage. In other words, regardless of the page the visitor lands on, s/he WILL see the list of top commenters! 

b) Display Gravatar?: No

Reason: In the past, I had the experience of Gravatars messing with the layout of my blog! 

These are just two of the several options the widget offers. Also, these are not hard and fast rules; let me repeat, you are free to customize the widget according to your needs! You don’t need to follow the Nuttie Guru. 

If you have ever commented/replied to a comment on a video at Youtube.com you will see four different options to choose from: “Reply“, “Vote Up“, “Vote Down“, and “Flag for Spam“. The “Reply” option is in-built in WordPress by default, and the Comment Rating plugin lets you add the other two functions: “Vote Up“, and “Vote Down“. Basically, this plugin makes “user moderated comments” possible. 

From the plugin’s description:

“If you’re tired of moderating readers’ comments on your blog, stop doing that and let your readers decide which comment deserves to be shown.  If you’re getting outrageous comments on your blog, don’t get too  angry yet. Let’s see how many readers feel the same. You can do these tasks (and more) with the Comment Rating plugin.

Comment Rating makes “user moderated content” possible…Poorly rated comments (too many Dislikes, not enough Likes) can be hidden in a click-to-see link, just like those on Digg. Highly-rated comments (a lot Likes and few Dislikes) can be highlighted. Hotly-debated comments (many Likes and Dislikes) can also be highlighted to draw more attention, to fan more votes and comments.”

However, unlike the plugin author, I would not ask you not to moderate comments at all; if you are too lazy, at least moderate the user’s first comment (most of the time, you will know from the first comment whether the user is a genuine commenter or a spammer).

Comment Warning is one plugin I have not used yet, but this is what the plugin does (from the plugin description):

“Comment Warning is a plugin for blogs that currently use a DoFollow plugin, or have used such a plugin in the past. It detects visitors arriving from URLs that indicate that they are likely to be potential comment spammers and ‘warns’ them of the blog’s comment policy“.

Just in case you were wondering, this is the same plugin being used at http://www.scratch99.com/wordpress-plugin-keywordluv/ to display that warning notice! 

Another plugin I have not had time to use yet is theContact Commenter plugin. The plugin’s description says:

“This Plugin lets you send email messages to individual or a group of commenters.“.

I am not sure if the plugin includes an unsubscribe link in the mailings you send out; if not, then you would be better off not sending commercial emails to your commenters. 

I think you already know about Greg’s Comment Length Limiter plugin from the first part of this article. In short, if you want to stop folks from posting very long comments (in order to prevent the comments from overshadowing the main blog entry by virtue of their length), you can use this plugin. On one of my blogs I have set the comment length limit to just 2500 characters, but you may set any character limit you want!

Ozh’ Absolute Comments is a very neat plugin. It makes replying to users’ comments more convenient for you, the author of the entry. From the plugin’s description:

“Reply instantly to comments, either from the email notification, or the usual Comments  page, without loading the post first.”

Note that (at least in my case) the plugin does not add the @commenter’s name in the reply form when I reply to a comment from the main dashboard (that is /wp-admin/) but it does so when I reply to comments from the comments page (that is, /wp-admin/edit-comments.php).

WP-CommentNavi: From the plugin’s description:

“Adds a more advanced paging navigation for your comments to your WordPress 2.7 and above blog.”

This is one plugin I have not used yet, because I am not sure what extra functionality it adds to the default comment pagination offered by WordPress (look under “Settings=>Discussion=>Other comment settings” for options to customize your default comment display settings).

In spite of this I mention this plugin because I don’t claim to know-it-all; maybe there is some cool functionality in the plugin that I might have missed out on – after all it is one of the most popular comment plugins if the stats of Wardress’s official plugin directory are to be believed. Of course I would certainly appreciate if you could point me in the right direction!  Perhaps the clues are here? 

Some plugins that did not work for me:

On one of my blogs I wanted to let commenters edit their own comments. For this I tried 3 different plugins. Unfortunately however, none of them worked for me:

Especially for AJAX edit comments (which probably you won’t find in the officially plugin repository of WordPress, for it has recently become a “paid plugin”; btw, here are I am talking only about the “free” version of the plugin, as I have ZERO experience with the paid version), the jquery takes a considerable amount of time to load, so that you won’t even notice the link to edit comments as well as the countdown timer, until a few minuets have passed!

This would not have been a bad thing if the plugin showed some sort of “Ajax loading gif” image while the jquery would load, so that people would know that their comment would be loading in a few minutes.

From what I have experienced, if I (as a registered user) post a comment and leave the blog immediately or browse to some other posts of the same blog, I would never see the comment editing screen (it could be a plugin bug or a problem specific to the theme I am using), and thus would not know that I have the option to edit my comments for a few minutes! 

Ajax Comment Preview is a different avatar altogether. I can only speak from my experience of installing it on WP 2.9. As soon as I activated it the admin dashboard went blank! I had to delete the plugin via FTP in order to get my dashboard back. 

I don’t really want to badmouth any of the free plugins, because I believe the developers spend considerable time in developing a plugin, and then it needs to be updated constantly in order to make it compatible with the newest version of WordPress. Not a very easy job for them, I am sure; to add, they don’t get paid for it either!

However, I thought that when I am telling you about comment plugins I should also tell you about these two for they are very popular in their own category, and when I mentioned them, it would be unfair if I don’t share my experiences regarding the plugins with you! 

To conclude, I would suggest that you rather use AJAX edit comments than Ajax Comment Preview! 

Another plugin that is supposed to serve the same purpose (but did not work for me) is Edit Comments XT plugin; however, it can be “excused” based on the fact that it is compatible only up to WP 2.2.1!

NOTE: One thing I would like to warn you about is: apart from your core theme files (not all themes are made equal, however), comment plugins are often the major culprits behind the slow loading of a blog. Building a beautiful blog is of no use if it takes excessive time to load! You would lose at least half of your visitors because online surfers have very little patience (and to add, not every household is lucky to have a broadband connection either).

Also I have heard that Google™ may lower the quality score of a landing page if it loads too slow (if you want you can read the article here, but it won’t apply to you unless you are an Adwords™ advertiser)

If you think your blog is loading too slow, here are some of the things you could do to troubleshoot the issue:

Step 1: If you have the Bad Behavior plugin installed on your blog, deactivate it temporality, else external bots won’t be able to access and check your blog! Once you have tested your blog’s speed, you can re-activate Bad Behavior again!

Step 2: Visithttp://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/, enter your blog’s URL in the “Enter URL to diagnose” box, and click on “Submit Query“!

Step 3: You will be shown a list of stuff found on your blog, such as images, CSS, JavaScript, etc, the size of each of them, as well as the ones you need to optimize in order to speed up your blog (note that only the warnings highlighted in red color are of real concern; you can ignore the rest). I would suggest that first of all you save the results page on your hard drive, so you can easily refer to it in case you need to!

You can then visit your blog’s home page and click on “View=>Page Source” (I suggest Firefox for this as it shows the source code in an easy-to-read, colorful format), check for the scripts that are causing problems by using the “Find” function (to display the “Find” box, you can press CTRL+F on your keyboard).

Maybe I did not make any sense to you? 

Let us say that the name of the culprit script that is causing your blog to load slowly is: xxx.js. So you visit your blog’s homepage as a guest and click on “View=>Page Source” option from your browser’s menu bar. Once the source code is displayed, click on CTRL+F to display the “Find” box. Next put “xxx.js” (without quotes) in that box. The script’s name would be highlighted in green color. Thus you would be able to pinpoint the culprit plugin and get rid of it easily! 

Step 4: Log back into your blog as admin, deactivate the culprit plugin and re-activate bad behavior plugin again!

Hopefully you won’t mind posting a nice comment below. 

To be continued…

A good friend of mine, Arindam at ArindamChakraborty.com published a very educative article on some cool WordPress plugins that you really should consider implementing on your blog. He has given me the express permission to republish it here since it would be a waste of time trying to beat this excellent and interactive tutorial by writing another similar one. Enjoy and take action!

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Yet another long and boring article for you! 

Most of the plugins I mention in this article are used by me personally. There are also a few that I don’t use personally but feel that they may help you; I list them separately in this same article. Note that not every plugin I mention here is used on this blog; I have a few other blogs as well where I use them. 

Backup Plugins
Security Plugins
Spam Control Plugins

1. Backup Plugins: Regardless of what your blog is about, the very first thing you need to install is a database backup plugin which automatically backs up your database to a selected location at regular intervals. Thus if anything goes awry with your blog database you can easily restore your old blog with one click! 

How frequently you backup your blog is up to you; personally I backup my blog database every week, but there is no hard and fast rule about it. You can, if your hosting space permits, backup your blog database everyday! 

Personally I use the WP-DBManager most of the time. There was a time in the past when I did not like the plugin, but it has come a long way since then. Right now it is probably the best (local) backup plugin you can have for WordPress. 

NOTES: Just downloading a cool plugin is not enough. It is also important that you setup the plugin properly on your server:

a) This is a given, but a lot of people make this mistake so I would mention it anyway. Inside the plugin archive you will find a file called htaccess.txt. You should NOT upload this file to your plugin directory; rather, you should rename this file to .htaccess and upload it to your backup directory in order to protect it from prying eyes!

b) The default backup directory generated by the plugin is an easily guessable name: “backup-db“. Even though the folder contains the .htaccess file I am still not fully confident that it would help secure the backup folder from hackers. The kind of paranoid guy I am, I would go a step further and rename the backup folder to something cryptic. I will then update the “path to backup” in the “DB options” section of the plugin.

Like if the original path was:

/home/username/public_html/wp-content/backup-db

And the name of your new backup folder is:

backup-dbxx5ty

Then the new “path to backup” would be:

/home/username/public_html/wp-content/backup-dbxx5ty

Immediately after you update the path, you may get an error message saying that the path does not exist. As long as your backup folder path is correct and the backup files are being stored there just fine, you can safely ignore this message and it should vanish when you re-visit the plugin page later on! 

c) This is another given, but since I got to make this article long and boring, I would mention it anyway: don’t forget to CHMOD your backup folder to 777! If you don’t know how to do the CHMOD, please check out myFTP tutorial.

d) Optionally, WP-DB-Manager can also optimize your database periodically along with backing it up! Optimization helps keep your database clean from broken tables and all other junk!  I use this option as well as another plugin called WP-Optimize to manually optimize my database once in a. 

e) If you want to backup your database immediately, just click on “Backup DB” link. 

f) Here we have such terrible internet connection that I cannot really imagine downloading a 100MB SQL database with no disconnection in-between!  So I always choose to Gzip my blog database; this makes the backup file smaller (and thus easier to download) for me! I would also suggest that you download the database directly from your server via FTP instead of using your browser download; this would ensure that your database file is fully downloaded with no issues. 

To open a .gz file, I use WinRAR.

On one of my blogs however, WP DBManager did not work right (might be an issue of “plugin conflict”) so I installed the classic WP-DB-Backup plugin there instead! It is not as versatile as WP DBManager, but pretty simple to use.

WP-DB-Backup plugin automatically creates a random backup folder (unlike WP-DB-Manager) in order to keep it secure from hackers. Nevertheless, I still suggest that you upload this .htaccess file (I “stole” it from the WP-DB-Manager plugin  ) into your backup folder; unfortunately the plugin author does not provide you with this file in the plugin package.

2. Security Plugins: Please note that most of the plugins discussed here merely offer you what is known aspreventive security. When it comes to WordPress security, I basically try to follow the silence is golden philosophy. 

WP-Security-Scan is the very first plugin I install on a virgin blog to check its security. It offers you a lot of information, but best of all, it tells you about the key vulnerable points of your blog through which hackers may gain an unauthorized entry into your blog.  Immediately after installing the plugin, browse to the “Security” and “Scanner” sections of the plugin to check what is wrong with your blog.

Few things you may want to do to make your blog secure:

a) Use a strong admin password: Ideally, your password should contain both uppercase and lowercase alphabets, as well as numbers and symbols; in addition, your password should also be minimum 8-10 characters long. If you own Roboform you can use its password generator to auto-create unique passwords of any strength; if not then you can set it up manually. Make sure that you DO NOT use any easily guessable names or dictionary words as passwords, and don’t forget to change your WordPress password often – first immediately after installing it and then at regular intervals (at least every once 1 month or so).

b) Make sure your server’s file permissions are correct: Secure File Permissions Matter. Unless otherwise required, all files of your server should have 644 permissions and all folders should have 755 permissions by default. Also take a look at Hardening WordPress. 

c) Turn off PHP error display: If you are on shared hosting you may not be able to do this unless your host is smart enough to have done it on his own; but if you are on a VPS or dedicated server, you can edit the php.ini file of your server and set display_errors to ‘Off‘. Note thatyou should do this only on a production site and not a test server, because this setting will stop showing you any and all php errors on your browser (you can however still check the errors by logging into your web hosting control panel and accessing the “error log” there). More info here.

How does this help, you may ask. Let us say a hacker visits your blog, and guesses the URL of a plugin whose vulnerability he knows very well. If the plugin is indeed installed on your blog, and the hacker accesses it as a visitor, the plugin would obviously display an error message to the hacker.

This would convince him that the plugin is indeed installed on your blog and then he would proceed to hack your blog through that plugin’s vulnerability! On the other hand, if he sees nothing except an empty page, he would be dumbfounded and leave your site. As in all matters of life,silence is golden.  (interestingly the author also has a plugin by the same name which I am using on one of my blogs).

d) Hide WordPress version from both meta tag and footer: This is important, once again to keep the hacker guessing about your site. If the hacker becomes aware of the version number of your WordPress blog, and if he is aware of even just one of the security vulnerabilities in that version he might use it to the fullest extent to gain access to your blog. For me it is done automatically by my WordPress theme (I use the free semiologic theme which is too good for me to switch to anything else); however, there are also a number of plugins you can use to achieve the same effect (see below).

e) Change user “admin”: In my option this is not really required as long as your password is strong and cryptic. Even if your admin username remains “admin”, the hacker won’t be able to access your blog unless he knows your password as well! Yet, if you want to change your admin username, you can do it by manually editing your database via PHPMYadmin or using a plugin (note that I have not used either method). Be sure to backup your database before you take this step! If you install WordPress via Fantastico then you get to choose your custom username and password; however, since Fantastico ’s softwares usually tend to be old you may need to do a manual/automatic upgrade of WordPress after installing it.

f) Change your database table prefix: Yet another thing that you MUST do in order to secure your WordPress installation. By default your WordPress database table prefix is wp_. You can change “wp” to anything you want, such as “wphfjf7_” or “ppplo_”, etc. You should do this at the time of installation (and NOT after it) by editing the wp-config.php file (inside that file you will find a section called “// Change the prefix if you want to have multiple blogs in a single database“)

Anyway these tips are nothing new. I already mentioned some of these things in an older article of mine. In that article I also mentioned how you can secure your “wp-admin” folder through WP padlock pro (and you can even download it free from there). CAUTION: WP padlock pro plugin is great if your blog does not accept user registrations (such as mine  ). BUT…

…if your blog is set to accept registrations from everyone, and if you install WP Padlock Pro there, then the users would have to jump through a few hoops in order to login to your WordPress blog each and every time, and they may not appreciate it. In case of such blogs I recommend two alternative solutions:

Solution#1: Use Theme My Login and Theme My profile to not only hide the admin dashboard completely from non-admin users but also make it look unique. In fact, if you are tired of seeing the same old boring Admin dashboard of WordPress and want to give it a cool look then too these plugins are perfect for you. Best of all, they are very easy to configure!

WARNING: From my own tests on a WP 2.9 blog, I can confirm that the Theme My Profile plugin is incompatible with both the WP-User-Online and TPC-Memory-Usageplugins.

Solution#2: Use WP Hide Dashboard – it hides the whole dashboard from non-admin users except the link to their profile; so that they easily update their profiles easily and at the same time be unable to gain access to your admin area. However, it does not hide the footer links in the admin area; so if you wish to hide them then you should also use the Admin trim interface along with it. The disadvantage of “Admin trim interface” is that it does not offer you a “Per role” configuration option, meaning that anything you choose to hide would be hidden globally – not just from the users but also you!

However the advantage is that it is very easy to use, thanks to the helpful screenshots offered by the plugin author (a more complicated plugin that does the work of both “WP-Hide-Dashboard” and “Admin-trim-Interface” is the Adminimize plugin; however, due to its complicated setup as well as lack of proper documentation in English I had to refrain from using it).

Solution#3: In case solution#2 does not work for you, you can try out DDHideAdmin. It is not as powerful as WP Padlockpro, but it serves one big purpose: it hides the entire admin panel from non-admin users (make sure you are okay with that), thus hiding your WordPress version number as well as other sensitive information from prying eyes! 

Another MUST-HAVE plugin for security reasons is Limit Login Attempts (You won’t however need this if you use the WP pad Lock pro software/don’t allow user registrations on your blog). I cannot describe the plugin any better than Vladimir, from whose blog I came to know about it actually!  In short, here is how the plugin maybe helpful:

By default, WordPress allows unlimited login attempts to all users, a very good setting for making brute force attackssuccessful! Mr. Hacker visits your blog and tries to login as an admin using different passwords, to see which one clicks. In theory he might eventually be successful if your chosen password is short and weak and there is no limit to the number of login attempts per visitor/user.

Enter Limit Login attempts! It stops the hacker dead by locking him out right after the 4th unsuccessful login attempt. Poor hacker would now have to wait for another 20 minutes before he could make another attempt. However, if he is locked out for 4 times, then he may have to wait for a whole day before he could make another login attempt. Of course, all these settings are customizable. 

WARNING: You, the admin, should remember your passwords really well if you don’t want to be locked out by Limit Login Attempts (if you do get locked out, the only way you can gain access to your admin area is by deleting the plugin from your blog’s plugin directory via FTP). Hmm, let me take this opportunity to shamelessly promoteRoboform once more! 

Noindex Login plugin adds the “noindex” tag to your WordPress login page. Thus, if a hacker searches for all WordPress login pages, your page won’t feature in the search results. More information on how SEO meta tags work.;)

3. Spam Control Plugins: Can any WordPress blog ever be spam-free? Yes if you close comments and trackbacks. pingbacks, but then, that would defeat the very purpose of blogging and you might as well be happier building static, plain HTML sites instead! 

Okay, let us discuss some anti-spam plugins I personally use.

One of the very first plugins you should install on your blog is the bad behavior plugin. The uniqueness of this plugin is that it stops spambots from even visiting your site, thus saving your precious server bandwidth. In short, it works like your blog’s doorkeeper. The default settings of the plugin work very well for me. Be sure to UNCHECK the “Display statistics in blog footer” option, in keeping with the silence is golden philosophy! 

Akismet is installed by default so no use discussing it here. If you are not moderating each and every blog comment manually, then I would suggest you also use the WP Spam free plugin. This would help you get rid of most of the initial spam you would be getting, and Akismet can manage the rest. Again, in keeping with the silence is goldenphilosophy, you should disable the “Help promote WP-SpamFree?” option. I know it is not very ethical to do but something you HAVE to do if you don’t want your blog to be the target of moronic WordPress hackers! 

Because WP Spam free is known to get quirky sometimes, it is also recommended that you check the “Blocked Comment Logging Mode” option, so that you can check out the “false positives“, that is, legit comments getting caught as spam, if any! Immediately after you enable this option you will see a red message like “The log file may not be writeable. You may need to manually correct the file permissions.
Set the permission for the “/wp-spamfree/data directory to 755 and all files within to 644.” This is not exactly an error message but rather a presumptuous warning.  In my case I had to CHMOD all files inside the “data” folder to 666 in order for the plugin to work properly; your case maybe different however!

For your own good, I suggest that you DO NOT use plugins like AskApache Password protect, WP-Hashcash, Cookie for Comments, etc., if you are using WP Spam free because they don’t play very well together (and on another note you won’t need to use them, anyway). More Known Plugin conflicts. 

WP-Spam-Free cannot however protect you from innocuous, discreet spam comments like the one discussedhere, and neither can CAPTCHA, unlike what the OP proposes there. So if this is your problem you can use theMinimum Comment Length plugin to set a minimum length for the comments; comments shorter than this would be automatically disapproved without needing further intervention from you (sorry, does not seem to work on my 2.9 blog; do you know of an alternative?). Along with this you may also want to use Greg’s comment length limiter if you don’t want comments to reach the length of full-blown articles (in my opinion such comments are usually posted in an attempt to overshadow the author of the original article, and mostly found on political blogs).

Would you like to put a stop to email harvesters? Well then use Cryptx, the ultimate email obfuscation plugin. It is designed to obfuscate any mailto: links you use in your articles, as well as the mailto: links posted by users in their comments.  

On my blog (no, not this one okay?  ) I have the following options of Cryptx checked:

i) Presentation: Text for link
ii) General:

-Apply CryptX to: Content, Comments
-Type of decryption: Use Unicode to hide the Email-Link
-Add mailto to all unlinked email addresses.

Hope it helps you with the initial setup, though these are not hard and fast rules! I chose Unicode over JavaScript for obfuscation for the simple fact that I hate JavaScript and also it might not work for users with JavaScript turned off in their browsers.

Is a certain spammer bothering you too much? How about banning his IP permanently? WP-Ban helps you with that and more. If you have WP-Spam-Free installed, then you may not need it; still worth a look! WARNING: WP-Ban does not play very well with WP-Super-Cache, in case you use it; more information can be found here. 

To be continued…

Disclosure: ArindamChakraborty.com is affiliated toWinRAR and Roboform.

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