If you are interested in following either my genealogical work -or- learn a bit more on how recommend building genealogy websites with WordPress you might find the article valuable.
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If you are finding that your site is benefiting from countless unwanted, undesired visitors from certain governmental jurisdictions, there is something you can do about it. Actually the solution is quite simple and is explained in excellent detail at Block-a-Country. Rather than fight these undesireables a single IP at a time… follow the instructions on Block-a-Country. It took me about 45 minutes to block three countries on 20 sites.
I apologize to anyone from one of the countries I’ve blocked, if you are one of the good guys. But certain nations seem to think that the Internet is a place to abuse the good graces of … well you get it.
Keep your site and information a bit safer; you can do it.
For those of you out there interested in seeing a genealogy site built using ‘mostly’ WordPress, please visit ManyRoads. Obviously the site is one of mine (my family genealogy). However, I think it provides a pretty decent example of what you can do to slice and dice a ‘bunch’ of information into a ‘pretty useful’ format.
I have tried to use a plugin for the genealogy database backend (TNG). Security remains a problem for that plugin, in that it does not work for me. However I do have a single set of logins between the two systems and databases when used in the manner seen on the site. As is likely obvious, the ManyRoads site uses a large number of plugins including (Revised list as of 29 January 2010):
- Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
- All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist
- AStickyPostOrderER - AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists.
- AVH First Defense Against Spam - This plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before content is served.
- Bad Behavior - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
- Category Order- The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.
- cforms- cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. Please see ____HISTORY.txt for what’s new and current bugfixes.
- Collapsing Blogroll- Output the built-in blogroll where the shortcode [collroll] is placed in the post/page. The categories can be collapsed.
- Count Per Day- Counter, shows reads per page; today, yesterday, last week, last months … on dashboard and widget.
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator- Generates a fully customizable sitemap
- EG-Series- Better organize and highlight your posts by grouping them into series.
- Enhanced Links- Allows to get better control over the links listing. Also provides a widget view of the links. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
- Enhanced Recent Posts- A plugin for wordpress which enhances the built-in “Recent Posts” widget. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
- Exclude Pages from Navigation- Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
- Flexi Pages Widget- A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
- Global Post Password- Enables you to define a global password for all password-protected posts. Click here to change the password.
- Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
- Hana Flv Player- The best way to embed Flash Player and Flash movie in your WordPress Blog. Includes GPL Flowplayer and OS FLV player. Usage: [hana-flv-player video='/source_video.flv' /]
- Hungred Feature Post List- This plugin is design for hungred.com and people who face the same problem! Please visit the plugin page for more information.
- Just One Category- On a category’s archive page do not show posts from that category’s children categories unless those posts are also a member of the original category in question. Based on Front Page Categories by Ryan Boren.
- List category posts- List Category Posts allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using the [catlist] shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can use [catlist] as many times as needed with different arguments. Usage: [catlist argument1=value1 argument2=value2].
- My Page Order- My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.
- NextGEN Gallery- A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
- OpenBook- Displays a book’s cover image, title, author, and other book data from Open Library.
- p2pConverter- This plugin allows you to easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface. You may either click on your Manage tab in Administration, and you will see a Convert option under Posts and Pages sub-tabs, or click Convert while editing a post or page in the bottom right side bar. A p2pConverter role capability prevents unwanted users from converting pages (i.e. only Administrators and Editors have this ability), which can be adjusted by using a Role Manager plugin.
- Page Links To- Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.
- pageMash- Manage your multitude of pages with pageMash’s slick drag-and-drop style, ajax interface. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organising of parenting.
- PollDaddy Polls- Create and manage PollDaddy polls and ratings in WordPress
- RB Internal Links- Link to other blog posts and pages without specifying the full URL. Uses a UI to ease finding the post or page you want to link to.
- Redirection- Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
- Secure WordPress- Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
- SEO Smart Links- SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
- SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam- Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. Also is WPMU and BuddyPress compatible. Settings | Donate
- SidebarTabs- sidebarTabs allows you to easily widgets into Tabs
- Simple Tags- Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
- Snazzy Archives- Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site which creates completely unique archive pages.
- Social Bookmarks- Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. Use the plugin options under Dashboard > Social to configure it.
- Subpage Listing- Displays a directory-like listing of subpages where <!–%subpages%–> exists in the content of pages. It will be displayed if a page is blank. txfx_wp_subpages() can be used to display subpages in the sidebar. See this plugin’s site for details.
- TNG WordPress Integration- Integrates TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy) with WordPress.
- Topsy Retweet Button- Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy.
- TreeMagic-Cypress- Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible
- Visitor Maps and Who’s Online- Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Settings | Donate
- WordPress Download Monitor- Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. If you are upgrading Download Monitor it is a good idea to back-up your database first just in case. You may need to re-save your permalink settings after upgrading if your downloads stop working.
- WP-phpMyAdmin- Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console
- WP-PostViews- Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Modified by David Potter to include options for when and where to display view counts.
- WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
- wp-scanner activator- This Plugin adds <!- wpscanner -> to enable wp-scanner to scan your blog.
- WP-SpamFree- An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
- WP Render Blogroll Links- Outputs your Blogroll links to a Page or Post. Add [wp-blogroll] to a Page or Post and all your WordPress links/Blogrolls will be rendered. This extremely simple plug-in enables you to create your own Links page without having to write a custom template.The output can easily be styled with CSS. Each category with its links is encapsulated in a DIV with a classname called “linkcat”. All the links are attributed with the class “brlink”.
- WP to Twitter- Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.
- YD Zoomify- This WordPress plugin allows for simple insertion of a Zoomify zoomable web image in a post content, page or template.
Tags: admin, BLOG, buddypress, css, Cypress, downloads, follow, java, plugin, quick, security, site, treemagic, web 2, WordPress, wpmu
Of late, it has come to my attention that someone is stealing this site’s (my) content.
I guess I should be honored that I am writing something that someone finds useful. On the other hand, it offends my sensibilities that these folks did not have the common courtesy to request the right to reproduce my content — which by the way, I would have granted– or provide a link to or mention of my original posting. Afterall as a BLOG publisher I want people to read my materials.
Anyway I found a wonderful posting on Lorelle’s site that provides a brief how-to guide on dealing with content theft. I highly recommend you read Lorelle’s articles/ post s on the subject (and there are quite a few).
As for my journey into this realm, I’ll add brief notes of what I have done in this post (so watch for updates here):
- My first activity was to send the offending site a Cease & Desist demand (you can find guides on how-to write these by searching the web). In the demand, I allowed that even at this late stage I would grant them permission to use my content if they met certain conditions such as asking me for permission and providing links to the original pages. This action was not as easy to accomplish as you might think. Their site has no contact page… so I posted the cease and desist demand as a comment to every posting of mine that I could easily find as a WordPress Comment.
more soon….
One of the handy items worth doing with a website is highlighting specific content. It turns out that there are a number of WordPress plugins available capable of doing the work, to one degree or another. However, for me there is one that stands above the crowd:
=== d13slideshow ===
The beauty of this tool is that it does what most of the others can but it does not conflict with the plugins I use. If you want to see the plugin in action you may view it on two of my personal sites:
Each site provides a slight variation on use of the plugin… but you’ll get the idea. It is worth noting that the plugin does require a small addition to your theme code. But the change is truly small and not very hard to accomodate; plus accurate instructions are provided with the plugin.
This is a real winner.
There are numerous actions a prudent web admin can take to make their site more secure. In an effort to place the key safety precautions you can employ on a WordPress site I have gathered a number of actions from multiple sources and placed them here.
Please note that this posting is not original content, rather it is a merged aggregation from the references listed below.
Item 1.
Always Upgrade to the current version of WordPress
Upgrade your WordPress as soon as possible. Most WordPress releases patch security loopholes, fixes which are essential for your continued protection.
Item 2.
Change Default Passwords
That is the first thing to do, if you are still using the default 6 lettered admin password which is sent to you via e-mail. Give a tight and secure password with numbers and letters and symbols jumbled up so that granny’s bruteforcing technique doesn’t cost you your blog. Don’t be too concerned about loosing your password and choose a simple password as you can always change your lost WordPress password.
Item 3.
Remove WordPress ‘version string’ in your theme files
1. Go to WordPress dashboard, click on presentation -> edit themes -> header.php
2. Find and remove this. bloginfo(‘version’) Save the file.
Explanation: Hide the version number of your WordPress such that it will be hard for hacker to find security loopholes for the specific version of WordPress.
Item 4.
Place empty ‘index.html’ file in the plugins folder
1. Open a text editor ’save as’ and save the file as index.html (be sure to change the filetype from text files to all files if you are running in windows)
2. Upload the file to WordPress wp-content/plugins folder in your web server.
Explanation: Hide the plugins used by your WordPress blog. It uses the same concept as above which is to hide security loopholes in the plugins.
Item 5.
Upload a copy of .htaccess file in the wp-admin and wp-includes folders
1. Using FTP program or your webserver file manager, go to the root folder of your server and download .htaccess file (set ’show hidden files’ first if you’re using FTP program such as FileZilla)
2. Go to your wp-admin folder
3. Upload the .htaccess file you’ve downloaded from the top level directory.
Item 6.
Use SSH instead of Telnet, SFTP instead of FTP
For real security use ssh to access your site instead of ftp which is inherently insecure and open to snooping of your account details as the authorization details (login & password) are transmitted in clear over the internet. With ssh you can use secure ftp protocol like sftp to do anything you can do with ftp. Similarly you can use ssh instead of telnet to securely connect to your Linux / Unix server
Item 7.
Create a robot.txt to place in your top level directory
Recommended contents include:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads
References:
- http://www.bloganything.net/922/secure-your-wordpress-blog
- http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/20-wordpress-security-plug-ins-and-tips-to-keep-hackers-away/
- wordpress codex
Tags: admin, BLOG, plugin, security, site, Themes, tips, WordPress
As many of you may have noticed, I have been working on improving the ‘noticability’ of my sites using select WordPress Plugins. I can say with certainty now that the following plugins have had a very positive impact on my SEO rankings but more importantly on my site traffic. The plugins I refer to are:
- YARPP- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- I use this plugin with customized settings (variable per site and my business objectives) to improve cross-linking of information on my site. This not only improves some of the ratings in Google but seems to have a positive impact on whether or not people stay on the site and look at additional related information. AND.. since I am in the business of providing information to people, this serves a very improtant function. (Similar functionality can be made available via Simple Tags– although I find this plugin superior.)
- All in One SEO- This plugin is very useful in improving what Google and others see when they examine my web-pages. The one dependency I have observed in using this plugin is to load the same keywords I use/ generate in Simple Tags in the Home Keywords area of this plugin. This seems to provide a higher hit rate on my pages when the search engines come by. It additionally appears to have a positive impact on making relevant pages available to search engines.
- SEO Smart Links- I use this plugin for much the same reason as YARPP. The big plus is that this plugin places hot links within the body of Posts/Pages to facilitate cross-navigation around the site.
- Simple Tags- is possibly the key to everything. If you are like me and often forget to tag things this plugin makes it easy to augment and re-tag your entire site at will. If you keep the tag list in this plugin as your master, it also makes it easy to cross-link and cross-reference all your SEO data across the site.
- Be certain to look at the admin function for this tool because you can invoke the following key functions:
- Related Posts- cross-linking of posts where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
- Related Pages- cross-linking of pages where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
- Relevant Tags- listing of the tags used on the Page/ Post
In order to better understand the relative merits of moving from NoFollow to DoFollow, I have begun a test on this site.
Basically I am using two new (for me) plugins.
The basic notion is that Lucia’s LinkLove allows for an automatic reset of the default NoFollow for comments to DoFollow, after pre-determined number (determined by me) of approved comments have been added by a given user to this site. The NoFollow Reciprocity module sets and/all comments to NoFollow if the receiveing site has their site set to NoFollow.
Hopefully this test will demonstrate an uptick in this site’s ratings and traffic without a significant additional burden in SPAM. I’ll post the results of my test, as they become obvious. If you have ideas of other plugins that I should add to this mix, please let me know.
Updated:11 April 2009
Updated: 15 April 2009
Like many of you, I am always in search of excellent themes for my existing and new WordPress sites. Also, probably like most of you, I seem to be constantly searching the web for them. In order to help consolidate my list of useful sites (eliminating many I find either to expensive or of too poor quality, here is my list:
- WordPress
- WordPress Multi-User
- Top WordPress Themes
- Bala Sadish sites:
- Smashing Magazine
- BlogOh!Blog
- MyGreenCorner
- WP Skins
- Fresheezy
- EZwpthemes
- Site Ground
- WeLoveWP
- Free WordPress Themes
- Widget Ready Themes
- Free WordPress Themes
- OSS Skins
- WordPress Themeland
- WordPress2u
- ThemeBot
Reviews
If you have other ideas or suggestions please be sure to let me know and I’ll add them here.
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