WordPress has come a long way since I started using it. Now you can update wordpress from the admin panel, add plugins and themes right from the admin area too. There’s practically no reason to manually ftp things in the correct directories anymore, which was always such a hassle.

If you follow the news or hit the boards you probably know WordPress installs have been getting hit just about everywhere. You know it’s bad when your host sends you an e-mail about it.

So yesterday and today I took the plunge. I updated all 15 blogs to the newest WordPress, 2.5.1. Wasn’t as bad as I thought, I had been putting it off.

In reality, if you want to be one of those that finds the good in everything, which I try my best, this exploit problem was a good thing.

• I was forced to back up my databases, something I don’t do often enough.
• I upgraded to the latest and more secure WordPress version.
• Now I have the cool new version with all the new extras. (still getting use to it).
• Was able to clean up, un-used theme’s, un-used plug-ins, ect.

It wasn’t a bad thing after all.

Did you upgrade yours? I found the current exploit on every one of my blogs, every one.

I just realized I did not post about my blog getting hacked. How the hell did I forget to post it here?

Anyways, a week or two ago, one of my blogs was hacked. Lucky I caught it pretty quick, though mainly by luck.

Seems some asshole figured out my password and got in to my blog admin. They added a number of direct links, some in posts, some actually in my navigation links by creating new pages and adding to the ones I already had up. Long story short, any one hitting my blog was redirected to another site, which from what I could tell was some weird Islamic message of some kind.

My bad, my lazy.

After looking at my passwords, the ones generated by WordPress on install, no I didn’t change them, were not very secure, not by a long shot. I am not going to go in to why they are not very secure, as I don’t want to give any other assholes any ideas.

So don’t be lazy and stupid like me, change your passwords, right now! What I did was open notepad and type in a big long password with all kinds of combinations. Then I pasted it in the change password section of WordPress. I also made sure to save it some where safe as I sure wouldn’t be able to remember the new ones

One thing that got me thinking about the subject was that some one else’s blog was hacked. A little different attack, but you gotta start some where. My thread and the other are both on the Greenguy and Jim Message board, in the blog section, if you want to read more or learn some other things you can do..

This might be old news to you, but something I just learned and thought I’d pass it on.

Recently I noticed my new tags were not showing up in the WordPress default tag cloud widget. Come to find out there is a limit as to the number of tags that will display. The limit is around 45. Odd there is a limit, though some designs or layouts might call for it.

So I got to searching and found the Configurable Tag Cloud widget plug-in. Don’t see much you can’t set with this handy little widget. You can set the limit of tags, the font size for min and max, color range for min and max, how it displays and more. Very nice.

I just installed it the other day, so far working perfectly. I’ll let you know if I have any problems.

I have come to love the addthis social bookmarking plug-in for WordPress. The biggest reason is that it adds the smallest amount of code to your pages, compared to the other social book marking plug-in’s I’ve seen or tried.

Remember, the Search Engines are looking for content, not code. There is also a theory, that the search engines reward pages that have more content than code, from indications I’ve seen I believe it to be true. Can’t be 100%, as I said, it’s a theory.

Anyways, there is one slight “problem” with the addthis plug-in, just a little thing, and that is the positioning of the code on the page. From my own experience, the addthis button often ends up say to close to the content. Ya it’s a nit-picky thing, but I’m sure I am not the only one.

Bottom line you can not position the button as you want, with CSS or even hard code on your theme pages.

I worked on it today and made an easy fix. I edited the code for the plug-in itself. I simply added a div container so I could do what I want from the style sheet.

Recently I found a little glitch with WordPress, though I haven’t had time to find out if there is a fix. I noticed on my future posts, while they post fine, if the post I created for the future is in a new category, the post will publish, but the new category will not. Odd.

Not really a big deal, you can just go into “Manage”, click on “Edit” for the post and just click “Publish”, a two second job, New Category gets posted.

Thought I’d pass it on.

When I listed the plug-ins I use the other day, there was one I wasn’t quite sure about and that was the Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger. I did not yet have data that showed it would work properly, mainly for future dated posts. Well I’ve been using it for a while now and yes it seems to be working just fine, least on the blog I checked.

The logs show me it indeed pings future posts, that was my main concern. Just wanted to update the previous post and plugin in question.

Now get to work!

Have a question or problem with wordpress? You could use Google to try and find your answer, or you could do one better, ask the source! The WordPress.org site is a mountain of everything WordPress. It surprises me how many people don’t use it or even think about it. I can’t think of anything I needed that I didn’t find on the site. Most likely some one has already asked the same question, or had the same problem as you. It’s community run, by volunteers, so give some time for an answer.

I see a number of people complain about comment spam on their wordpress blogs and it doesn’t need to be. With just a few plug-ins you can stop it completely, at least as of this writing and what’s worked for me. Of course it’s not 100% fool proof, but seems to be doing a good job so far.

Akismet – Outstanding spam protection plug-in. It’s come with WordPress by default for some time, so you probably already have it. If not, go get it now! If you do have it, make sure it’s active.

Math Comment Spam Protection – this one I really like. It’s a plug-in for WordPress that basically makes the comment, human or not, answer a math question, such as, “What is 3 + 5?”. So far it seems the bots haven’t caught on, plus you can change the question at any time. There is talk that bots can bypass it’, but it takes some human intervention before the bot is smart enough. Actually Ihad a blog that was starting to get some comment spam, Akismet was catching it, but I can be anal sometimes, I didn’t want to see any! Well, after installing the plug-in, I haven’t seen one spam. I doubt they just stopped. I’ll be honest this one takes a little work, you do need to paste some code into your theme comment file, but it’s not that hard. This blog is using the plug-in, check out a single post to see it in action.

Hope it helps…

Found this link some time back and thought I’d share it. It lists 100 free “quality” WordPress themes. No reason to have an ugly blog these days. Check it out. Smashing Magazine WordPress Theme List.

There are a few other links at the bottom of the post (which is long!), linking to some other great lists.

Enjoy..:)