1. Thousands of 3rd party plugins – majority of which are free
   See the official plugin directory
2. Thousands of 3rd party themes – mainly free, but for a small cost you can by some amazing premium designs
   See the official theme directory
   
3. WordPress is written in php with MySQL database back end meaning you can host your blog on 99% of the webservers in the world.
   php is a dynamic web language
   MySQL is a fast full featured database
4. Easy to use well thought out admin interface
   WP-admin dashboard screen shot
5. Constant development cycle
   Download the latest build from wordpress.org

PART ONE: wp-security-scan plugin

Download: WP Security Scan

Author: Semper Fi Web design

Cost: Free

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the plugin upload it to you plugins fold and activate it in your plugins menu in the admin area of your blog.

When the plugin is active you will get a new tab in the top menu like this:

Here is what each tab will tell you

Security Tab

This tab is a ‘dashboard’ for the plugin, it reports to you all of its findings. One of the plugins features is to help you rename the ‘admin’ user and it will report to you here in red if the admin user exists. The way to rename this user is listed on a page called Change WordPress Admin Username. The other items it reports on are:

• WordPress version: 2.6.2 You have the latest stable version of WordPress.
• Your table prefix is not wp_. Your WordPress version is successfully hidden.
• WordPress DB Errors turned off.
• WP ID META tag removed form WordPress core
• “admin” user exists.
• The file .htaccess does not exist in wp-admin/.

Further down the page is a table reporting more system level information which includes:

• Operating System
• Server
• Memory usage
• MYSQL Version
• SQL Mode
• PHP Version
• PHP Safe Mode
• PHP Allow URL fopen
• PHP Memory Limit
• PHP Max Upload Size
• PHP Max Post Size
• PHP Max Script Execute Time
• PHP Exif support
• PHP IPTC support
• PHP XML support

Scanner Tab

Clicking on this tab brings up a list of files and directories which it checks that they all have the correct permissions state. If it’s correct the line is highlighted in green – if it’s incorrect then it is highlighted in red. The correct permission status is displayed so you can change the permissions accordingly.

Password Tool Tab

This is a neat facility which it gives you the ability to check the strength of your passwords. A field is displayed on screen and you are invited to type in a password, a graphical bar indicator progresses as you type, alongside words telling you the strength of the password.

Another nice touch is it automatically generates a random strong password which you can just copy and use.

Database Tab

It seems there are two major vulnerabilities in WordPress the first is the auto-generated ‘admin’ user – this is a security issue because every WordPress blog will probably have this user, therefore a potential hacker already knows half of a Username and Password pair. The second issue is the name of your tables in your database. By default when you install WordPress it auto prompts you with a table prefix of ‘WP_’ if you leave it as this then a hacker also now knows all your table names. This is a simple one to combat because all you need to do when you install is change the prefix to something else then install. This won’t prevent a hacker from getting in but it will make it more difficult.

If you have already installed your blog the Database Tab has the answer. Clicking on the tab presents you with a field populated with your current table prefix. Here you can now change it to something else, but as the big, bold, italic letters say:

Make a backup of your database before using this tool

Support Tab

The support tab is under construction but is a place where you can link back to the publishers changelog and documentation.

Conclusion

My conclusion of this plugin is it highlights the two most over looked vulnerabilities in WordPress – the admin username and the table prefix. Both vulnerabilities are fixable and this plugin shows you how to do it. What’s more having these highlighted to you will teach you to install more securely in the future. Some of the info that the plugin reports will go right over most bloggers heads but so long as you don’t get bogged down with the unimportant stuff you should be OK.

[rating:3.5]

Overall I would give this plugin 3.5/5

Killer feature: the ability to change the table prefix in one go.

So here are three killer tips for you to maximise your post input.

1. Resize the window

Take a look at the bottom right hand corner of the post input window (and edit window for that matter) and see that the blue bar has a grey chevron icon in it. Click, hold and drag down (or up), this will resize the window.

This is very useful, but the change isn’t permanent and the next time you write or edit it’s back to its normal size.

2. Hit the blue button

This isn’t a facility of older incarnations of WordPress. Along the row of icons (starting with B then I then ABC etc) is an icon of a blue button it should be about the 2nd from last icon. If you click that the whole input box goes full screen and everything else disappears from the display. Now you have maximum input space. To get back to normal you click the button again and the usual input page is returned. Please note saving or publishing is not possible in this full screen state.

3. Permanently resize the input window.

This option is so understated I never realised it was there. In the admin, go to Settings, then click on the Writing tab. The first option is: ‘Size of the post box’. All you need to do is increase the value in this field and hit save. Then the next time you go to your write or edit page the input window will be your new enlarged size! The beauty of this is the enlargement is permanent.

If you have found any obscure WordPress options please comment below. For the first person to comment with a great WordPress tip I will stumble a page on your blog.

It’s not a hard folder name to type – but I wish it didn’t contain a dash and was slightly shorter. So I went and renamed my ‘wp-admin’ folder to ‘admin’.

Here is a tip: don’t do it because it doesn’t work. You get an error up that complains about the admin.php file and on inspection there are ‘LOTS’ of hard encoded links to the wp-admin folder. Too many to make it viable to change by hand – especially as a WordPress update could put it all back to how it was.

So basically as it stands with WordPress at the moment (version 2.6.2) – you can’t change the name of that folder, so I’m just going to have to continue being fed up.

So how do you count your words? As I’ve said many times before don’t use Word to type your blog posts, so that means using Word’s count facility is out of the question. So what should you do?

Well when you are next writing a post on your blog, glance to the right just under the SAVE and PUBLISH buttons is a handy little word count gem built straight into the core of WordPress. Keep typing and watch the little counter increment every few seconds.

The problem doesn’t actually lie in the WordPress coding, it seems to lie within the settings of the webserver that is dishing out your files. Fortunately there is simple answer to this and it lies in doing a quick edit in your .htaccess file.

It seems that some hosting accounts have SecFilterScanPOST enabled and this is causing the problem.

Alter your .htaccess file by adding these two lines of code:

SecFilterEngine Off

SecFilterScanPOST Off

Now try to upload your picture again and you should find it working.

Please note: I’m not a webserver techie and I have to hold my hand up and honestly say that I’m not sure why turning off these two options makes the difference. I do know that they were on for a reason – that reason may be because it’s a default install and they can be either on or off without making any difference, or it could be that it’s a critical bit of set up that really shouldn’t be turned off.

So here is a shout out to anybody with webserver knowledge to join in the comments on this post and tell me what’s what with these settings. So please follow this post’s comments in either the comments RSS feed or subscribe to the comments below.

As with any of our advice the usual disclaimer applies: back up before you do any alterations and be aware that you do the mod at your own risk.

1. Write at least two posts

Promoting your site is a given, no promotion, no traffic. But the traffic will only flow one way and never return if all your readers see is stale content. You need to write at least two articles a week, more if you can (if you can’t try and get guest articles from your peers) and post them a day or so apart. TIP: better traffic spikes will come from posts that appear at the beginning of the week – there is an assumption that news is ‘freshest’ at the start of the week. A great resource of tips and how to’s to help you improve your writing is www.copyblogger.com

2. Check for broken links

Links that end in a 404 page will lose you traffic so fix any incoming or internal links that are broken. A good plugin for checking your posts is Broken Link Checker. An awesome plugin for managing incoming broken links is Redirection it allows you to take an incoming URL and map it to a new post via 301 redirects. It’s the only way to preserve traffic to your posts when you change a site structure.

3. Check your Webstats

You know in the movies where you see the big macho hero choosing his weapons before he goes off and does something amazing, and he picks up a big gun, looks at it lovingly… then puts it back and picks up an enormous gun, snorts a laugh and nods his head in approval? Well your website statistics are that enormous gun. Your site stats are where you find out who is linking to you, how much traffic you are getting and what pages your visitors are looking at. The stats can tell you your most popular pages and therefore you will know what kind of content your audience is hungry for. There are many stats packages around, your hosting will come with some and there is of course Google Analytics. I’m currently using WordPress.com Stats which is a great plugin because it causes no extra load on your server and hey, who else but WP knows enough about WordPress to produce good accurate stats? A word of warning: only check your stats once a week, checking stats is like weighing yourself when you are on a diet, check to often and you don’t see any progression. Check once on a regular basis and you get to see the movement.

4. Plan future posts

Doing step three will make this step a breeze. While you are checking your stats, look out for your busiest pages or notice when your busiest times are (and note what you did to produce the extra traffic) and plan your next posts to extend your popular content. If you find your popular posts aren’t really where you thought your blog was going, don’t dismiss them and blindly push on, be sensible about it and let the market lead you, as they are the only experts in all this.

5. Don’t give up!

In every bloggers life there are moments of despair, moments where you think “Argh F**k It! This is going nowhere” if you are like this then you are probably checking your stats too often! Everyone is in the same boat here, don’t assume that others are getting more success than you, some might be, but others definitely won’t be. Just keep going and don’t give up. If you feel isolated then join a community, I’m in the Blog MasterMind coaching program and there are forums and communities to help keep me going – you can join too and I strongly recommend that you check it out.

6. Do Back up!

I will continue to harp on about this for probably the life of this blog, and even beyond, I might even have it etched on my Tomb Stone:

RIP
Ian Blackford
Blogging Rocket Webmaster
(*Snigger* I can RIP – I backed up!)

Get a back-up plugin, set it on a schedule to back up at least once a week and then forget it – job done. A great plugin for this is WordPress Database Backup

7. Take a break!

There is a lot to blogging, a lot more than people realise and if you do all the above every week along with your blog promotion and digesting information from others you are going to need a break. So don’t beat yourself up for a taking a little time off, switch off your computer turn on the TV – go on, I bet there is a good film on!

Plugin Master

I first came across Pawan and his plugins when I needed to prevent my blog from becoming a victim of Ping spam, and his MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin was just the job. I then went on to use many of his other WordPress plugins almost too numerous to mention. Pawan just keeps coming out with great plugin after great plugin, so he was a natural choice for my now (getting famous) 5 Q Interview.

MaxBlogPress and Pawan’s plugins can be found here:

MaxBlogPress.com

1. Who is MaxBlogPress and what is www.maxblogpress.com all about?

MaxBlogPress is a team which focus on creating software/plugins for bloggers for helping them better monetize their blog as well as attract lots of traffic to it. Currently, MaxBlogPress.com offers many free wordpress plugins for helping bloggers use wordpress in more effective way.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I think I dived into blogging around the early 2005. That time blogging started getting quite popular and was the latest buzz. I tried wordpress for my test blog to have personal experience with it. That’s from where i hooked and started using it for most of my projects.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes, I spend full time for MaxBlogPress.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up MaxBlogPress ?

The challenge which I’m facing from startup to even today is keeping up with so many feature requests/bug fixes for our plugins. WordPress constantly come up with new version and each new version might break our plugin. Also, we face unforeseen problem like conflict with other plugins, different configuration of wordpress and webhost etc…

We spend most of our time helping other bloggers run our plugin smoothly and adding new features for existing plugins.

To overcome this problem, I’ll be hiring more developers for making time for new innovations. But these challenges will still stay as the part of our daily work due to the nature of our work.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

The one advice I’ll give to all bloggers is same old “Write killer content” for your blog. This is the base of your blog and you must make it strong. If you don’t then whatever latest tricks you apply, ultimately you’ll fail.

Instead of writing lots of low quality content, focus on few good content. Ask yourself, would you read a blog with 90 posts of which 75 are simply useless? OR would you read a blog which have got only 15 blog posts but all of them are hard hitting valuable post?

Also, make sure to spend majority of your time in promoting your blog so that your content get good exposure and can have many regular readers for your blog. One mistake most bloggers do is they simply keep on writing new blog posts but never ever think of getting more exposure to their blog.

When you create a post WordPress saves the author details for you, some themes will display this on the blog posting. If you are logged in as the default user (admin) your post says something like: This post was written by: admin

Well that’s not great is it? However you have a way of sorting this out, here is how:

1. Login to wp-admin
2. Navigate to Users –> Your Profile
3. Scroll down to the ‘Display name publicly as’ option and look in the pop up menu

So long as you have filled in First name, Last name, Nickname (in the same panel) you will see different permutations of your name which can be used for display.

A real person in a virtual world

Adriaan Pienaar lives and works in Cape Town South Africa and is one of the developers over at WooThemes. I came across Woo while I was looking for a new theme for this blog, and their stuff blew me away. Since talking to Adriaan I have realised that Woo is just one part of his online life, there is a load more going on over at his personal blog Adii WordPress Rockstar. I caught up with Adriaan via email and asked him my usual Five questions – his answers are great and here for you all to read.

The Woo themes can be found here:

WooThemes Premium WordPress Themes

1. Who are Woo and what is www.woothemes.com all about?

WooThemes is a theme club & store for niche-based WordPress blogging & CMS templates. The business is currently co-owned by myself, Magnus Jepson (www.jepson.no) and Mark Forrester (www.markforrester.co.za), whilst we collaborate with various other well-known designers & developers on a regular basis.

It is our aim to create a niche community for users of our themes, where we can add value; not only through the design & functionality of our themes, but also through quality support, modification help, superior customer service and other user resources (such as tutorials & free themes). With our themes, we try push the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress and in the process target niche solutions for WordPress themes. We also try create themes that work out of the box and are basically ready to go once purchased.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I started blogging at the beginning of 2007 and there was really two reasons for that… The first being that I had started to follow other blogs and thought that “Hey! This is cool and I can / want to do it as well!”; so I got a blog, because I had something to say. The second reason was business-related, as I knew that I needed a cheap, cost-effective way of marketing myself and my freelance services.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes and no. I’ve started up a formal company now – {radiiate} designs – which has basically taken over my freelance design & development work. So as the company grows, my own blog will become less of a business tool and more of a personal, online property. That said however, we still get 90% of our business leads through my blog; so maintaining my blog is definitely still considered to be a business task.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up WooThemes?

I think there was 2 main challenges. Firstly, the whole idea of running a business based on designing & developing digital products was new to all 3 of us (partners) and it took us a while to get to grips with all the requirements that the business model poses (in terms of support, customer service, development maintenance etc.). The second challenge was on a whole different level and it challenged us to create a reputation for ourselves and essentially establishing ourselves as a credible source of great WordPress themes.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

Persistence! Unless you are family of Robert Scoble or Micheal Arrington (TechCrunch), then your new blog will probably take a while before it gathers some traction. So in the initial stages, when no one is reading your ramblings, don’t get demotivated and stop blogging… Instead stick to what you set out to do – the traffic will come!