I’ve had several people submit donations from this plugin since it’s release and will be sending each of you emails in the coming days to correct the donations.

Christopher

First off, Chris is an independent website developer and creative type in Montreal Canada, his website is all about how to build and design WordPress websites for small business owners and online marketing types, basically the same audience as mine but with a much more technical and WordPress focus.

His website, BavotaSan.com is packed full of amazing goodies such as his free themes for WordPress and a series of premium themes such as the Stationery Premium WordPress Theme , Illustrious Premium WordPress Theme and a great paid WordPress plugin called Delete Duplicate Posts Pro which surprisingly … does just that. It’s great for auto blogging website in that it scans for duplicate posts and ensures you’re not falling victim to Google’s duplicate post penalties but Chris’s website isn’t just a great resource, it’s a work of interface art. Let’s take a look at some of the features of this great website.

The Footer

I always start with the footer when I review a website, it’s often the last place a design thinks to look but the first place somebody looks when they’re lost … so it’s important. Actually, it’s a little like Walmart I think in that most people never think about customer service until they’re standing in line and really upset. Walmart is one of the few national chains that I can think of who put great thought into this fact, when a customer is trying to return or complain about something … make it easy for them, make it pleasant.

The footer on Chris’ website does just that. Finding things easily is a pleasant experience.

You can easily see the links he wants to promote in his footer, as well as a clearly defined link for Twitter.  His downloads and tutorials are organized to be effective and you’ll see this subtle use of a “Back to Top” option with an icon, a small detail often over looked by web designers in a rush. Ironically, Chris isn’t a web designer, he’s a web developer so his attention to detail is refreshing.

The Header

At the top of Chris’ website he promotes his internal links very well using a process we call deep linking but it’s done subtly and doesn’t interfere with users ability to navigate his website. In fact his menu is designed to accomplish two functions. First, he accommodates the users need to quickly reach content and two gives search engines the ability to easily feature content from his site.

Two things that I absolutely love about Chris’ website? First, his use of the Get image from post code (he uses the code as a part of his theme rather than as a plugin, which is very effective) and the great link to his RSS feed on the right.

Everybody should take a few minutes to visit Montreal Web Designer, Chris Bavota .

Visit the Stan Cassidy Foundation online.

Step One when dealing with a hack is to determine where that hack is.

When I’m called in to help get a hacked website back together, the first thing that I do is disable all the plugins and see if the vandalism goes away. If it does, the hack is in one of the plugins and I simple reactivate them one at a time until I find the culprit.

If it’s not in the plugins, I download a fresh theme from WordPress.org and install it on my website, this allows me to see if the hack is in my theme files. If it is, simply reinstalling my theme will solve the problem.

Using a tool like phpMyAdmin, I scan the database for keywords and common phrases which might point to a database insertion.

Finally, I test the WordPress files themselves. A lot of hackers attach their rubbish to the core WordPress files these days, to clean them up I simply replace them all with a fresh install.

What to do next?

If you suspect your website has been the victim of a hack, the most important thing to do is replace all your current usernames and passwords with clean ones.  Make sure to include:

1. FTP & Hosting Control Panel
2. WordPress Admin
3. Database Connectivity

Afterwards, ensure you’ve deleted all non essential user accounts in WordPress and be sure to follow my guide to securing WordPress.

[source lang="html"]<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>" /> <!– leave this for stats –>[/source]

Unfortunately, this isn’t just good for stats … it’s great for hackers because it tells then exactly what version of WordPress you’re using which allows them to search the net for hacks specific to your version of WordPress. Unfortunately, as of version 2.5 the people at WordPress don’t simply allow you to remove this piece of code from your theme and forcibly “inject” the damning meta tag into your theme using the wp_head(); function which is required to make WordPress work.

There is luckily a fix, but it requires users to edit yet another file in their template directory. To truly remove the code, you’ll need to open the functions.php file and add the code:

[source lang="php"]remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’); [/source]

WordPress, for those who don’t know is a blogging platform turned website manager which makes it fantastically easy to build, deploy and manage websites. It’s the best platform on the market for doing this, and it’s free. That’s a pretty powerful endorsement right? Well, it’s true … except … it the past few months the people who run WordPress and are responsible for it have been getting sloppy. Let’s take a look at some of the recent security holes.

Security Holes

The 2.8.4 release this weekend was due to a newly discovered hole in WordPress. In fact, the whole (which seems to have appeared in 2.8) was so big, it allows anybody with even a basic understanding of web technology to reset your admin password whenever they want. When 2.8.3 was released on the 3rd of August, it was to fix security flaws overlooked in the 2.8.2 release from July 20th. In fact, every release since 2.8 has been to fix major security flaws in the core WordPress application. Here’s how WordPress describes their 2.8.1 upgrade:

WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and tightens security for plugin administration pages. Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked [emphasis added]. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to be safe.

If you think I’m being tough on the people at WordPress, take a moment and read the release reports on WordPress.org, it shows nearly three months of security blunders by the world’s most popular package and if you think that you’re immune, think again. In March, Ashley Morgan who runs Upstart Blogger was the victim of a cyber attack, in June my website was hacked and trashed by somebody promoting links to flu vaccines and earlier that month we suffered hacks on both Tinker Priest Media and my partner’s website BavotaSan.

Ashley’s advice is strong, make sure you update your backups daily and always download the latest security updates from WordPress, especially when they’re released on weekends. Take my friend Chris’s advice and remove reference to your WordPress version, install some basic security on your WordPress blog and always remember that there are people out there who want to hack your site.

When Montreal design studio house9 design needed to have a website built for a great photopher, Dallas Curow (also of Montreal) they asked me to put together an easy to manage tool using WordPress which would allow Dallas to easy add new photos, update her text and ensure prospective clients can easily contact her.

WordPress allowed me to use a super easy content management tool without needed to program a complex tool from scratch, it allow allows this talented young artist to focus on what she knows best, photography. To make the most of the site, it’s also integrated into Google applications for Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

Thanks to house9 design for the awesome design but do you know what really makes this website great? Amazing content in the form of brilliant photographs from Dallas Curow.

OK, I gotta get back to work and finish a great new website for a jewelry store, a personal coach, a small restaurant and of course more work on the Great Chefs!

To stop yourself from being counted as a visitor, all you need to do is add a simple piece of code to your websites header.php file that will read:

[source lang="php"]<?php
if (is_user_logged_in() == 1) {
if (wp_get_current_user()->ID == 1) {
setcookie("analyticsexcludeme", "analyticsexcludeme", time()+3600);
}
};
?>[/source]

Make sure the code is placed above the Google Analytics code (which I always like to place in the footer of my websites anyways). Once this code is placed in your header file, your website is updated but you’re not finished yet!

The code is only the first part, it’s what tells Google that you’d like to be excluded but now we need to actually exclude you.

Log into your Analytics account and click Analytics Settings.

Next, open the Filter manager (very bottom right corner).

Finally, add a new Filter with the settings:

This will tell Google to exclude all visitors who have the cookie “analyticsexcludeme” in their web browser, the same cookie we set earlier in the header code section of this tutorial.

If you’ve ever wished you could add your own menus to WordPress, then this is the plugin for you!

The WordPress Admin Quick Menu plugin allows you to quickly add new menu items to a special WordPress Quick menu, giving you and your clients fast access to important third party website shortcuts such as Analytics and email as well as adding faster access to internal WordPress pages.

Download the plugin for free.

What is a bandwidth thief?

Since many website hosting companies charge per file transferred (or total file transfer size for the month), unscrupulous website owners often load key graphic files from smaller, unsuspecting website owners in hopes of both lowering the costs of running their website and increasing the performance of their site.

This plugin uses Apache’s .htaccess capacity to stop foreign websites from loading images from your web server.

You may download the WordPress plugin for free.

The theme features a rich, three column layout for the homepage and a large single column for content within the website. I’ve purposely left formating to a minimum on this theme to allow web designers to rapidly introduce their own creative elements to the theme and make changes.

You can preview the theme live here on thisismyurl.com or download and enjoy the theme free of charge on your own website.

Well it’s been a little while since I uploaded a new theme but as before, this one is fully optimized and ready to help you community or non-profit group show up in the Google rankings.

The theme design has been created as a basic, no thrills piece which can be easily added upon for most community groups, churches and non-profit organizations which are seeking an easy way to  get their website online.

I’ve included a lot of Search Engine Optimization tricks in this theme by default.

• Download the Theme
• Preview the Theme

I wrote the plugin for my new theme and use it here on thisismyurl as part of the new magazine style format.

Download

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

The forums can be found online at http://forums.thisismyurl.com, I still have a lot of work to do on them but for now if you have any questions about my plugins please feel free to visit.

Chris

For example, if I want to list a series of pages inside a <ul> tag I first want to know if there is going to be a list of pages to write otherwise I will be writing an opening and closing <ul></ul> with nothing in the middle or worse, a title as well. To avoid this, here’s what I do:

[source lang="php"]<?

$list = wp_list_pages(‘echo=0′);

if ($list) {
echo "<h2>My pages</h2>";
echo "<ul>";
echo $list
echo "</ul>";
}

?>[/source]

The code example above simply uses the echo=0 option to preload the page list results into a variable called $list, next I simple check if $list has a value and if it does, I write the header and <ul> tags as well as the variable $list. If there are no pages, nothing is written.

I’ve build a similar function into three recent plugins, where you can preload the results into a variable using a show attribute by setting the value to false:

1. $list = scheduledPosts(’show=false’);
2. $list = randomPosts(’show=false’);
3. $list = popularPosts(’show=false’);

While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of scheduled posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple plugin for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:

• Customizable number of links returned
• Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
• The ability to echo or return results

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]&lt;?php scheduledPosts();?&gt;[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]&lt;?php scheduledPosts(‘count=10′);?&gt;[/source]

Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (<li></li>) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:

• Customizable number of links returned
• Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
• The ability to echo or return results
• Let’s you control how popular a post should be

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]&amp;lt;?php popularPosts();?&amp;gt;[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]&amp;lt;?php popularPosts(‘count=10′);?&amp;gt;[/source]

Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (

• Customizable number of links returned
• Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
• The ability to echo or return results

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]&lt;?php randomPosts();?&gt;[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]&lt;?php randomPosts(‘count=10′);?&gt;[/source]