Super quick note here. Last week, my friend Elizabeth invited me to talk about WP security on her podcast. The podcast is published. I urge you to go listen to it.

This came about since WP sites and blogs have been a target of some malicious hacks. Just visit the WP forums and seach for hacking or security you’ll see a bunch of threads.

Is it because WP is in the dumps? Personally I don’t think so. It’s because too many WP installations are set up ‘on the fly’ and not locked down. Kinda like leaving your house door open day and night. An open invitation for people to enter and ransack it.

Anyhow, I talked more about what can happen on an insecure installation with some suggestions what you can do. Here’s a link to a previous post I made (in case you missed it). It has resources detailing the things you can

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Take a look at your blog (or website) categories. What do you see? A handful of easy to understand and navigate categories or a tangled mess?

I’ve had this blog for a long time. 4 years to be exact and it has grown up with the blogging ‘industry’. Back then, I created a few categories and over the years this just grew and grew. So now, I am forced to ‘tame’ them. But the problem is, with so many posts, I didn’t want to wait until I have time to re-organize each post. So how do I quickly keep unwanted categories from displaying, so I can deal with them on my own time?

If you’re running WordPress, you’re so in luck because they made is super easy.

Step 1 

Log in as administrator, go to you Manage >> Categories to pull up a list of all your categories. Hover your mouse over the categories you want to remove.

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As promised, a few days ago, here’s a theme based off Kubrick. This was originally done for my husband’s blog. At that time, I didn’t have the time to code it up from scratch so I used Michael Heilemann’s fabulous theme as a basis.

No hidden code or crazy linking terms. Download here to by clicking on the screen shot.

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This has been a long time secret concern of mine. WordPress is such a popular platform and everyone (including yours truly) is using it as a content management system in addition to blogs. It is only a matter of time it becomes vulnerable to all kinds of attack - just like Windows.

photo credit:
mauren veras

Guess I’m not that paranoid because there has been quite a bit of hacking going on this year. As if that’s not enough, if you’re not careful, there are some really, really bad themes out there that steal your traffic and have hidden code in too.

What can you do? Well for one, if you are using free themes, check them if they are clean before using. If you don’t know if they are clean, ask someone who knows to check them out. By the way, did you know, I have some free themes too? Here’s one. I’ll post two more

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In the years I’ve worked with WordPress for myself and clients, I’ve never had any issues with posting. Ok, so never say never. Let’s just say I rarely experience them. But one recent installation had so many issues I was rather surprised and a little miffed.

The client would get a Maximum execution time error every time they post. They had to try several times before it took. After checking out the obvious places and not finding the root of the problem, I turned my attention to the titles. There didn’t seem to be any special characters.

No crazy stuff, not even asterisks, exclamation marks, or brackets which should not be an issue anyway. But they did have ellipses (…) yet… how can that be a problem they are just three dots right?

Wrong! 

I deleted them and sure enough they were a block of three dots not three dots entered using the keyboard. In other words, instead of typing

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