Spam comments have always been a big problem with WordPress. A busy blog frequently sees well over a hundred spam comments each day. If you have a WordPress blog, here is how we recommend that you deal with the issue. In the early days of WordPress, the primary method for dealing with spam was to review each comment and determine if it should be approved or deleted. For a … [Read more...]
How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress
Many WordPress blog owners do not use RSS feeds themselves and are not aware that the RSS feeds in WordPress are enabled by default. While an RSS feed can be a good way to allow loyal followers to monitor new posts in your blog, an RSS feed can also be a double-edged sword. Sometimes there are valid reasons for disabling an RSS feed. You may not want competitors to be aware … [Read more...]
Beware of Free WordPress Themes
If you run one or more WordPress blogs, you might be tempted to use some of the thousands of free WordPress themes available on the web. Be aware that some may contain malicious code or links embedded in encoded sections of PHP code that may be detrimental to your web site. We have always been suspicious about the numerous free WordPress themes available where the … [Read more...]
Securing WordPress
With open source software it is fairly easy for knowledgeable hackers to find vulnerabilities in code. Although vulnerabilities are quickly patched with WordPress due to a very pro-active development team, there are steps that should be taken to secure WordPress against hack attacks. Securing software and servers against hacker attacks is called "hardening." The idea is to … [Read more...]
WordPress Error: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page
Were you just locked out of your WordPress blog's administration area? When you try to access the admin area, do you see the error message, "You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page"? Did you just recently run a prefix changer to tighten the security of your blog? If the answer to all of these questions is "yes", then this may be the solution that you are … [Read more...]
What Is An Autoblog?
Whether you wish to call it an autoblog, spam blog, scraper blog, content scraper, autopost or auto updating blog, this technique is used to take content from other sites in order to automatically fill a web site with new content every day. We are seeing more an more autoblogs being added to web every day due to the introduction of several "content building" plugins … [Read more...]
WordPress Under Attack by Hackers
The good news about WordPress is that the development team is very proactive and frequently releases updates that patch security holes reported by other WordPress users. The bad news is that this means that frequent updates must be applied in order to keep WordPress secure. There are several reports indicating that hackers are taking advantage of recent security holes … [Read more...]
WordPress Tips and FAQs
The following is a summary of some of our favorite WordPress tips, shortcuts and FAQs. You do need to have some working knowledge of PHP in order to implement some of these tips. If you are not sure of what you are doing, either have an experienced PHP programmer make the changes, or keep an original copy of any script that you change, just in case you make a mistake and … [Read more...]
Customizing Read More Links in WordPress
We have used WordPress for several years and have always been annoyed by the fact that the "Read More" or "Read the rest of this entry" link that displays when using excerpts on the home page, category pages and archive pages always jumped to the next block of text on a page using a bookmark link. We want the entire page to display, just like any other web page, and want users … [Read more...]
How to Remove Useless Meta Tags from WordPress
The XHTML code generated by WordPress includes a few useless meta tags that can easily be removed. The following tutorial explains how to do this. The purpose for meta tags is to provide useful information to spiders and search engines. Meta tags do not display on a web page, but do display in the HTML or XHTML code. Many meta tags are obsolete or do not serve any real … [Read more...]