Tag: WordPress

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Change the Name on Your WordPress Admin File

Here’s a cool plug-in to help you monitor, change, and keep up-dated your WordPress blog administration names. It is called Admin Renamer Extended. You may ask why not just use the WordPress control panel to update your admin names? Sometimes a hacker will hide the admin name from you to keep you from deleting their access. This renaming plug-in allows you to update, see, and change the administrative names for your WordPress account.

It is interesting to know that many blogs are set up with the name admin and lame passwords making their blog easy to hack. By default WordPress calls your main login simply admin. I recommend a much more difficult user name such as a combination of words and certainly a secure password with letters and number. I don’t recommend that you use your business name as the administrators name.

Try to make your administrator login complicated for others to guess and easy for you to remember.

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WordPress Security Tips

In this ever changing world where hackers look to hide spam links on your blog and hackers try to crack into your blog posts to try to spew their malware out at your expense, it makes sense to keep your WordPress blog secure.

Here are a few thing that I do and recommend that you consider to keep your website and blogsite safe. First, why do I say website? Well, it is not uncommon for a blog to be hacked and used as the springboard to compromise your website. So if you have a blog on your server, make sure you are keeping it secure to protect your website.

I use the following items for our managed blogs:

Login Lock Down
This plug-in protects you from brute force robot attacks that try to gain access to your blog by simply trying a million possible login combinations. This plug-in allows you to set login attempts to a specific number before access is locked for a specific time period you select.

Exploit Scanner
This is a very good plug-in and can actually let you know if your blog has been hacked and where the files are residing. I really like this one and have solved and cleaned up a number of hack attacks with its use.

WP-MalWatch
This is another very helpful plug-in. After installation look for it on the dashboard. It will let you know if your site has been compromised with the Pharma Hack and searches your locales.php file and file ending combinations.

WordPress File Monitor
Oh, I really like this one. Once you have cleaned up after a hack, this plug-in will advise you by email or text message when any of your WordPress core files is changed. This is very helpful if you are having trouble keeping your site clean from problems.

There are other great plug-ins these are just the top three that we use that come to mind. In addition to using scanning application, make sure that your logins are secure, you keep all your plug-ins up-to-date and keep your WordPress version on the most recent version.

If you don’t have time to keep an eye on your own WordPress application, get a blogmaster like  us to watch your blog and scan it monthly or weekly.

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Yikes, I Can’t See My Blog Posts!

This has just happened to a prospect, and I wanted to share the situation in case you ever come across it. First the prospect is using WordPress for their blog. They had recently moved to a new web host and mentioned to me that when you clicked the blog post title of any posts on their blog their browser returned a blank Internet Explorer page.

I have seen this before where a Word character such as a long dash or an ampersand has not set well with the version of MySQL on the hosting server and then the post needs to be deleted and totally reentered to make the title be clickable, but that was not the case with this client. The title of the posts were simply not clickable.

What ended up happening was that the client had to actually reenter all the blog posts on their blog after they had upgraded to a new version of WordPress. I am not sure if this was due to an issue on the MySQL server, the blog template, or as I suspect the permalink settings that were not updated to match the database when the blog was moved, but it was a very thorny problem.

If you have seen this and have a recommendation for other readers on what you have done to repair this issue on your own blog, just leave a comment below.

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Make Sure You Have a WordPress Backup Application

This last week a client that I help on occasion who has one of the highest traffic blogs that I have seen lost his MySQL database that runs his WordPress blog. The crash was devastating to his blog and to his business. What is even worse is that he did not have a recent backup of his blog post; lost were 6 months of blog posts and comments.

To prevent this from happening to you, I recommend that every WordPress owner install a WordPress plug-in called WP-DB-Backup. This simple to use and configure blog post database backup allows you to email yourself a backup of your blog posts in MySQL format on a schedule you select.

I routinely backup my blog posts weekly and recommend that all clients and WordPress users do the same. Although you can tell the application to store your backup on your web server, I like the additional security of saving the backup to my own hard disk.

Just make sure that once you install the plug-in that you review it to make sure that your folder is writable. You will access the plug-in control panel from your WordPress “Tools” navigation link. If the directory location is not writable, you will need to correct that to use the plug-in.

Although you may never have a situation when you will need your backup, what if you even do. Will you be wishing you had a backup plan in place like the client I mentioned in the first paragraph or will you be able to get back up and running quickly only losing a day or two of blog posts?