It would be nice if you did not have to worry about the security of your blog but that would be an ideal world. It does not work that way unfortunately. Here are just a few notices I have received this month from WordPress Firewall for this blog.

I get one of these just about every day. Often more than one as they try multiple times to access it. Yep every day someone is trying to access my blog and not just this blog but all of the blogs I have. That is why it is important to protect your blog.

Here are 7 ways to improve your blog security

1. Password and login

You should not have a user of admin and always use a solid password. Your password should have upper and lower case letters along with numbers and symbols. It should be a unique password for each blog.

Now I know this can be a pain in the @ss but you can use a tool like Roboform that will track your passwords and logins. This tool also will generate passwords for you. Definitely the first step in securing your blog.

2. Making data base extensions not wp_

If you use the standard installation WordPress always has the extension of wp_ added to all of the data base tables. Using a different extension will make it harder for the cretins to find your data base tables to attack then. Changing this is easy when you install a blog directly.

Just change the table prefix in your wp-confg.php file when doing your installation.

If you have already installed the blog or used Fantastico here is a guide you can grab that will walk you through the procedure to change all of your table extensions manually – Securing Fantastico Installations.

3. Install the WordPress Firewall 2 plugin

WordPress Firewall 2 is a security firewall plugin for WordPress. It was originally developed by SEO Egghead, and has been revamped by me.

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple, WordPress-specific heuristics, to identify and stop the most obvious attacks. There are a few powerful, generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and usually difficult to configure.

Install through your dashboard or you can download it here.

4. Install WP Security Scan plugin

This plugin scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. Except for the data base this will primarily make sure that your server permission settings are secure.

Install through your dashboard or you can download it here.

5. Install Antivirus for WordPress plugin

AntiVirus for WordPress monitors malicious injections and warns you of any possible attacks. This looks at some of the injections that are common.

Install through your dashboard or you can download it here.

6. Install WordPress Exploit Scanner

This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker.

Install through your dashboard or you can download it here.

7. Install WordPress Database Backup

Now this is not for security but or when you have a problem. Hopefully you never need it but… Much better to be prepared because despite taking action to stop bad things they still can happen. You need to be prepared for that possibility.

Here are two posts that cover in more detail how to use this both to back up your blog and to help you fix your blog of the worse happens.

• Protecting Your Blog
• Using your database backup

Would be nice if a post like this was never needed but unfortunately it is. My Eagle Scout background taught me to “Be Prepared” and if you apply this seven tips you should be.

At the worst you will be able to recover from the cretins if necessary.

Do you have any additions that should be added here? Leave your comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogs, database backup, firewall, passwords, plugins, secure blog, security

Really looking to do some updating on this blog shortly. Have been looking at themes trying to find a new look that I like for this blog.

Spent a bit today going through this blog’s plugins. Now I may be the exception but after looking I had quite a few plugins that I was not really using any more.

You know what happens. You test something new that you want to try. You replace one plugin with another and just deactivate the old one because you are not sure you are going to like the new one.

Then time goes by and you forget to go back and remove them.

I had 15 inactive plugins and just did a quick clean up. Ashamed to say it because I know better. Learn from my laziness and check your plugins today and get rid of what you are not using.

So am I alone or do you have plugins to clean up too? Leave your comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, inactive plugins, laziness, plugins

Every once in a while I come across something that just looks like it can add value and be fun to play with. WP Note seems like a plugin that can be very useful for this blog.

Quite often I use block quotes, bolding, italics and other texts to add little notes with in the blog post.

This is especially true when I am doing tutorial type posts. Something like

It is very important to back up your data base before starting your upgrade

or I could use a note.

It comes with 5 categories you can use besides the warning one used above.

You can use important

A regular note

You can use tip

Or for help

To use it you just need to use the type of note you want to use in [item] and use a closing tag after the content [/item] much like using billboard code in forums. Just substitute the type of note from the list above for the word item.

Looks like it may be a very useful item for making parts of your blog post stand out. A great way to bring attention to various points you want to make and break up the appearance of your blog posts.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: adding plugins, plugins, wordpress, wordpress polugins, wp note

Todays question brings up a good point about people being afraid to ask questions because they may look dumb or stupid. It amazes me when I see this and shortly before I sat down to write this I was answering a similar concern in a forum.

This was a person who was offered answers for the questions they had but would not ask because of fear of looking stupid. Well let me tell you the only stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask as you never get an answer. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments below whether you think they are stupid or not. If you have the question there are probably a lot of others that do too.

As you know some people are just shy and don’t want to look dumb by asking an obvious question that they may need the answer to. It is good that you are giving them the chance to step up and ask the questions to get answered. When manually upgrading your site should you turn off the plugins before you do it? There, I will get the party started.

The short answer is yes you should disable your plugins before upgrading as a bad plugin can keep you from getting access back after you upgrade until it is removed or renamed.

With the latest versions of WordPress you can disable all of the plugins at once so it is not a huge time saver to not do it.

Just as important though is to make sure that your plugins are kept current. Most of the problems I have seen happen when upgrading from plugins is that the plugin had an update that was skipped.

For the most part the vast majority of plugin authors keep current with the changes in WordPress. If you paid attention to the number of updates to plugins that came through once the release candidate for version 3.0 was released you would have seen 3-4 times the number of updates than what you would normally expect.

My advice is that even before you upgrade the version make sure that you have upgraded all of your plugins that need it.

Again feel free to leave your comments and your questions below in the comment areas.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: plugins, questions, upgrade wordpress

Over the last few days we have been talking about a wide variety of plugins and why they are helpful. It has been done by category and there have been a large number of plugins discussed.

This series came about while answering a question posed here and your questions are welcomed and I will be addressing them here so leave them in the comments below.

what are you top plugin choices for WP?

Now the downside to plugins. Each plugin has the potential to slow your blog’s load speed down. The images you are using on your blog are also a factor but a slower load speed can hurt you.

How fast your page loads is now part of Google’s algorithm. If your plugins are slowing your blog down that can become a detriment to where your pages rank in Google.

There is always a trade off when you add plugins. You can check your page load speed at a variety of sites. Just do a search for page load speed.

Now to be truthful your theme and the number of images it uses will make a difference too.

So even though all of the plugins mentioned in this series and a lot of other plugins can add to your blog some neat things there may be a trade off.

Some plugins like the ones for SEO far outweigh any slowing they may cause through the improvements they can create some of the nice but not necessary items you might want to skip.

As you see the new shiny buttons of plugins add them then test the change in page speed. Take advantage of the tools Google provides for webmasters. This will allow you to get an insight into how Google sees your site.

Remember that your questions and comments are appreciated. Leave them below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, google, page load speed, page speed, plugins, wp

Almost finished the series on plugins here. There will be one more post on this tomorrow and that will be the most important one of the series so stay tuned. Remember that I am always looking to answer the questions you have here so feel free to ask them in the comments.

The original question that started this series was..

what are you top plugin choices for WP?

Today we address spam plugins and other miscellaneous plugins. There are a lot of choices and this list could be much longer but these are the ones I use at least semi-regularly.

• Askimet
• WP Spam Free
• Podpress
• Google Analyticator
• WordPress Thread Comment
• WP Ezine Articles

Askimet – Comes with the base installation and is a good anti-spam plugin but needs some help.

WP Spam Free – When combined with Askimet the two do a decent job of eliminating spam.

There are lost of other spam plugins but some hurt your number of comments such as the captcha plugins which keep people from commenting so it becomes a thin line to walk. Do you increase comments or reduce spam? I prefer more comments and deal with moderating the additional spam comments.

Podpress – This is the best of the podcasting plugins that I have tried. It interacts with the major podcast directories and can be tied directly into Itunes easily.

Google Analyticator – Easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to see the stats from there within your dashboard.

WordPress Thread Comment – If you have an older theme that does not support threaded comments (they are integrated into the latest versions of WordPress) this will allow you to take advantage of them without having to hack the theme.

WP Ezine Articles – If you are a Platinum member of Ezine Articles this is a nice plugin that allows you to submit your articles to Ezine Articles from your dashboard.

Repurposing your content is a great way to get more traffic to your blog and article marketing can be an easy way to do that.

Now I could have added literally hundreds of other potential plugins but there is a trade off when you add plugins and that will be tomorrow’s discussion as we end up the series on plugins.

Your comments and questions are welcomed. Talk to you tomorrow.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, blog, eliminating spam, google analytics, plugins, podcast, podcasting, podpress, traffic

Today I continue the series on plugins I use. This goes back to a question that was asked here. Today we will look at the plugins that allow interaction and why they are worth using.

Your questions are welcomed and can be asked in the comments and will be answered here in the future.

what are you top plugin choices for WP?

Allowing people to interact and spread your word can be a good way to generate extra traffic because you can reach other people that would not know about you.

Here are the plugins I use.

• All In One Bookmarking
• Comment Luv
• TweetMeme Retweet Button
• WP Facebook Like
• WP Google-buzz

All In One Bookmarking – This makes it easy for visitors to bookmark my post on a wide variety of places.

Comment Luv – Creates a link to your commenters last post which benefits the commenter and gives people an extra reason to interact on your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This allows people to tweet your post on their Twitter time line with a single click.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google Buzz, interactive plugins, plugins, social bookmarking, twitter, wordpress plugins

Today’s question has two parts. One about the plugins and one about the widgets that are created often by the plugins. If you would like your question addressed here leave a comment.

Are the number of plugins that are installed (NOT Activated) detrimental to the blog performance.

I like some plugins like “Simple Facebook Connect”, but it adds 19 widget plugins to WP. I really only activate 3-5 of them, but can’t uninstall the rest because they are all tied together. Will these effect my blog performance?

Thanks.

Plugins can add great functionality to your blog but they can slow it down too. The only thing that plugins do until activated is to take up hard disk space.

So you can have a hundred plugins and if they are not activated it will not effect how your blog works until you turn them on.

Now when plugins create widgets they have no effect until you use the widgets. When you drag them into the sidebar then they are activated and run whatever part of the script they use to display whatever they do.

Now I am not familiar with Simple Facebook Connect but it sounds like it creates multiple ways to display items. The plugin itself may or may not slow down your blog load speed but the number of widgets you activate may effect the performance.

You do need to be aware of how plugins effect your load speed and I do think that it is always a balancing act between the increased functionality and the decrease in load speed.

Always look at whether the benefit of the functionality increase out weighs any slow down of the load speed.

Because of that I tend to use plugins like All In SEO where the increased improvement in potential search engine rankings through proper title tags etc is extremely beneficial.

Compare that to some of the plugins that just create a neat feature but may hurt blog performance. Those I might think twice about as to how much benefit I get versus blog performance.

Remember you can ask your questions you would like answered by leaving a comment here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blogging, functionality, hard disk space, load speed, plugins, search engine rankings, widgets, wordpress, wordpress plugins

Don’t you just love an open ended question that there is no right answer for everyone? Really I went through a few of my blogs and run between one plugin and over twenty.

Now to be truthful the blog with just one is really not a blog but a membership site that is password protected. It is not being indexed and I don’t want it to be. All I need there is a secure place to deliver the content to the subscribers.

Now on the upper end, the blog with more than twenty is a test blog that I use to check compatibility with groups of plugins and themes. I do not like to test plugins on any of my good blogs until I have used them on the test blog.

That being said when you have over 20 plugins it will slow down the blog.

That is why the perfect answer will always be a trade off. The trade off is slowness versus how much you want the feature the plugin adds to your blog.

That is why there are certain plugins that have a higher priority than others. Plugins that deal with spam and making the blog more search engine friendly area much higher priority than those that add a neat feature.

Even here it depends on the feature and how well it works for you. My exit light box pop is very effective in adding subscribers so that has a greater value than the new Google Buzz button on this blog.

Now I use them both but if my speed becomes a problem (one reason why you need to be using Google Webmaster Tools) the Buzz button would go first.

Now adding WP-Super Cache was a case where an addition speeded up the blog load speed. ( A quick note on this plugin turn it off when you are editing your themes. Drove myself nuts, a short trip I know, when I changed the theme on my other blog until I turned it off <oops>)

So ultimately the optimum number will depend on what they are doing, what effect do they have on load speed and how high on your priority list they are.

For me on average it ends up at 12-14 plugins on my niche blogs and closer to 19-20 on my marketing blogs. How many do you think is your optimal number? Let me know and I’ll get into the plugins I am currently using by category and rate them in the future.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: how many plugins, optimum number of plugins, plugins, wordpress plugins

Google Buzz has continued to grow in many ways and the number of plugins available has been increasing quickly. I set out to go through some of the more popular ones and see how hard or easy they were to set up and which seemed to work best.

To start I only tested the plugins that rated 3 stars or better when I searched for Buzz in new plugins.

Buzz This – Need to edit the theme to make it work and it comes with 2 images and very little instructions to help someone install it. Not a good choice for new people to add to their blog. Just adds a buzz this button where you designate it.

Google Buzz ER – Easy to set up and add a widget that can be dropped in your sidebar to show the latest buzz from your feed. Very easy to use and easy to configure.

Simple Buzz – Requires you to add code into your theme with your profile. No settings page and can only be manually set up.

Google Buzz – Easy to add feed but the formatting left a lot to be desired on the Flexibility theme and did not take the time to look and see why it was not working properly.Did have some neat caching available to minimize the draw on resources.

Google Buzz Button For WordPress – Easy to set up but did not end up showing a button but a link to Google Buzz. Could be set up without any tweaks and could set it before or after your content.

Google buzz this Button – Easy to set up can be set for before, after or both or you may edit the theme and have it show exactly where you want it to show.

Google Buzz Feed – Requires you to edit the plugin manually to be able to add your feed to your blog. Not a viable option for most.

Simple Buzz Link – Another plugin that will require you to manually edit the code and input it into your theme.

WP Google-buzz 2.7.5 – Definitely the cream of the crop if you are not technical and want to add a Buzz button to your blog. A wide variety of choices and more settings than any of the other plugins I tried.

So after testing all of these if you are looking to add your feed from Buzz to your blog I would useGoogle Buzz ER and the best by far for adding a buzz this to your blog is WP Google-buzz 2.7.5 for anyone that is not technical and wants to be able to customize it.

Will be talking more about Buzz and adding some of this to my free Buzz report which will probably be updated by the 15th. You can grab the report here and that will get you the updates as they are made too.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: Buzz plugins, Google Buzz, Google Buzz plugin review, Google Buzz plugins, plugins