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WordPress Brute Force Attacks

Apr 15th, 2013
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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Just in case you haven’t heard about this in the news, there’s a nasty flare of attacks on WordPress and Joomla sites going on.

Things you can do:

  • If your login password is admin – CHANGE IT NOW!
  • Likewise, beef up your password. Really, make it un-guessable.
  • Install something to slow down a hacker trying to guess their way into your site. Limit Login Attempts is a handy security plugin that does just what it says. (though this isn’t totally foolproof)
  • Keep your WP install up to date.
  • Find out if your hosting company is doing anything to help prevent attacks.
  • Read and follow the advice in the Hardening WordPress documentation.

I’ve been lucky so far, despite some attacks, no one has managed to get into my sites.  Colleagues with sites that get far more traffic than mine have also reported attacks, but have been safe so far.

 

Tame Your WordPress Plugin Lust!

Feb 6th, 2013
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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Thinking about adding a few dozen plugins to your WordPress site? Think again. This infographic and its accompanying article, The Only WordPress Plugins You Need, have wise advice! (Thanks to JD Thomas on the WordPress and Libraries Facebook group for sharing this.)

 

Wordpress Plugin Flow Chart

WordPress 3.5 is almost here

Dec 3rd, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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TwentyTwelve demo image

The next release of WordPress will be coming out any day now. I’ve been testing the beta versions and found the latest betas stable enough to use in workshops this past week.

The biggest change that most of us will notice is in the Media Uploader. It’s much simpler and more intuitive.   This is a huge improvement. It’s so much simpler that when I included it in a workshop last week, a participant actually  noted on the evaluation that I shouldn’t have covered it because it was so simple.  Loved that, proof that ease of use is always improving.

Other changes include:

  • A new default theme, TwentyTwelve. A nicely designed,  responsive theme.
  • Goodbye to the outdated and rarely used Links Manager (A plugin will add that functionality back if you really want it.)
  • Ability to access your favorite WordPress.org plugins from your Plugins admin panel. Very handy.
  • For an overview of more changes see:  10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.5

WordPress Classes & Webinars

Mar 13th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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WordPressOver the next few months I have a lot of WordPress related stuff going on with my WordPress buddies Amanda Goodman and Kyle M.L. Jones.

 

Colors with Storify WordPress plugin

Jan 12th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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One more plugin to test today. This one is the Storify plugin plugin. I think Storify is a great curation tool and it’s one of the first ones that I tested out.  The fexibility of being able to add notes and commentary interspersed with the embedded content from other sites makes it a great choice for students working on research projects.

The plugin adds a Storify button to the editing toolbar to easily insert a story into a post. But this is pretty easy to do without the plugin, just copy and paste from the Storify site to your WordPress post/page.

The plugin also adds a panel where you can build a new story from within your WordPress dashboard. If you spend all day in your WordPress dashboard this might be handy. Personally, I’d rather use the Storify bookmarklet in my browser toolbar to add content to my stories. And with them already embedded on a page/post, the content will just update itself anyways.

Tell me what I’m missing? I’d love to hear how people are incorporating this into their workflow?  I do love that Storify listened to folks who wanted this plugin though!

Photos from my flickr feed – to test the Storify plugin for WordPress

(And this is my last #blog12daysxmas post! Hooray, I did it, a week late, but done!)

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Testing Embedly Plugin

Jan 12th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
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Our WordPress ecourse is about to begin! So I though I’d test out a couple of WordPress plugins today.

The Embedly plugin makes it easy to add content from other sites simply by pasting a URL into a post. No need to find the embed code for a photo, video, map, etc., just copy and paste the URL onto it’s own line in your post. There are over 200 services that will work.

Tweet

Image from my flickr stream

Friday Photos 2012 Week 2 : Colors and PAD:2012-01-12

Google Map

And even though I’m a week late… I’m determined to write my final two #blog12daysxmas posts. Consider this Day 11!

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