Tag Archive - wordpress

How to remove base64 encrypted code from your website

March 29, 2012 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

WordPress or other PHP CMS based website hacked?

base64 code hacked

 

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the level of security you have tried to impose for your website. Coming up with crazy long passwords that no one or machine would guess. Sometimes it is beyond your control. I host several sites on Dreamhost, and their servers were hacked. The hackers were able to gain access to the database server. On January 20th Dreamhost admitted there had been a breach, but they weren’t divulging specifics. Link to TechCrunch Story.

So what happens if you have been a victime of such a hack? Well, if you ‘re like me, you had sites that were redirecting to other websites when visitors would request your page or URL. Not cool. Totally sucks right…amIright? Ok, so you’ve been hacked…now what? Well, depending on what kind of hack you have it could be a simple resolution or a complete pain in the ass to resolve. This post is focused on what I have done to fix hacks related to websites redirecting due to injected “base64 encrypted” code. To resolve it we need to take a look at the files in your website.

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Maintenance Mode For WordPress

November 30, 2011 in How To, WordPress with 0 Comments

How to put WordPress into “Maintenance Mode”

How to put WordPress into "Maintenance Mode"

One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that it comes with the built-in ability to put itself into “Maintenance Mode”. This can come in super handy while you’re developing, switching, upgrading, or troubleshooting your WordPress site. It will give you (or any user with the ability to sign into the admin area of WordPress) the ability to sign into WordPress and see your site as you normally would while your visitors / users see a completely separate splash page or even a completely different site. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll just stick to a splash page.

Below are the steps to put WordPress into, and easily get it out of, “Maintenance Mode”. For this tutorial, you’ll need to make sure that you can see / edit hidden files (files that begin with a “.”) in your file system or FTP client.

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How To: Setup WordPress Virtual Machine

May 7, 2011 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

Using Virtualbox & Turnkey Linux To Launch a Fast WordPress Test Environment!

Setup a test wordpress site

ScatteredBlogger on ScatteredBlogger!

Have you been tempted to try out some new theme or plugin that you downloaded for your WordPress website but were to concerned that you might mess something up? If not then you must be a beast or maybe you didn’t know how easy it was to setup a fast WordPress test site. You could use your existing web host to create a new website for testing, or you could leverage the power of free tools to be up and running in minutes on your local machine. (mah-sheen)

Download Virtualbox

Virtualbox FTW

In order to follow this tutorial you will want to download your free copy of Virtualbox.

Once you have downloaded Virtualbox you will be ready to download some virtual machine images or you can create your own if you feel the need. For this tutorial though we will use some pre-built images thanks to the folks over at Tunkeylinux.org There are several images they put together for both VMware and Virtualbox as well as ISO files which can be burned as an image and then installed inside of a VM or on most computers as the host operating system. You will want to download the WordPress virtual image for this exercise located here.

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Move WordPress Admin Bar To Bottom

March 25, 2011 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

How To: Move the admin bar in the WordPress admin menu to the bottom

you got to move it move it!

As you see from the screen-shot above the typical location for any WordPress 3.1 installation will default to the top of the page. Well that’s all fine and well but I’d prefer it to be at the bottom of the page. I get annoyed with the drop-down menus everytime I hover over them. There are a couple ways to do this, there is even a plugin for it, here.

 

As you may begin to learn that I prefer not to use plugins if at all possible. It adds bloat to my site and it’s just not efficient to run a whole love of plugins, that is one reason why I love the Standrad Theme for my blog theme. I will get to that in another post.

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How To Add Suggesstive Search to WordPress Search Box

February 25, 2011 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

Easily add suggest Search To Your WordPress Blog or Website!

We are all familiar with suggest and corrective search with Google. Why not offer your visitors that same experience on your WordPress website or blog and in turn yield a higher conversion rate on your site?

Suggest Search for WordPress

Find What You're Looking For!

Thanks to Joost deValk over at Yoast, we now have a very easy method for enabling the search functionality that we all long for. Joost wrote this plugin leveraging Yahoo’s API for suggesstive search. This is also great for those that are searching on your site for something and misspell something.

In order to add this funcitonality, you can simply download the plugin or install it from within the WordPress dashboard. Once you have instaleld and activated the plugin, you will then need to add two lines of code to your “search.php” file. The easiest way is to use the “editor” from your WordPress dashboard. It can be found under the “appearance” section of your admin options.

I always recommend making a backup of any files before editing them. Once you are in the editor open up your search.php file, and below the “no posts found” message, add this:

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Speed Up Site Load Times Using Caching

February 14, 2011 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

Use client side browser caching to speed up your site or blog.

use browser caching to speed up your site or blog

Ok, not that kind of cash! "cache" mmmkay?

So there are several tutorials I will be writing that have to do with optimizing your website or blog. The first one we will cover is simple and easy. Hopefully you have easy access to your “.htaccess” file so we can modify it. Depending on your web host you might be accessing it via FTP, or SSH (secure shell). I highly recommend making a backup of your .htaccess file before editing it so if something goes dangerously  wrong you can put it back to the way it was.

We are going to leverage the client’s web browser to cache the files from our website so once they load the page and surf to other pages the load times will be much faster than the first visit to the first page. Often times there are graphics, fonts, video and other files that load on every page. Well, why not let the client cache them and load from memory?

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Spice Up Your Admin Page With ‘Fluency’

February 8, 2011 in Design with 3 Comments

If you are annoyed with the collapsing menus on the left hand side of your WordPress Admin menu, change it out!

Fluency is a really awesome plugin that requires little configuration and adds all sorts of sexiness to your administration back-end. Most bloggers may not care about the look and feel of the admin menu but your client might. The other neat feature is it changes the look of the login screen, and it’s brand-able. You can use your own logo to replace the boring look in the upper left hand side.

Fluency provides the following features:

New features

  • Compatibility with WordPress 3.0
  • Add your own custom link to your custom logo on the WP login page
  • Display your own custom logo at the top of the WP Menu once logged in.
  • Turn Hover menus on/off
  • Turn Hot Keys on/off
  • iPad friendly menus
  • Improved support for Opera 10.5+
  • Added ‘Coffee’ color scheme (set in your profile) (2.3.1)
  • .pot file now included for those wishing to translate Fluency (2.3.1)
  • See changelog for full list of changes/additions

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Custom Login URL For WordPress Admin

February 7, 2011 in Tutorials with 0 Comments

Create a custom login URL for your wordpress admin login

customize wordpress admin login URL

Let's Get Custom!

So if you are new to using WordPress you might sometimes forget what the login URL is to access your administration page. By default the login link would be “http://yoursite.com/wp-admin” and this will load the screen for you to login. If you would like to simplify this login URL you can do this easily by modifying your “.htaccess” file which WordPress creates when you install it. It is located in your root directory of wherever you installed WordPress.

There are a couple of ways you can modify your .htaccess file. I prefer to do it through a secure shell connection but you can also modify it and upload it via your favorite FTP applicaction. We will do it both ways. First way is via secure shell. I open up a terminal window is OSX or in Windows you can use putty. I have a quick video on using putty here at the bottom of the post.

The first thing I do is tell it that I want to connect using the command:  ssh username@domainname.com  If you are using a web host that allows you to use secure shell this is a great way to access your website securely. If not, you can use the FTP method to modify your .htaccess.

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WordCamp Atlanta 2011 Is Near!

February 4, 2011 in Events & Conferences with 1 Comment

WordCamp Atlanta

It's Coming! BOO YA!

Last year I attended WordCamp Atlanta, and Birmingham and had a blast at both. I think I enjoyed the Birmingham WordCamp a bit more simply because it was in the summer time, and it was in another state and I enjoy getting out of here from time to time. The WordCamp Atlanta conference was in January of 2010 and we had a hellish week of snow, ice and bitter effin’ cold that made for a hasteful getaway post conference. One of my favorite things about WordCamps & BarCamps is the after party of getting to know fellow bloggers, web designers and developers.

Having the opportunity to mingle with people IRL (In Real Life) that you know from the interwebs is an awesome experience because it really bonds that connection that you have worked to build online. WordCamp is a conference of WordPress users, developers, and enthusiasts to learn from each other with somewhat formalized sessions that are topic based.

Genius Bar – Another awesome aspect to attending WordCamp is having access to experts. You can walk right up to them to ask a question, open your laptop to show an error or problem, and get instant help from people who have been developing and using this fantabulous web software we call wordPress.

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How To Setup WordPress Part: IV (WordPress Settings)

February 4, 2011 in Get Started with 0 Comments

Optimizing your WordPress settings for success.

This is the fourth video of the [Get Started] series especially for WordPress beginners.

Optimizing WordPress Settings

Time To Configure for Optimization

So before we fire off writing posts and pages in our new WordPress site, we want to make sure we have our settings optimized. What do I mean by optimized? We essentially want to make sure we are optimizing the foundation for success. Our work-flow, SEO, and process for publishing can be much easier if you have everything setup correctly ahead of time.

Let’s start with a setting that catches even the most seasoned blogger. The time setting.

WordPress Timezone

Make Sure To Set Your Timezone!

So if you wanted to “schedule” a post to publish at a certain time and date, it is important to make sure your site knows what time it is for you. Missing this is setting is a common mistake and can be configured under the General Settings of your website.

If you would like to publish content from a third party or remote connection, you will want to make sure you enable Remote Publishing under the Writing settings.

Remote Publishing

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