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Excerpt: In Part II we further examine how you can make your WordPress installation more secure including passwords,    login plugin to prevent brute force attacks, .htaccess to restrict access to wp-admin and more.  Part  I can be found here. Even if you have done everything so far, it might be easy for someone to get into your site if you have not secured it with a good password. Password Security The simplest way for an attacker to break in would be to attempt a brute force attack and guess your password. To be safe, you need to follow the standard advice: your password needs…

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Excerpt: Regular readers will have noticed that  for the last few days the blog was sporting a skull and death to everyone motif. This wasn’t a new nihilistic  F*ck-you WordPress theme. The blog was defaced by idiot hackers. Well we are back up and running again and no lasting damage was sustained although the inconvenience was significant. This misfortune gives me the opportunity to talk about security. There are a number of ways in which the little tinkers can mess up your site. Including server vulnerabilities,  network attacks, database hacks and accessing admin areas. Server Vulnerabilities Server vulnerabilities are the foundation of a secure site, if this…

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Excerpt: In part I of this two part series on SEO tips for Blogs we looked at WordPress plugins, creating themes, internal linking, RSS Feeds and Blog Aggregators. In the second part of  search engine optimisation for blogs, we examine social media, external linking and how to avoid duplicate content. Social Media Twitter Twitter is a social networking site that allows you keep in touch with groups of people on the web through the passing of short messages (tweets) to say what you are doing. It sound like a ridiculous idea but it has the capability to build up a targeted audience for your…

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Excerpt: Blogs are great way to add fresh content to an existing website but there are estimated to be around 133 million blogs indexed since 2002 according to Technorati. How can you make your blog stand out from the crowd and start bringing in a decent quantity of traffic? Optimisation for a blog is similar to that of any web site but  some things are particularly effective for blogs. WordPress WordPress is the definitive software for writing blogs. There are lots of reason why it is great. It is simple to install has many plug-ins, highly configurable has a large user base great support. WordPress Plug-ins When you…

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Excerpt: Following on from my original article on publishing equations on the web, there is a new method which may be useful to those information retreival specialists or publishers of blogs which use mathematics. Enter PHPMathpublisher a useful conversion tool that creates a png image of the equation from a simple code which has the advantage that it will display identically in most browsers. To use the script you need to have the GD library for PHP. Examples are included below: Equation Syntax All equations start with <m> and end with the tag</m> Separators for 3d-mathematics are held within {}. Subscripts: _ Superscripts ^ An extensive list is…