Over the US Labor Day weekend, older (pre 2.8.4) versions of WordPress were reportedly attacked by a worm which inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
Here’s what the New Tricks Team recommends:
From the WordPress dashboard, select ‘Tools; Backup’. If you don’t already have the WP Database Backup plugin, then install it from ‘Plugins; Add New’.
Backup a copy of your WordPress site. You can download the backup to your local machine, send the backup to your email address or store it on your server.
For double protection, go ahead and create an xml export of your content (‘Tools; Export’).
Disable your plugins (from the WordPress Dashboard, select ‘Plugins’. Then, select all of your Plugins by checking the box at the top. Choose, ‘ Deactivate’ from the Bulk Actions Dropdown then ‘Apply’).
Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 (Either follow the prompt at the top of your Dashboard or select ‘Tools;Upgrade’).
Reactivate your plugins. We recommend reactivating them one by one in case one doesn’t work with the latest WordPress release.
We have written before about the evolution of WordPress’s use as a website development platform rather than, what most people think, as just a blogging program. Using WordPress for websites is cutting edge Web 2.0 and takes advantage of WordPress’s use of a My SQL database. It then becomes a content management system, otherwise referred to as a CMS, which offers much more to a business than a traditional old skool static or Flash website.
Today, I want to bring you what I imagine must be the first song in history about using WordPress as a CMS. I know it is a little rough and I understand there is a new version coming out with much improved production quality. In the meantime, I bring you a performance by Charles Williams from the Dallas WordPress Camp:
I have been working with my daughter Amanda on her Global Girl Blog site and thought I would demonstrate how you can start with one of the thousands of ready made WordPress themes and then customize their look and feel for your own purposes. Some of the changes involve replacing the graphics with new images and some changes require edits to the CSS Style sheets.
For the Global Girl Blog site we started with a theme called Urban Elements by Press 75. Go to their site and check out a demo of the original theme. Some WordPress themes are free and some called premium themes are available for usually $20.00 to $79.00. In this case Urban Elements was a premium theme and there was a charge of $75.00 to download it.
I chose Urban Elements, despite its grunge look, since it has a cartoon like feel to the post box and I liked the little tabs with the post dates on them . This theme also has a stationary background which was important since I wanted to put the global girl avatar on the background and have it stay put even when the post box scrolls down.
After downloading the theme to the “Theme” file in the “Content” folder in Amanda’s site, we went to work customizing it. First, we got changed out the gray grunge background image. I had previously made a text based logo and added that to the appropriate sized header. If you want to use fonts other than the handful of font families that are browser safe you will need to make them into graphics and then add them to the site.
I uploaded the new header and a new background the same size as the one it replaced, that included Amanda’ global girl avatar and voila, an almost new site. But then more tweaks. I then changed the social network icons, the color of the comment box graphics and the text colors of the headings and links. The third site below, Mirar Salon shows how more tweaks were been done that made it more distinct from the parent theme. Both of these sites took less than a day to make the changes you see below.
Urban Elements Theme by Studio Press
GlobalGirlblog design using Urban Elements
Mirar Salon site also built with Urban Elements Theme
Stay on topic. Pick a topic for your blog and pretty much stick to it. I mean you can deviate a bit, but people want to know what to expect from your blog so try and give them what they come to you for. Put yourself in the shoes of your users and deliver the goods. You can write down your major category names and then think up posts ideas for each category. Use the list to write from or to research the ideas for posts as you have time.
Present your ideas with visuals. Blog posts are mush easier and more pleasant to read when they include photos, illustrations or videos. Try and use the same size photos and generally the same placement so your readers don’t get seasick scrolling down the page. Remember to check the licensing when you use photos or art work that you did not produce.
Keep posts short and to the point. If it is a longer “how to” article then use the “read more” to present only an excerpt so people do not have to scroll through the entire article if they are not interested in it.
Think through your categories. This should not be an index of everything and the kitchen sink. It should give readers an idea of the general type of posts that will be presented in each area. This is a better way for readers to find what you have written about than to include archives by month and date. Keep the archives on a separate index page if you must have one.
Don’t put posts in multiple categories. This creates a big mess. When you write a post make a decision as to where it goes and put it there. You can change it later if you need to. Think chapters in a book. Each thing goes into one chapter. Not only is it annoying to see the posts in every category, search engines think you are putting the same content multiple times on your blog which they do not like. It is a good idea to check into the DO Not Follow plugins anyway since even categorizing posts and the blog page can confuse the search engines into thinking that you are duplicating content and they don’t like that.
Link a lot. Search engines love links and they boost your Google ranking. Link to other people, places and things that you mention in your posts as well as to other blogs posts. It is not considered good etiquette to ask other bloggers to link to you. Make them interested enough by good content or making relevant comments on their posts that they will want to link to you.
Use ordered and unordered lists and use headlines liberally. The bots and spiders that crawl the web for content love the use of links and headings. Only use the heading 1 for the Blog Title but then go down from there. These things help them navigate. Flash stops them dead in their tracks. So if you have paid oodles of dollars for a flash website that is not getting good rankings, this may be why. Add a blog component to your site and reduce the number of flash pages.
Make your blog post headlines unambiguous. Newspaper headlines are often very short and pithy. Magazines can get away with outrageous article titles that make you want to read more to find out what the story is about, but search engines and RSS feeds work better when the subject of the post is clearly or even somewhat indicated by the post title.
Include a list of related posts under each article. You can point readers to other posts that are on the same subject and thus increase page views on your blog. There are Plugins that can do this for you automatically.
Write in your own voice. Be yourself. You don’t have to reveal a lot about yourself but a glimpse or two gives the reader an idea of who you are and that makes your blog more accessible. People like to know the background and the details so don’t make them beg.
Newbies bloggers beware. You may be creating validation or formatting problems in your blog posts and not even realize it by falling into a little discussed bad habit known to wreck havoc. Usually you will be writing a post directly into the WordPress edit window when adding a Post or a Page. But for longer posts or articles that you are writing you may use a word processing program like Microsoft Word or from time to time you will need to copy something from another website.
A good rule of thumb is not to copy and paste directly from Word or from another web page in order to avoid hidden, unnecessary (and often out of date and harmful) CSS styles and HTML tags that may be lurking in the copied material. The tricky thing is that you may not even know there is a problem until one day you can’t update your version of WordPress and someone suggests running it through a validation editor and you find 276 errors! Does that sound like the voice of experience? uh huh… You won’t have this problem if you do your posts directly into WordPress but on the occasions that you do need to copy / paste I have listed three ways to avoid creating problems when doing so.
When in the edit box click on the “Kitchen Sink” button to show more options, choose Paste as Plain Text (Paste from Word removes only some of the bad code, not all of it) then paste your text there. You will lose simple styling such as bold text or links, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Reformat your text with the WordPress WYSIWYG ( what you see is what you get) editor.
If you have Dreamweaver (other WYSIWYG editors might work too), paste the text you have copied from word or a web page into Design View, then go into the Code View window and copy the text from there. Click the HTML tab in the WordPress editor and paste the text there. This will remove any superfluous markup.
Paste the text into Windows Notepad and save it as a txt. file. Then you can copy it from the .txt file and paste it into WordPress.
Don’t worry that you have been copy/pasting with wild abandon, you can check for errors by going to the site http://www.w3.org/. You will see a listing for a HTML Validator and a CSS Validator. Select each one of these and put in your blog URL to have it search for errors. It will also show you where they are located so you can go back and fix them on your site.
I am Co-organizer of the Atlanta WordPress User's Group Meetup. We meet the third Wednesday of each month and try to have a little something for people at all levels.
Check it out! We now have almost 900 members!
Over the US Labor Day weekend, older (pre 2.8.4) versions of WordPress were reportedly attacked by a worm which inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
