Found out the other day, three of my Wordpress-Hosting blogs were suspended. I believe it was because they were too promotional. I am not upset with the service, it’s their service and their rules. They sure provide a great service and make some incredible free blogging software. I think I’d also say my hats off to them for creating a space, that is not all marketing, all the time.

I thought I posted some good content, with only 2-3 links per post. I am guessing my RSS feed in the side bar for my store was a little too much. I see many other blogs that have links, so can’t see how my lnks were the reason for my penalty. I’ve heard rumors, they did not like marketing, guess I proved the rumor.

Anyways, here’s another chance to learn from me, how I learned the hard way and avoid the mistakes I make. This is also very important to show, never put your important work anywhere that you do not have total control, it could all disappear into cyber space at any time.

Second lesson would be, don’t over market all the time. Some times just getting a link is all you can get, and that’s often good enough.

So, did you learn anything?

Any one else get their Worpdress blogs knocked off the net?

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I talked about it not long ago and finally took action, stepped up to the plate and installed a new theme.

What do you think? Good? Bad?

I am terrible when it comes to looking for a new theme, I get a layout stuck in my head and find myself searching till I find it. Well, usually not exactly what I had i n mind, but real close.

Now Hopefully, i won’t see this one being used everywhere. I’d love to create my own, but I don’t have the time and I am not a CSS expert. I can do the little things, like changing colors, fonts and alignment, but when it comes to layout or the frame work, I am lost. I even bought a couple books that could probably teach me, but they are a low priority on my reading list, which seems ever growing and never-ending.

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If you have a Wordpress blog, on your own server, not a Wordpress provided blog, you might want to check your security.

Few days back I was the lucky winner of a blog makeover. What a great day for me!

I wasn’t quite the make over I was looking for. My blog was hacked. Yep, lucky ducky me. It wasn’t the first time and if I was smart, it shouldn’t have even happened.

I wasn’t smart because I was using the same password Wordpress gave me when I installed the blog. I also wasn’t smart enough to study it and think to myself, gee, thats really a pretty lame pass. Sure wouldn’t be hard to figure it out. I am not going to go in to why I finally realized it was a less than secure password, don’t want to give any evildoers any idea’s.

If you installed a Wordpress blog, did you change your password, to a combination that’s near impossible to hack? I did not and I paid for it. Lucky I discovered it pretty quickly and it wasn’t hacked for long. Also lucky they just added some redirects to a few pages. Could have been worst.

So take my bad deal and save yourself, today, right now. You could be next.

How did I fix it? I opened notepad and typed in a long block or combination of letters, numbers and combination of lower and upper case. Next I went to the “Users” page, click edit for my user name and pass, then copied and pasted the new password into the “Updates Users Password” boxes. Of course I also copied the new info into a secret place on my pc.

You could even go one step further. If you’ll notice, with default Wordpress set up, you can not change the user name, it’s admin by default. You could create a new user, with a unique name of course, give that user the highest level of security for the blog. After you have added the new user, you delete the default “admin” user. So now the hacker not only has to figure out your password but now they also have to figure out the user name.

Now, for this to work, the new user name must NOT show up anywhere on your blog. You’ll have to remove any reference to the user name. This would include any “Posted by:” references on your blog. If not it wouldn’t be a secret would it?

One last thing, if you happen to get hacked like I did and they change your password, as they did to me, here is a great video on how to recover your password: Recovering Wordpress Password. I hope you won’t need to use it. Learn from me

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I’ve been testing a few Wordpress Plugins for adding Google Analytics to my blog. Last one I activated, just gave me a blank options pages for the plug-in.

Well, think I’ve found one that works pretty well. As they say, so far so good. It’s not an all out Analytics plugin, it just adds the code to your pages so Google can take your visitors. You do track your traffic right?

I’m really happy with it, so I thought I’d pass it on. It’s called Google Analyticator. The latest version even allows the new JS code from Analytics.

Did I mention it was even free?

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Life’s no fun if your not always learning.

Here’s something about Wordpress I learned the other day.

I’ve been getting into using tags on some of my blogs, why not, some easy extra SEO. Though I am not so vigilant on this blog. Wordpress even makes tagging easy with a built in Tag Cloud Widget. Course it’s not all always that great…

After posting on a number of my blogs I was starting to noticed some of the new tags I had been adding to posts, where not showing in the tag cloud. Hmm.. not good. Did I break Wordpress? Wouldn’t be the first time.

I got to asking around and come to find out, the built Tag Cloud in Wordpress has a limit to the number of tags that display. Seems there is not exact number, but the limit looks to be about 45.

Easy Fix…

Get yourself a good tag cloud plug-in. I’ve been experimenting with the Configurable Tag Cloud Plugin and working great so far. Not only can you set the limit of tags displayed, if there even is a limit, but you can also set just about anything else. You can set the colors for big to small, the font sizes and pretty much everything else.

That’s my lesson for today.

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