Yellow Swordfish

Rate My Webhosting is a handy online app from Hostgator. Just by adding a snippet of javascript to you enable your sites visitors to rate the load speed of your page on a sliding scale (1-5 stars). Hostgator provide you with a secret link to a Google maps mashup with your visitors locations overlaid, and a breakdown of how they rate you. This should be a useful tool to run on any site that is geotargeting ~ if you are located in Europe paying for North American adwords traffic and have a host in Asia it is good to know how well your site is responding. Sites that are slow to load lose traffic, and a lot depends on the location and quality of your host.

You can see my secret link here (I’m not too worried about showing the stats on this blog, although I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone working in a competitive niche).

I liked this little app so much that I wrote a Wordpress plugin for it. Wordpress can be a pain when it comes to adding javascript snippets, so hopefully this will make it quick and easy to add Hostgator’s tool to your site. If you want a copy of the Wordpress plugin please contact me and I will make it available to you.

Don’t forget to rate my webhosting whilst you’re here!

I quite often draw inspiration for color schemes from the web pages of others. I Like Your Colors is an awesome tool from Red Alt which extracts color codes from the html and css of any webpage. A great idea, and pretty neat execution too!

Being on the other side of the world from most of our family and friends is difficult at times, not to mention expensive when it comes to phone calls. I had some kind of vague plan before we left the UK to use Skype, I figured that it would be an economical way to call home and alleviate some of the homesickness. With this in mind I purchased a Nokia N80 mobile which has Wi-Fi among its extensive feature list. I figured that Wi-Fi handset plus wireless router and a quick download from Skype would see me making easy and cheap calls all around the world ~ even when away from home so long as I could find a wireless access point in Starbucks or some other god-awful globalised American chain.

The one problem with this theory is that neither Skype or Nokia seem keen to help us poor symbian users, although there are solutions for PDA’s. A quick search on the net shows that many, many people are sharing my predicament, crying out for help on their blogs and on forums.

One notable service I came across whilst searching is FON, a Wi-Fi sharing community. Joining the community entails buying a special wireless router from them (subsidised price too) ~ you are then a ‘Fonero’. You then choose to become either a ‘Linus’ or a ‘Bill’. All Foneros share their wireless connection publicly, Linus’s do it altruistically and are rewarded by being able to use other Foneros wireless connections for free when they are roaming, whereas Bills get paid for sharing theirs. Revenue is generated by members of the public (’Aliens’) using the network, for which they are charged a few dollars per day. As well as paying the ‘Bills’ this fee helps subsidise the price of the routers for new Foneros. One thing I didn’t notice on the site was a notice recommending that people check the terms and conditions of their internet providers contract before signing up. Think there may be trouble there.

Anyway, Skype and FON have hooked up to offer a package which includes the FON router and a Wi-Fi phone. As the price is subsidised by FON it looks to be quite a good deal for anyone that wants to use Skype without having to have their PC on 24 hours a day.

Just added some credit to my Skype account so that I could make some calls home to the UK. Even though the account is registered in the UK with a UK payment address, the site insisted that I pay in AU$ (guess they must be taking my location by IP address, a very stupid thing for them to do considering that many people using their services will be expats) which was compounded by the fact that Paypal doesn’t use AU$ as one of its currencies, so Skype converted the amount to Euro for me before charging. As I keep my Paypal balance in US$ Paypal converted the Euro amount to US$ before charging my UK bank in UK£.

I wonder how much ‘value’ I was left with after being scalped on each of those conversions?

When making the call I noticed the price was $0.36 per min ~ with my Vodafone mobile I get 10 mins to the UK for $3. Somehow I think I might not be using Skype too much again.

Related Link: games would be a great addition to Skype, wouldn’t they? Well, my daughter loves playing these free online games. I kind of do, too!

We Have a Winner!

Just 24 hours after my first Wordpress theme auction started it received a Buy It Now bid. The sponsorship slot was bought by Maiahost, a hosting company who specialise in wordpress web hosting. It is a great buy for them as their link will be seen by thousands of tightly targetted potential customers.

Spurred on by this success I have decided to auction another theme called ‘Flowers‘. You can see Flowers in action on Themey.com until the end of the auction (at least). Again, I would love to hear comments on the theme and the new site.

The auction is here.

The BlackHats are Coming!!

SEOidiot

Watchout WordPress users, the BlackHats are coming!!

As you may or may not know I have several friends who are involved in BlackHat SEO and they have been showing particular interest in the progress of Themey, my WordPress theme site. I had a little think about the potential for WP in the blackhat arena, and the things that can be done with it are very worrysome. The potential includes (but is in no way limited to):

* Using your domain, server and IP address to send bulk email.
* Using your server and IP address to spam other bloggers with comment and trackback spam promoting their latest PPC campaign (Pills, Porn and Casino).
* Using your site to pass PageRank (PR) to their PPC site.

If you are interested in the way that spammers could use your site for evil you can find more details (including an example site showing a method of user-agent based PR spam) in my Security Vulnerability post at Themey.

Hacking WordPress Security

First time I’ve visited my blog in a while, and I’ve discovered a problem with my site’s security. If you view this post you can see that there is a strange vertical black line at the bottom of the post.

Hacking WordPress Security

Editing the post shows that it is actually an iframe.

Security flaws with WordPress

I’m not sure if this is a problem with the security of my server, or a WordPress problem. My feeling is that it might be a WordPress security problem as nothing more sinister has shown itself yet.

I’m going to leave it there for now so that SEOidiot can have a look (I know he loves this kind of stuff). You might think I’ve gone daft publicly exposing a security flaw on my server… I can tell you I’m not daft enough to have my personal blog on a server with anything that matters too much, and I have backups.

If you have seen this before please leave a comment. I’m just hoping now that it isn’t some kind of secret project that I have forgotten about…

SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme

SEO Wordpress Adsense Theme

This theme might look pretty basic… that’s because it is!

This theme has been designed to be quickly added to any Wordpress site with no customisation. There is no need to alter header images because there aren’t any… like Kubrick it relies on text generated from your blogs title and description, and also from the category and post descriptions.

Adsense is integrated (3 units per page, and one linkunit ~ the maximum Google allows), and the theme also includes Adsense for search in place of the standard Wordpress search function. Of course, it is easy to switch out Adsense for any other advertising program you may wish to use, the banners are standard sizes.

Some basic SEO has been carried out… the “title” and “h1? tags contain the most relevant information… on a post page, the post title is used, on a category the category title is used etc. This should give Search Engines a better understanding of your page, and hence an improved ranking for your page. Another often overlooked advantage of correct use of tags is that your result in the SERPs will be formed correctly, so instead of your websites name (eg. pilkster.com) being used in every result, the page title (eg. SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme) or category title will be used. This is a much more useful and appealing result for the searcher.

This theme is also compatible with my Amazon Plugin For Wordpress.

Adsense is located in the following files; header.php (728×15 linkunit), footer.php (728×90 adunit), sidebar.php (336×280 adunit, 160×600 adunit).

Adsense for search is located in searchform.php.

The theme is intentionally basic and should be simple to build up and out from. If you use this theme as-is, or build a new theme from it, please let me know by commenting on this post.

Developers

WordPress development is led by Ryan Boren and Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg and Mike Little were co-founders of the project.

The contributing developers include:

* Dougal Campbell
* Mark Jaquith
* Donncha O’Caoimh
* Andy Skelton
* Michel Valdrighi
* Peter Westwood

Though developed much by the community surrounding it, WordPress is closely associated with Automattic, where some of WordPress’s main contributing developers are employees.[14]

WordPress is also in part developed by its community, among which are the WP testers, a group of people that volunteer time and effort to testing each release. They have early access to nightly builds, Beta versions and Release Candidates. Upgrading to these versions, they can find and report errors to a special mailing list, or the project’s Trac tool.

Multi-blogging

WordPress supports one weblog per installation, though multiple concurrent copies may be run from different directories if configured to use separate database tables.

Wordpress MultiUser (Wordpress MU) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. Wordpress MU makes it possible for any one with a website to host their own blogging community, control and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. Wordpress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

Lyceum is another enterprise-edition of Wordpress. Lyceum, unlike WordPress MU, stores all of its information in a set number of database tables. Notable communities that use Lyceum are TeachFor.Us[13] (Teach For America teachers’ blogs), BodyBlogs and the Hopkins Blogs.

Vulnerabilities

In January 2007, many high profile Search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, as well as many low-profile commercial blogs featuring Adsense were targeted and attacked with a WordPress exploit.[9]

A separate vulnerability on one of the project site’s web servers allowed an attacker to introduce exploitable code in the form of a back door to some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1. The 2.1.2 release addressed this issue; an advisory released at the time advised all users to upgrade immediately.[10]

In May 2007, a study revealed that 98% of WordPress blogs being run are exploitable.[11]

In a June 2007 interview, Stefen Esser, the founder of the PHP Security Response Team, spoke critically of WordPress’s security track record, citing problems with the application’s architecture that make it unnecessarily difficult to write code that is secure against SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as other problems.[12]