We are announcing a giveaway prize with another contest for our Devil’s Workshop readers. This time we bring you Handy Backup Standard Edition software. 5 lucky winners will receive the key codes to Handy Backup Standard Edition which is worth $39.00.
Back up folders and individual files with file mask filtering with options of backing up only photos, music files, videos.
There are free plug-ins designed to facilitate backup for My Documents, Windows registry, Outlook backup, etc.
Backup with to DVD, CD, local or external HDDs, network drives, remote FTP servers.
Backup options. Enable backup compression, encryption, verification and other options for most convenient and smooth backups.
Flexible backup scheduling is also a great feature which allows backup and synchronization tasks on a regular basis according to a predetermined customized schedule.
Another option allows performing inconspicuous backups which does not require the user to be logged in but running the Backup software as Windows Backup.
To participate in the contest all you need to do is :
Tweet about this post through your Twitter account.
Comment on this post with link to your tweet.
Become a fan of DW on Facebook Fan page in the sidebar.
How Winner will be selected :
All the participants who have completed all 3 conditions stated above, will be eligible for participation. Five winners will be decided via Random draw using random.org. Winners will be announced on 25th of March 2010.
Example of your Retweet:
Retweet and win #free license for Handy Backup #software: DW #contest
Best of luck to all the participants and DW readers.
The Fedora 13 “Goddard” Alpha release is now available! You can participate by testing the Alpha release and reporting all bugs to the Fedora QA team. Here’s a message from Jesse Keating:
The Alpha release contains all the features of Fedora 13 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora [...]
This plugin offers wordpress administrator a method of updating all of their blog images at once after changes have been made to the Media Upload settings.
Once this plugin installed, you will find a new link at “Media” in Admin Menu. This link is called “Scan Images”. Click this link and then click the “Start Scan” button. This will scan every single image attachment on wordpress installation. Report items with a green header are in “Perfect Condition” while items with a red background are incorrect and may or may not be resizable by wordpress.
I am a seeking a designer to perform minor customization and provide consultation for my WP site located at http://bit.ly/b21yZ1 and potential future sites on an as needed basis. Please respond via email or to 719-304-9363. Thanks in advance.
I have data already available and on my site, but I want to be able to update / add data from within the wordpress admin panel. The pages to be integrated into wordpress so that everything works together (tags if possible)
Coach pages, rosters, game summaries, schedules, stats, etc.
The site will be very similar to [...]
This plugint allows to insert arbitrary Text and/or HTML code. But also parses any inserted PHP code and executes it. This makes it easier to migrate to a widget-based theme.
All PHP code must be enclosed in the standard tags for it to be recognized.
Now that things have calmed down, it’s time to discuss what happened that took WPTavern.com offline. It all started the day I published my review of the Backup Buddy plugin from PluginBuddy.com. That post not only received a large number of comments, but it ended up on StumbleUpon and was overall a large success. However, a few hours after that post had been published, I started to receive a large number of trackbacks to that particular post. The trackbacks were from different URLs which appeared to be junk domains. The site was setup so that an article was published near the top of the page and below the article was a list of related links. Each one of those related links pointed to a source outside of the parent site. I chalked all of these trackbacks as just typical splog spam and didn’t think nothing of it.
The next day, I woke up to see at least 50 more trackbacks in my Akismet queue all pointing to the Backup Buddy review post. When I started to look at the various junk domains, I noticed that the word Backup appeared to be the keyword these sites were after. Again, I deleted the trackbacks as I thought it was typical to see a large number of illegitimate trackbacks on a post that was popular. Things started to get interesting once I published the winners to the Backup Buddy give away as well as the WPTavern Backup Buddy coupon posts. At the time, I didn’t know this but I now realize that those extra posts with Backup in the title were adding fuel to the fire. I started to receive a large number of trackbacks on those posts with the word Backup in the title. I just kept deleting the trackbacks thinking nothing of it.
After I came home on March 9th, I took a 4 hour nap as I was exhausted from working on 4 hours sleep. During this time, AnHosting decided to suspend my account due to processor overload. Thanks to everyone on twitter for your concern as it prompted me to wake up and get into action. Since I couldn’t access cPanel or anything else tied to my account, I visited the AnHosting web page which gave me the option to perform a live chat with a technician. They explained to me that XMLRPC.php and Index.php were the two culprits sucking up all the CPU power. Once I told them I would disable XMLRPC on WordPress as well as disable trackbacks and pingbacks, they temporarily restored my site. After disabling those, I also used a trick I learned from Brad Williams where I viewed the source code on the index of the site and pasted that into index.html and renamed index.php. This was just in case a large amount of human traffic was the source of taking down the site. However, it struck me as odd that Woopra showed no signs up a large influx of human traffic on the site during that time or just prior to the site being suspended.
Once I renamed XMLRPC.php and index.php, the CPU on the server immediately went back to stable levels. However, WordPress needs index.php to function properly. Thanks to this line of code from Will Anderson, I was able to successfully use index.php without the scrapers being able to access it.
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if('/index.php'==$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']){header('Location: http://wptavern.com/');die('Do not request this file directly');}
According to Will Anderson, this is just a little redirection code with the hope that the scrapers will not be able to handle the redirect. Oddly enough, it worked and prevented index.php from being loaded by an external source. I say external source because according to Woopra, the source of the CPU overloading was not caused by human beings browsing the site. Instead, some type of software whether it was a bot or something else was loading my index.php file and either scanning the content for posts or doing something else. The irony to all of this is that during the attack, I noticed a comment in the Akismet queue advertising Trackback Submitter software. I’m pretty sure that XMLRPC deals with Track/Pingbacks in WordPress and if that’s the case, that would explain why that file was used so heavily. Once I was able to navigate within the administration panel of WPTavern, I noticed I had over 250 trackback spam links waiting in my Akismet Queue. While some of the IP addresses attached to them were the same, a large number of them were different. Also, the webhost for these junk domains also varied. It was as if I was attacked by a distributed denial of service through trackbacks. A cheap ass way to take a down a site in my opinion.
This is the first time I’ve ever experienced something like this. I really want to thank the tech support guys from AnHosting for allowing me to chat with them directly and work on resolving the issue. Obviously in a shared hosting environment, one bad apple can take down the whole tree. I apologize for being that bad apple. Furthermore, although Ozh had different reasons for doing so, I am highly considering disabling trackbacks/pingbacks for good considering I’ll see incoming links from either the Incoming Links dashboard widget or through other analytic software. Alternatively, I can use a plugin called Simple Trackback Validation which so far, has received a lot of good feedback from those who have used it.
I can’t believe how easy it was to perform a DoS attack on WPTavern.com through the use of trackbacks and XMLRPC. Although not an inherit flaw within the WordPress software, I wonder if anything should be done to prevent this sort of attack from happening? In fact, what can be done by WordPress to help prevent this from happening? If the Simple Trackback Validation plugin is as good as what people have told me, I’m guessing it could be absorbed into core?
This plugin display flags to switch languages. This plugin only uses the locale files from wordress or buddypress and eventually theme for user to have the interface in his language.
When the user clicks on a flag, he is sent a cookie mentioning the language to use which will be destroyed when leaving his browser or updated when he clicks on another flag. It does not provide content localization features.
This plugin to change your blog into an iPhone application-style theme, It is a single click task. To complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.
The admin panel allows to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of blog to iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code.
The theme also includes the ability for visitors to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.
This plugin allows to create a draft copy of a post or page in two ways:
1. In ‘Edit Posts’/’Edit Pages’, you can click on ‘Duplicate’ link;
2. While editing a post/page, you can click on ‘Copy to a new draft’ above “Cancel”/”Move to trash”.
Both these ways lead to the edit page for the new draft and change what you want then click on ‘Publish’.
This plugin is developed using JScript FloatBox library whcih is using to display window content over top of web pages. It can be considered a “lightbox clone” (Lightview, Lightbox, Shadowbox, Fancybox, Thickbox, etc.) with great image gallery capabilities.
This plugin extends that model with support for all types of content and strong programmability for “smart”, interactive content. Floatbox is highly customizable, easy to deploy and very robust and reliable across all modern browsers.
If you’re responsible for a WordPress site then you need to know how to keep it secure. You cannot afford to leave your product and investment unprotected. Most of these strategies will take you under two minutes to implement but can save you many hours of agonizing over how to clean up a mess created by the ravenous robots that roam the internet. You’ve heard the nightmarish stories of friends who have been hacked but you will never be among them if you take the time to implement a WordPress security strategy. Here’s a few quick strategies that will help you to make your WordPress installation less vulnerable.
Add a New User With Admin Permissions and Delete the Admin User
You may have heard this before but may not have taken the time to do it. This is the easiest and perhaps one of the most important adjustments you can make to boost your security. Don’t ever use “admin” for a username. All the robots who target WordPress know that it automatically generates the admin user and that most people are unlikely to change it. Create a new user first and make it an administrator. Select a username that is not easy to guess. Then use it to delete the admin user.
Allow Only Your IP Address to Access the wp-admin Directory
If you are the only person you want to have access to your blog and you don’t have any editors or contributors, considering denying access to every IP address except your own. The wp-admin directory is vulnerable to attack, but this quick .htaccess trick will help you to protect it from security risks. Add the following code snippet to your .htaccess file. Replace the xx.xx.xx.xx with your static IP address. You can list multiple IP addresses by entering them on another line if you wish to allow access from other places.
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Example Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
</LIMIT>
If you really want to cover your tracks and keep sniffers off your trail, use SSH to access your WordPress files instead of FTP. PuTTY is a free SSH client that you can use to transfer files between your machine and your server. SSH uses cryptographic technology to secure your session and will help keep you safe from traffic sniffers.
Get Regular Security Scans
This is essentially like a dental checkup for your WordPress blog to ensure that you don’t have any cavities. There are plugins that will take care of this for you. One is WP Security Scan. This plugin will scan your blog and notify you of any vulnerabilities and suggest things for you to do to make your blog more secure. It checks passwords, file permissions, database security, version hiding, WP admin protection/security, and removes WP generator meta tag from the core code of your blog.
Keep Your WordPress Version Updated
Chances are that your blog has not attracted the attention of a malicious hacker intent on destroying you. However, there are wicked armies of robots out there using any number of automated methods to try to exploit security holes in your installation. I know that upgrading can cause some tangles with plugins and is from time to time a huge pain, but it is necessary for your blog’s security, even if you’re not desiring new and updated features. Robots are very familiar with WordPress and know how to hack it, but if you keep your blog on the cutting edge you will generally be one step ahead of them.
Password Protect Your Most Important Directories
Enlist the help of AskApache Password Protection For WordPress. It adds multiple layers of security to your blog. The plugin is simple tot use. Simply choose a username and password and you are done. The plugin writes the .htaccess file without messing it up, encrypts your password and creates the .htpasswd file as well as setting the correct security-enhanced file permissions on both. Beyond keeping you safe from malicious attacks, it may even assist you in decreasing spam received on your blog.
Change Your WordPress Database Tables Prefix
This will help to protect you from SQL injections that can make your blog into a link farm. If this has ever happened to you, then you know it’s basically like getting heartworms. If you want to add an extra boost of protection when you install WordPress, make your table prefixes unique by editing wp-config.php file:
$table_prefix = 'wp_';
Change the ‘wp’ to something that is meaningful to you and this will automatically make your database more difficult to inject than 99% of all WordPress blogs.
Having tabs open in a browser can pretty much slow it down and bloggers and developers often have 10 to 15 tabs open on their browser. At work developers often use Firefox browser for IDE development work and they lose tally of how many tabs are open with the browser.
I wrote a few months ago about speeding up Firefox with SmarterFox add-on, as lately Firefox does have the issue of too many addons and toolbars which slows down the browser.
One of the main fears of any person having to restart Firefox is the dread you face waiting for all tabs to open and restart. I have started using Firefox add-on called Bar Tab. It is like a tab manager and helps speed up your Firefox browser.
About BarTab add-on with Firefox
This allowed me to set a time for a tab to be put on Bar Tab after a specific time. Right clicking on the tab also gave me the option of putting a particular tab into Bar Tab.
Bar Tab works on the concept that every tab on Firefox browser puts a load on your Firefox browser. So when a browser restarts all the tabs need to refresh.
This is not really needed for instance if I am using a few tabs and not touching 4-5 tabs they can be closed. Most times we forget to close them. This is where a timer can be set for putting it on Bar Tab automatically and when we restart the browser it only loads up the tabs that were not in Bar Tab.
It also hides or makes the tabs not being used inactive or simulates it being closed. This helps you still refer to it with a simple click but does not hog memory. I can say that it sort of converts a tab in a temporary bookmark for your Firefox browser.
Google has touched our lives in ways no one could have dreamt. Be it latest news you want to read (Google news), looking for some good pics for your presentation (Google images), or looking for directions to a new place (Google maps), Google is there to help you out every time. All this had made a strong group of Google worshippers. Lately I came across an article that shows how strong Google’s fan following has become that people are comparing it to God!
The article at “The Church of Google” (read the whole article here) cites some solid reasons for comparing Google to God. One of the reasons given is the omnipresence of Google. Reading this particular point reminded me of a funny video on YouTube which is on the same lines- Google Toilet.
On a Serious Note…
Though amusing, the article and the video are also thought provoking. They show how much we have started relying on Google. Searching something on net has become synonymous to googling, which shows Google is rightly the Big Brother of search engines.
But comparing it to God!!
Isn’t that’s too much? Aren’t we giving too much hype to a piece of algorithm written by two humans? Give too much power to someone and you will be crushed by that power. Already a section of people have started doubting Google’s motto “Don’t be Evil”, because of privacy concerns, to which “Big Brother” replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Google was made to serve humans, not to control them, which is what we are making it do these days.
As for me, I don’t believe for a second that Google can be compared to God. The moment I disconnect from internet, the so called “God” has no influence over my life. Nor has it answered all my “prayers”-there are hundreds of things I searched on Google for which I didn’t get a satisfactory answer. And the latest embarrassing mistake by Google’s algorithm (see image below – pointed by labnol.org) only proves that it has to cover a long way before it can even be called the God of Internet.
The two netbooks from India, I really liked in terms of price and decent configuration were Wipro’s Ego Netbook and iBall Lil Netbook. Both are 10′inch screen netbooks which are the cheapest I have come across upto now.
Here is a table of comparison of both the products. The main criteria being they are one of the cheapest Netbooks around in India.
iBall Lilbook 1017 10 Inch Netbook
Wipro’s Ego 10 Inch Netbook
Processor
Intel Atom (1.60GHz, 533MHz, 512KB)
Intel Atom Processor 1.6 GHz
OS
Windows XP, Vista & 7 (32 bit)
Windows XP Home
Web Cam
1.3MP web camera
1.3 MP web camera
Screen
10.1 Inch WSVGA 1024 x 600 LCD screen
10.1 Inch TFT screen
RAM
1 GB
1 GB
HDD
160 GB
160 GB
Weight
1.3
1.3 kg
Misc
3 in 1 card reader
8 in 1 card reader with 3 usb ports
Price*
INR 14,559 (approx 320 USD)
INR 19,990 (440 USD)
* Prices are taken on 10th March 2010
I think the cheapest tag can easily go to iBall Lilbook 10 inch Netbook which is almost Rs 5000/- less than the price of Wipro’s Ego 10 inch netbook. But Ego does have 3 USB ports and also an 8 in 1 card reader compared to just a 3-1 card reader with the iBall product.
If you know more details or have an opinion on Netbooks and their significance or future in India? Do drop in your comments.
This plugin is a filter for the FeedWordPress plugin. If you do not use FeedWordPress this plugin will not be useful to you. The filter works by hooking the “syndicated_post” action of FeedWordPress.
For each potential post, the filter compares the post title, and either the post guide or the year-month-day of the post_date_gmt attributes.
If it finds a match of both the title and either the guide or date, it tells FeedWordPress to skip that potential post. Otherwise, it tells FeedWordPress to continue processing it however you have syndication set up on your blog.
This plugin is used to display a certain link category as slide show in the sidebar. It automatically excludes the chosen slideshow category from the Wordpress internal links widget.
Available Options With This Widget:
set width an height of the slideshow
specify timeout between transitions and time of transition
I’m looking for someone to code my new music website. Design layouts can be seen here:
http://mhbmusic.com/mhb-Brown—Home.jpg
http://mhbmusic.com/mhb-Brown—Music.jpg
http://mhbmusic.com/mhb-Brown—Copy-Page.jpg
My main concern is the music player on this site. I want the player to be integrated into the website, so that the music plays while still surfing the site. A great example is how the player works on this [...]
