Hello bloggers, as you may know WordPress 2.6 released some days ago, with some exciting features which you can see in this video.

However, if you upgraded your WordPress, you need to know about a security hole in this awesome platform ( I think this bug is in the past versions too ). So check this out to learn how to protect your blog from hackers!

The plugins’ directory is not safe! if you search in google for the index of the path where wordpress storage the plugins, it will give you thousand of websites as result, which you can access and check their plugins! Practically, if you want, you could steal information, paid plugins or even steal a blog…

Wordpress Security Hole

As you can see, your blog is not safe. How can you fix this issue? That’s simple!

You need to create a file called index.html and upload it to the Plugins’ folder yourblog/wp-content/plugins/. So, when someone try to load that location, the browser will load the index file and that person will get nothing important.

In the .html file you can write a message linking to your blog. Also, you could redirect that page to your blog… However, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is that your folder will be safe now .

Check my html file here . You can get a similar one by copying the following code into a html file:

<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0in”><FONT SIZE=6>YOUR-MESSAGE-HERE</FONT></P>
<br/>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0in”><img src=”YOUR-IMAGE-URL-HERE“/></P>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”3; URL=YOUR-BLOG-HERE“>

Take care!

Hello new bloggers, if you use wordpress to manage your blog and you are thinking on monetize your blog, this offer is for you.

To monetize your blog, I recommend you to use OIOPublisher Plugin for wordpress, which you can easily manage your advertising and sales. OIOpublisher is aimed at blog owners and webmasters. It is being continually developed into a complete advertising solution. That means not only creating the ultimate sales solution, but also focusing on traffic and content development.

This plugin has the advantage that you don’t need to pay a commission for sale, with this you are your own boss. This mean you will have full control over what and how you sell, and you will keep 100% of your earnings.

So this month, at Mr. Javo dot Com you can get 2 discounts by introducing the following codes:

• $5 off code: QWERTY-5 (expires 30 days from now)
• $17 off code: QWERTY-17 (expires 15 days from now)

This plugin, normally has a cost of $39, but you can get it for less with these coupons! So what are you waiting for? Start to monetize your blog with OIOPublisher Plugin and take full control of your sales, turn on the auto-pilot!

Yesterday in the morning, I upgraded my wordpress from 2.3.3 to the new WordPress 2.5. Easy as the preview WordPress’s versions, I finished to upgrade my WP in a couple of minutes. To enter the admin panel, I had to update my database with a simple click.

I thought to write this post yesterday, but I wait another day to test the new platform and give you my report:

The Sections

The main change is the new structure of the wordpress panel. It is very cleanest, easy to navigate and beautiful than the preview version. The new dashboard is not so far to the preview version, though it is more organized, those boxes make easiest to check the recent backlinks, the comments, the statistics and everything you have there.

Also I like how you can jump between different sections through the Related links. You can see this box in every section of the new panel.

About the widgets, I think the old way to place them on the sidebar was a little more easy. They implemented 1-click to add the widgets, which is easiest than Drag and drop. But to remove a widget, you need to click Edit>Remove. Two clicks vs One Drag and Drop, D&D wins. However, still being very easy to place widgets on the sidebar.

The Writing Experience

There are new features which really improve the writing experience. Now, you can write in fullscreen, something good that help you to concentrate and don’t lose the focus on what you are writing about. Something interesting is that now you can add media as images, videos and audio, uploading them from your pc.

There are more technical features, but I will let you to discover them by yourself, upgrade to WordPress 2.5 now!

Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Today someone send me an email asking me for a page which he added to him bookmarks and today he tried to visit it and it was impossible to him. The page was not deleted, I just changed something in the permalink but he got an 404 Error Page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server cannot be made at all.

However this issue was good because it makes me notice that my 404 error page really sucks and I start to think how could I improve it…So I was thinking, in which circumstances someone get an 404 Error Page:

• When the url is written bad.
• When the url is deleted from the site.
• When the permalink is changed.

So I thought that is annoying when someone get a 404 message, the person is waiting to see the content and instead the person need to go back in the browser or verify the url. However that’s boring, so I will give you some tips to improve your 404 error page as I improved mine and give to the user a more pleasant sailing.

1. Be friendly with the user: ok may be this could be considered stupid but not everybody knows what a 404 error is. Normally this kind of pages only show a single message: “404 Error – Not Found” or something like that. The experimented user know what it means, but if you are not an Internet lover, you surely won’t know what to do. In this case, you need to tell them what’s happening, a little message explaining it is sufficient for this.
2. Include a search bar: if the user couldn’t find something, you need to help him to find it! how? if he is interested in something specific, he’ll want to find it, so what’s better than a search bar? a good and simply search bar could solve the problem, adding it to your 404 error page could help the users to find their wants.
3. Offer personal assistance: exist the case that the user simply can’t find what he is looking for. In this case you should offer personal assistance, let them know that you are willing to help them finding what they want. Placing a link to the contact form will be enough in addition of a little note.
4. Offer other posts: may be they can’t find what they want because simply the content does not exist on your blog. What should you do in this cases? offering other posts could be a nice way to attract them to your blog. I used a wordpress plugin called Customizable Post Listings for this, it let you to set random posts where you want with a simple php function: you can set the number of posts, the format of them, the author of them…inclusively you can set categories, so the plugin will only show random posts under these categories.

Building a 404 error page could be simple, but it’s very important for any website because depending of how is it configured, the users can leave or stay in the site when they can’t find what they want.

Happy blogging!

Hello wordpress bloggers, yesterday I was talking about some great plugins for wordpress to improve your search engine optimization. Today I will tell you some tips about how you should set your wordpress to get success on search engines.

WordPress is considered one of best blogging platforms because it allows to perform Search Engine Optimization functions that most of the other blog platforms do not support. This includes elements like title tags, meta descriptions, related posts, optional excerpts, and other easy ways of making the Search Engines clearly aware of your content and what it is about.

Best format for Permalinks

The permalinks or permanent links are one of best ways to improve your seo. By activating them, you will have links permanently for every post you write, so if you have them deactivated just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel and activate them. For this permanent url, you can set different formats: Date and name based, Numeric and Default. Also there is an option to customize this format, so you should check that and set the structure /%postname%/ and nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. Try to avoid using dates as subfolders, this ties your post to an specific date, limiting your ability to update old posts. Also, using dates as subfolders may result wrong in search engines because your post will be ranked with less weight and this will reduce the crawl rate. If you noticed, my blog has dates as subfolders. I changed the structure just like I recommend here but the problem is that wordpress change automatically every url’s post, so this mean that every oldest post linked in my newest posts won’t be find, redirecting you to the 404 error page. I’m thinking a solution for this, don’t worry .

Use your keywords on slugs

Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. For example, you can use www.yourdomain.com/blog-setup-basics.php instead of something like www.yourdomain.com/?p=140. If you don’t set a slug ( you can find this at the right of the posting screen ), wordpress automatically will set as slug the title of your post with a “-” between words. Try to avoid “the”, “or” and “and” in your posts slug, and use some of your blog keywords on it to get success in search engines indexing.

Enable Pinging

This is a little out of place but it’s good to mention it, what is a ping? pinging sends a signal to the Search Engines to come take a look at your blog every time new content is added or changes are made. This gives you a big SEO advantage, as it ensures your content is seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help your posts rank right away for less-competitive keywords.

Following this tips, you will be optimizing your blog for search engines, google, yahoo, msn, ask etc etc…The implementation of your keywords on your permanent links is very very important and it’s something that you should have in mind when you are setting a post tittle and slug.