Daily Cup of Tech

Recently found How to Firewall Your WordPress Blog to be useful. From the website:

You already know to use a decent password for your blog, but brute-force or dictionary attacks aren’t the only attacks used against bloggers. It’s much cheaper and faster to exploit software flaws, and that the hackers do. A programmer’s oversight may allow a hacker to gain access to your blog to insert spyware, adware, or links to various pharmaceuticals you’d prefer not to speak about in front of your mother.

And it’s not just WordPress proper. WordPress has caught some major criticism for its security holes — but lately it’s been a bunch of insecure plugins, not WordPress itself. Matt Mullenweg counters the argument that WordPress is insecure over here. I think he’s totally right — WordPress has a rich “plugin ecosystem” that no other blogging platform can touch.

However, the problem remains. WordPress has some great plugins that are written by people with the best of intentions — but who may not understand the importance of sanitizing data provided by untrusted users, and its relationship with security. Upgrading often, setting permissions, using good passwords, etc. — that all helps a lot — but unless you have the time and ability to painstakingly audit all program code for security vulnerabilities, you’d be best off running one of the WordPress firewalls —

Great!  Yet something else that needs to be done!  But would be well worth tackling!

[How to Firewall Your WordPress Blog]

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One of the annoying things about web design is the fact that you are really quite limited in the number of fonts that you can use on your website.  Unless you’re really into rendering your text to graphics and adding a pile of alt tags so that search engines can see your content, there really is little that you can do.

Well, it appears that your prayers have been answered.  typeface.js is a javascript library that will render your text in real time so that your website looks the way it should without all of the advanced work.  Check out some examples of how this works.

You also aren’t just limited to the fonts that the authors of typeface.js produce.  You can upload any TrueType font that you may have in your library (i.e. c:\windows\fonts folder) and it will prepare it for the script.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/24/embed-any-font-you-want-into-your-website/trackback/

I use ScribeFire as my primary blogging tool.  The problem that I ran into is that I blog on multiple computers.  If I were to start a post on one computer and then go to my other computer, the post that I started did not follow me.  But, I found a way around this.

It requires that I remember to post the partially completed post to my blog and set the timestamp for a time in the future.  This way, I can retrieve my post later and continue to work on it.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/05/use-scribefire-on-multiple-computers/trackback/

For those of you who are using the latest and greatest version of Firefox or IE, you will notice up in the search bar an option to add Google Search by DCoT.  Now, this is not some amazing new search engine.  In fact, it is the same old results that you get from your regular Google.  But, there are three differences:

1. The results are generated out of Google Co-op Custom Search Engine
2. There are fewer adds on the results pages than on the regular Google results pages
3. If you do find something of interest in the ads, Daily Cup of Tech gets a small kickback

So, if you are so inclined, feel free to install the Google Search by DCoT.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/02/28/dcot-search-engine/trackback/

This is part eight of our series on configuring a Slicehost slice.  We are finally at the last part of this series.  Here goes!

Step Eight – Install WordPress via Subversion

Install Subversion

Using Subversion is a much easier way to install Wordpress.  Install Subversion with this command:

sudo aptitude install subversion

Install WordPress

Move your working directory to the root of the directory that you want to install Wordpress in:

cd /home/<username>/public_html/<domain.name>/public

Install the latest stable version of Wordpress:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7 .

We’re done.  Now you can connect to your website and walk through the standard Wordpress installation.

Conclusion

I hope that you found this to be a useful series.  I have put this entire series into a PDF document (along with a few extras) so that you can have a nice printed version available.

Basic Slicehost Slice Setup Series List:

1. Part 1 - Updating Ubuntu
2. Part 2 - Configure iptables
3. Part 3 - Install and Configure OpenSSH
4. Part 4 - Install nginx Web Server
5. Part 5 - Installing MySQL
6. Part 6 - Installing PHP5 with fastcgi
7. Part 7 - Create the Virtual Host Website
8. Part 8 - Install WordPress via Subversion

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