According to Mashable there are two clues that your blog has been successfully attacked by the computer worm:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked.

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account.

Webmasters are asked to update their blogs to the latest version of Wordpress immediately. Those that have been hit by the computer worm should backup all files, export their settings, and do a clean install of Wordpress. More help is offered at the Wordpress website.

Rant:

It’s Sunday and it is time for a little rant. Webmasters who do not update their blogs as soon as a new version of their blogging software is released are acting stupid. A Wordpress update usually takes less than ten minutes and ensures that the blog and server is protected from attacks like these. Webmasters who do not have the time to perform these updates should consider switching to a hosted blogging platform like that at Blogger or Wordpress.com. The automatic update option that has been introduced in recent Wordpress versions makes it even easier to update the blog as soon as a new version is released. Webmasters who cannot do this should not operate a self hosted blog, period.

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One interesting application for that purpose is RightThumb for the Windows operating system. It is a portable application that can be integrated into the Windows Explorer context menu to offer the option to create a thumbnail from selected images.

Several parameters of the thumbnail creation can be configured upon startup including the output format for the thumbnail image, the maximum dimension for the image, the quality of jpg images, compression of png images, the resample filter and if desired a prefix identifier for the image. The image will be automatically sharpened after resizing and it is possible to select a different output folder for the thumbnail image.

The program can be closed after the initial configuration and is from then on accessible from the Windows context menu if that option has been selected. Right Thumb (via Barry’s Computer Tips) is a free download for the windows operating system.

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So, what is BloGTK? BloGTK is an application that allows you to easily blog from the comfort of your own desktop. “But wait!”, you say, “I can blog already from my desktop, with the help of my browser.” Yes you can. But with BloGTK you can blog off line, save drafts, have multiple accounts, and more.  So, let’s take a look at how you can start using BloGTK as your desktop blogging system.

Installing BloGTK

Before we get into connecting to your blog we have to install the application first. This is very simple. You can install BloGTK from the command line with a command such as:

sudo apt-get install blogtk

or

yum install blogtk

Or you can open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for “blogtk” (no quotes), select the resulting entry, and click Apply to install.

Once BloGTK is installed you will find the menu entry in the Internet submenu of your Applications or Main menu.

Making the connection

As I mentioned earlier, BloGTK doesn’t offer as many connection types as some of the other tools. But it does connect to:

• Blogger
• MoveableType
• MetaWeblog API

Now from the last listing you would think that BloGTK could connect to Drupal, Wordpress, and many more types of accounts. As of the current release (1.1) BloGTK doesn’t handle the MetaWeblog API well. So for the purposes of this article I will show you how to connect to a Blogger account with this software.

Figure 1

The first thing you need to do is go to the Edit menu and select the Accounts and Settings entry. When this new window opens (see Figure 1).

Notice the Server URL. For Blogger this is the exact URL you need to use to connect. Other than that you will enter the username and password for your Blogger account and make sure Blogger is selected from the list of Blogging Systems.

Once you have this done click Save and then click OK.

You should notice, at the bottom of the main BloGTK window (see Figure 2) the instructions telling you to use File/Connect to connect (or re-connect) to your server.

Figure 2

You do not have to connect to the server right away. You can create your blog entry first and then connect to the server and post your entry. Or you can create an entry and save the entry for later posting.

To save an entry you go about creating and, when you are ready to save, click the File menu and select “Save Post As…”, give the draft a name, and save the draft. You can then open the saved post for editing later.

If you want to post immediately you only have to create your post, connect to your account, and click the “Post Entry” button.

In order to connect to your account you go to the File menu and click “Connect”.

Gotchas

Outside of the seriously lacking account types you can use, there is a gotcha you will find when using Blogger. The Blogger system is using a newer API and the current iteration of BloGTK can not make use of all of its features. For instance, you can not add a title to your blogs with this release. You also can not use the Extended Entry or Excerpt features as well. Outside of that, BloGTK works just fine.

Final thoughts

When the 2.0 release of BloGTK hits the repositories this application’s usefulness will be extended quite a bit. All of the Blogger features will work and, hopefully, more APIs will be added so more accounts can be used. Until then BloGTK can be thought of as a quick and easy way to add basic entries to your Blogger account. If you don’t want to wait that long, consider helping the creator with the updates. I look forward to being able to use BloGTK more often in the future.

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Some changes that Wordpress admins will notice right away are speed improvements in the admin interface and the ability to change more aspects of the layout than before. Wordpress will for instance automatically adjust the layout according to the screen size of the web browser window with options to change the amount of columns and what is being displayed on the screen.

It is now possible to remove or add information when viewing posts, pages or comments in the admin interface with the additional option to change the number of items that are displayed on the screen. It is now therefor possible to change the default number of comments that are displayed on screen which could have been achieved before only by hacking system files.

Other improvements include a new theme installer which allows the webmaster to search for and install themes right from the Wordpress admin interface without leaving the website. This is a similar feature to the automatic plugin installation that was added in earlier versions.

The Wordpress Codex contains a list of all changes and additions that have been added to Wordpress 2.8. The new version can be downloaded from the main Wordpress site.

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Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use Wordpress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

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Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called “methods” are temporary. In the beginning there was the “fill your site with invisible keywords” method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don’t. Try that now and you’ll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a ’sin’, it won’t give you what you’re looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you’re lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you’re banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that’s about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

So if you want to go instantly to number one, you really need a great idea, like Twitter, Remember The Milk and so on. Otherwise you will have to keep at it. if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll find so many little successes on the way. When I started my own blog, Hack Your Day after about a 5 days if you typed “Hack Your Day” into Google I was at number 8-9, Hack a Day, Lifehack and so on were in front of me. After a month or so I was at number 1. This is of course of no use at all, but still a small victory, showing I’m doing something right.

If you’re doing a project on the web, especially a blog, keep in mind that you won’t be successful in a matter of days, it will most like take years if it ever happens at all. Hey, if it was easy, where would the challenge be?

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Someone who wants to earn money from blogging needs traffic more than anything else. It is not hard to put Google Adsense on a blog and earn money with it. The ad might not be optimized but it will still earn money if the blog receives traffic. Without traffic, there will be no money no matter how optimized or clever the ad units are.

Blogging for a period of three years teaches a lot if you are eager to learn. Bloggers learn about search engine optimization which is a profession in itself, about monetization, about the blogging plattform, how to interact with visitors / customers / fellow bloggers and more.

It’s a steep learning curve but if you master it you will be successful. Here are a few blogging tips that helped me a lot:

• Keep Going: That’s the most important part of it all. Many bloggers give up after blogging for a few weeks because they cannot see that traffic comes in. No visitors equals low motivation and that’s usually the point when they decide to quit.

  Some search engines apply an automatic filter to new websites (some call it sandbox) that prevents them from ranking for popular keywords to avoid spam. It is natural that new sites will not rank well for terms like business or credit cards while they will have lesser problem ranking for long tail keywords.

• Keywords: Speaking of which. Keywords are the essence of a blog. Search engines analyse blog posts and pick out keywords that they think the blog post is about. They then give the keyword a score and compare it to other sites that rank for that keyword and place the new website on a specific rank in the search engine for that keyword. Other factors may weight in like the new blog filter but that’s basically how it works.

  If bloggers are serious about traffic generation they need to understand the keyword concept and how they do keyword research. Keyword research meaning to find profitable low competition keywords that the blog can most likely rank well for.

• Long Tail Keywords: Long Tail refers to keywords that are very specific and usually consist of a few words. Blog is not a long term keyword while How To Create A Blog is. Long Tail keywords receive less traffic than their more generic counterparts but that traffic is usually targeted.
• Build a Network: If you blog on your own you will miss opportunities. It is impossible keeping up with all the news and trends related to blogging. A network of bloggers that target the same niche can help each other in several ways. If they come upon an interesting topic or option they will inform their fellow bloggers about it. They can also promote the blogs of other network members in their own blogs.
• Don’t read the Chows: Don’t read the blogs of those so called probloggers. The only thing they usually care about is their own bankroll. The products that they promote will earn them money because other bloggers will join or buy them because of their recommendations but there will be no or small gain for the little guy who bought the product. Their sites are about an image that they have to keep up and about upselling products to newbies. Stay away from them. Look at my link list for recommendations.

Here is a short link list:

• Make Money For Beginners
• Internet Marketing School
• Seo Zombie
• Google Adwords Keywords Tool (Keyword Research)
• Wordtracker Free Keywords (Keyword Research)
• SEO Quake (Firefox Extension)

If you read the three blogs posted above you will learn a lot in short time. Those are honest bloggers who do not try to sell you yet another “make money in no time” product that only works for them because they can sell it to you.

Seo Zombie is a site that I discovered a while ago and the guy does a good job as well, his Keyword Sniping Case Study sounds interesting and might be a great way to learn if he continues posting updates.

The keyword research tools are essential to discover keywords that can be target that pay well and have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

Seo Quake finally is a Firefox extension that displays all kinds of “SEO” information like Pagerank, links and domain age on the screen.

If you have any questions about blogging let me know and I try to answer them.

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See the problem is that I never really “got” Twitter… I tried, I really did. I signed up and followed people and Twittered regularly, but it never really did it for me. Eventually I just forgot about it.

Enter Plurk.

Considering micro-blogging isn’t something I’ve really got into you may be surprised I wanted to introduce you to this service. Some say it’s just a better featured Twitter clone, but I think it has a great deal more potential then that.

It’s got a wicked name for a start.

No seriously, the name is actually brilliant. It manages to sound suitably web 2.0 without taking a killing the consonants and even works perfectly as a verb. Check out how they explain it:

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

I agree.

It also demonstrates the sites tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, something which actually works in this case… *ahem* Sphinn (“Stop right there! We’re going to have to see some ID”). In fact the Plurk blog is quite entertaining and worth a read.

You’ll find a nice attractive UI which features a colour scheme very similar to the WordPress dashboard. Here is an image of what to expect:

As you can see I have no contacts so it’s not very fun at the moment, I would like to test drive the service properly so so why don’t you join up and try it out too!

One particular element I’m liking is the horizontal orientated timeline, rather then the vertical focus of most services. I’ll be interested to see how it’ll handle a lot of contacts because having to scroll across and down to view “plurks” will be a pain.

Anyway, this isn’t just a Twitter-plus-more-features start-up, it’s a whole new take on micro-blogging and social networking in general.

Expect it to be big soon!

(If not, just expect it to be in TechCrunch’s Deadpool by early next week)

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