Monday, April 28, 2008

Disable Directory Listings in WordPress

By default when accessing any directory which does not contain an index file, a directory listing will be shown displaying a list of the files in that folder. Web servers can be configured to automatically display the listings of the contents of a web site's file directory if no index file (i.e. index.html or index.php) is present. This can expose files and information to visitors.

Simply adding a blank/ 0 byte text file named "index.html" will prevent this directory list from being displayed, however another way to disable directory listing is by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in your public_html folder of your web hosting account :

Options -Indexes

That’s it, with this line in place, folders which do not contain index files will no longer show the default directory list.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Top Ten Best Wordpress Plugins

WordPress is a simple to use blogging tool. The beauty of WordPress is that it can become so much more with the simple installation of plugins. With a few clicks, WordPress can become a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). Here is a rundown on the top 10 best plugins every blogger should have installed.

Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular Wordpress plugins which every blogger should have installed. Enjoy the list.

Akismet - Simply the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

WP Super Cache - An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

WP-PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily.

WP-PageNavi - A WordPress Plugin that adds more advanced page navigation to WordPress. It does this by adding page number links to your different pages. Using this plugin your readers will be able to jump from the first to the last page and other pages of your blog very easily.

Simple Tags - A plugin does everything related with tagging. With this plugin you can generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry. The tags can be used to search your blog and are picked up by blog search engines like Technorati and can bring in new users.

All in One SEO Pack - Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog, everything you need to get your site optimized for search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps - Simple tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

Wordpress Thread Comment - This Plugin is an enhancement for Wordpress's comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

FeedBurner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Wordpress Database Backup - Automated or on-demand backup solution for your wordpress database. Don't leave home without it!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

DreamHost CPU Minute Restrictions

DreamHost is a popular web host among bloggers. With accounts beginning at only $7.95 a month, featuring generous disk space and bandwidth. But DreamHost's CPU minute restriction limits their otherwise generous bandwidth/storage allowance.

DreamHost measure server resource consumption in CPU minutes. This number indicates how much time a processor spends working for host user. All DreamHost shared hosting customers should use less than 60 cpu minutes per day for all their users on their account.

How to find the my CPU minutes per day, DreamHost tell us the way.

First, you'll need to verify that you have CPU Reporting enabled for your user. This can be done from the 'Users'->'Manage Users' section of the web panel by clicking 'edit' for the user.

You should be able to access your reports within a day after being enabled by FTP'ing or SSH'ing to your account and switching to the logs/resources/ directory. In there, you'll find files named .sa.analyzed.0, .sa.analyzed.1, .sa.analyzed.2. Your username will replace . These files are generated by a script that looks at how many minutes your scripts use, then rotates them every day. So the latest file from yesterday will be the .0 file, and the day before will be .1 and so on.

You can also view and download these stats files through the stats url of any of your domains (E.G. http://yourdomain.com/stats/resources )

You'll only really need to pay attention to the first column, the second column, and the total at the bottom. In the first column is the process name, or the file name. The second is the total CPU seconds per day it's using, and then the total CPU seconds after the dashed line. In this example, the top process is "view" with 6245.03 CPU seconds per day (or 104.08 CPU minutes per day if you divide by 60). The total for this particular day is 6767.95 CPU seconds per day, or 112.79 CPU minutes per day.

Monday, April 14, 2008

WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version

I have discussed in an article under WordPress 2.5 in widescreen display abnormal. Almost all of the interface of WordPress 2.5 are directed at the design of the 1024 × 768. When I use my 1440 × 900 widescreen monitor will show only the left side of the body. I've finally managed to get my 1440×900 widescreen monitor working with the WordPress 2.5.

Open file wordpress\wp-admin\css\global.css, in line 159, replace:

max-width: 980px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

In line 166, replace:

max-width: 950px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

That's it. Before the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like this:

WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version

After the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like that. It's so cool, isn't it.

WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version

If you are using the 1440 × 900 display resolution, you can changes the code and make a better look in WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version.