Now, normally I deny all ZoneAlarm program alerts I don’t recognize as something I want to give access to, but I was really tired that night, and my hand actually twitched and I clicked accept! Honestly, I did not want to click that but it happened! And the next thing you know, my desktop was hijacked, my browsers were hijacked, and it took me almost a week to get rid of this malicious trojan – the AntiVirus XP 2008 trojan, a rogue anti-spyware program. This trojan takes over your hosts file, your desktop, your browsers, and who knows what else. It was nasty!

Now, if a web-savy techie, geeky, internet consultant/marketer like me – who’s been online making a living since 1997 – can get infected accidently by malware or viruses, etc., can you imagine what’s happening to most people who aren’t so savy and have no idea they even have spyware or malware on their computers? They are mostly using Intenet Explorer and if they are not getting regular Windows updates on patch Tuesdays and if they are not using a proper firewall with proper browser settings and tools, or updated antivirus software, then they are very vulnerable and at risk.

Good old Microsoft Windows and Intenet Explorer is so full of security leaks. Ah, but Internet Explorer is not the only browser at risk anymore. Because of the huge popularity of Firefox, it is vulnerable too. I was using Firefox 3 when I got attacked. In fact, 3 of my browsers got hijacked: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 amd Opera 9.52. Luckily Netscape 8 was not affected and I was able to find solutions to get rid of the problem.

Now I use a really good Firefox add-on called NoScript . I enable scripts at sites I trust, only. I have a better firewall and I do regular port scans using SheildsUp at Gibson Research. I am just more vigilant about updating my anti-virus/anti-spyware programs. I can only suggest that you do the same.

The Internet is wonderful most of the time, thank goodness. Just make Intenet security a priority and you’re good to go.

Enjoy the ride!

Related Posts:

• Crack Windows Passwords
• Cross-site Scripting
• WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes
• A Great Little Script for Affiliate Marketers
• WordPress 2.5: First Impressions

First I touched on the topic in my first impressions of WordPress 2.5. Then I whined a little about the tickets relating to them, and eventually I released my Google Maps Plugin that uses them. In the end, WordPress’s new shortcodes are really nice.

What are they?

First of all, a shortcode called “mycode” can look like any of these:
[mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123" color="red" something="data"]
[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]
[mycode]<p><a href="http://example.com/">HTML Content</a></p>[/mycode]
[mycode]Content [another-shotcode] more content[/mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123"]Some Content[/mycode]

As you can see, shortcodes allow a user to put a code into a post or page, and a plugin can then easily handle those codes. They can be nested, contain content (including HTML), attributes, etc.

How can I use them?

First of all, you need to add your shortcode:
add_shortcode('mycode', 'yourFunction');
Your function should take two arguments and return the content that you want to replace the shortcode with. The first argument will be an associative array of attributes (keys will be the attribute names, and the value will be the corresponding attribute value), and the second will be the content between the tags.

To handle default attributes, you can use shortcode_atts($defaultsArray, $attributesArray):

function yourFunction ($attr, $content) {
    $attr = shortcode_atts(array('foo' => 'bar', 'id' => '','color' => 'blue'), $attr);
    return '<h2>Attributes</h2><pre>' . print_r($attr, true) . '</pre><h2>content</h2>' . $content;
}

That’s it! That’s why they are so great, it takes next to nothing to handle! However, maybe you’re thinking about a relatively complex way to use these, and you want to take it to the next level.

The Next Level

Maybe you’re worried that you’re users won’t grasp the intricacies of your shortcodes, or will be plagued by typos. It’s a valid concern. For example, I don’t want to assume that my users will be able to create a Google map by flawlessly entering:
[googleMap width="100%" height="400" name="Aero Rental - Phoenix" directions_to="true" directions_from="true"]3432 W. Clarendon, 85017[/googleMap]

The solution is to create a way for your users to generate the shortcodes and have them sent to the editor, but where to start? First, you need to add a meta box to the writing/editing pages (these are the dropdown boxes below the editor, such as Tags, Categories, etc). To do this, create a function that you will use to display the form used to generate your shortcode. Then you need to hook into the admin_menu action, and use it to create the metaboxes.

View the complete solution to complex shortcodes in WordPress 2.5.

Related Posts:

• Migrating from wordpress.com to wordpress.org or self-hosting
• WordPress Tip-Disable Visual Editor
• Simple Guide to Monetizing your Blog
• WordPress 2.5: First Impressions
• Fine-Tune Your Flash Drive

There are many services on the net offering shorter links, etc., but to me they don’t seem as professional as this script I found recently called simply Free Link Cloaker. Not only will this script mask your affiliate links, but it uses a friendly keyword format such as http://yourdomain.com/recommends/keyword
Nice!

Another added feature is that the script keeps track of the number of clicks your cloaked link gets, so you will know which affiliate products are converting for you.

It does require a MySQL database and it uses PHP rather than Javascript, making it a much more stable link cloaker than others you may find in your searches. It is easy to set up, taking only minutes, but you can get support if needed and upgrades for life. I find this little script to be an invaluable resource for every affiliate marketer, or for anyone who just wants shorter URLs.

Related Posts:

• The Power of Free
• jQuery: New version and UI package
• SRG Clean Archives 4.1 Released
• Plugin Compatibility for WordPress 2.2
• Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain

Writing Posts

The first thing that stuck out to me (and that I had been waiting for) was the tag suggest feature. Simply start typing a tag, and an auto-suggest feature will give you a dropdown of existing tags to choose from. Before, it was too easy to end up with tags like “web development” and “webdevelopment” since you had to remember them (no one actually looks them up).

This brings me to the new way media is managed/added. I haven’t had the need to add videos or sounds to my site, so I’ll stick to the images. In the end, I like the new way it works. The Flash uploader is nice, and the addition of a medium option for each image (thumbnail, medium, full size) is a welcome change.

However, nice as it is, there is one thing about it that is REALLY annoying. Full size isn’t actually full size. It’s 500px wide! What’s the point of calling it “full size” and then not making it “full size!” If they want small, medium, and large, they should call it that (although I still think there should be a full size option). There is however a simple solution. You can set $content_width inside your theme’s functions.php file, and it will use that instead of 500 for the max width. I set mine to 1024:

$content_width = 1024;
Unfortunately, this isn’t a standard that was in place, so themes do not have this. It’s a hack, and it’s shouldn’t be needed.

The last thing I wanted to mention, which is very minor, but annoyed me, is that you can’t resize the editor window when in HTML mode. I almost always use HTML mode, and I thought they had removed the ability to resize the text area. as it turns out, you need to switch to the visual editor, resize it, and switch back.

Admin Layout

I don’t like static width layouts. Have dual screens that both run at 1680×1050, and I run my browser full-screen because that’s the way I like it. My laptop runs at 1920×1200, and I even run full-screen on that. Instead of having more room to work, I am rewarded with more than 40% of my screen wasted as blank white space. Having said this, I’ve seen far worse layouts, and it’s fairly intuitive. You can expect plenty of plugins to fix this. Right now (as I’m typing this), what I have done is use firebug to inspect the HTML, found div#wrap, and altered the style by removing max-width:980px;. This seems to work fine for me.

Plugin API

For me, this is the most exciting change. I love the new shortCodes. They are a little rough around the edges, but they are extremely handy. As a matter of fact, I just finished a Google Maps Plugin that uses the shortCodes. It generates a shortCode based on the settings a user chooses, and inserts it into the editor. It later handles those shortCodes by changing them out for a Google Map. Unfortunately it relies on the ticket referenced above, so I’ll release it once that gets figured out.

Summary

WordPress 2.5 is definitely a big step forward. It has some small inconsistencies, which I expect to be easily fixed in upcoming minor releases, but nothing that should keep you from upgrading. Go try it and tell me what you think.

Related Posts:

• A simple guide for new bloggers
• WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes
• Migrating from wordpress.com to wordpress.org or self-hosting
• WordPress Tip-Disable Visual Editor
• Blogging and Commenting

For other businesses, giving away free coupons, free samples, free info (ebooks, articles, etc.) would be the recommended strategies for creating viral traffic back to your site. Using a free blog, anyone can implement the power of good fresh content along with downloadable freebies to give their visitors a reason to return.

Writing free articles and submitting them to article directories is another way of sharing free information and if you are a decent writer or you decide to spend the money on a ghost writer, your free info could end up being syndicated on several sites, all of which link back to yours. Viral!

Everyone loves a bargain and everyone loves to get free stuff so start thinking about what you can give to your Web site visitors. It doesn’t have to be much. Just give them a reason to come back.

What are you doing to attract your site’s visitors and what strategies work for you?

Related Posts:

• A Great Little Script for Affiliate Marketers
• Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain
• Be a different Blogger, on your Blog
• Make readers feel comfortable in your Blog space
• 5 sites to promote your open source design

Purchasing PhotoImpact is really a good deal. You get so much value for your dollar with additional software included:

tools for managing and browsing your images, creating 360-degree panoramas and making animated GIFs. Plus, you get 1,398 royalty-free images, 2,221 Web elements, 3,270 customizable effects!

• Ulead Photo Explorer & PhotoImpact Album 12
• Ulead® COOL 360„¢ photo panorama software
• Ulead® GIF Animator„¢ 5

The other great thing about PhotoImpact is that you can use just about any Photoshop plugin there is, and you can work with PSD files if you need to.

Of course Corel has their high end products as well of which I would recommend CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3, a powerful vector illustrator, and Corel Painter X, a powerful Natural-Media® painting and illustration tool.

In short, Corel continues to provide quality products with features and technical capabilities that are comparable to products offered elsewhere, at significantly lower prices.

Related Posts:

• Free WYSIWYG Editors
• jQuery: New version and UI package
• The Right Tool For The Job
• Blogging and Commenting
• WordPress themes for programmers

They didn’t stop there though. Immediately afterwards, jQuery UI was released. jQuery UI is a package of user interface widgets that can be combined to create a powerful user interface for the web.

The list of themeable widgets include:

• Accordian
• Calendar
• Dialog
• Magnifier
• Shadows
• Slider
• Sortable Tables
• …and Tabs

As well as mouse interactions such as:

• Draggables
• Droppables
• Sortables
• …and resizables

Just as I was thinking that the jQuery UI page could use some work, a post came up in my RSS reader from Glen Lipka. He opined that the demo page made it hard to see what was going on in the background with the UI framework.

Like him, I’m sure many of us came to learn HTML/JS/CSS from a quick ‘view source’ of the page. In time, I’m sure they will get around to fleshing out the documentation and examples.

As a regular user of jQuery, I can’t imagine writing plain ole javascript anymore.

In fact, when it came time to take a look at something I wrote a few years ago in POJ, I could barely follow it. jQuery helps me write less code faster that is easier to read in the future.

A good example how jQuery can reduce your code came by accident today on Ajaxian. Jon Davis wrote a script that would pull static content into a div. Think server side includes (SSI), but client side instead.

This 300+ line script could have easily have been written in jQuery in just 3 lines, as demonstrated by a member of the jQuery team, Yehuda Katz:

$(“textarea[src], div[src], span[src]“).each(function() {
$(this).load(this.src);
});

A overly simple example perhaps, but important none the less. Don’t forget to get the latest jQuery info from their website, blog, or discussion groups.

As this framework evolves, so to may the way you write javascript.

Related Posts:

• A Great Little Script for Affiliate Marketers
• Corel’s Graphics Creation and Editing Software
• SRG Clean Archives 4.1 Released
• Plugin Compatibility for WordPress 2.2
• File uploads with Ajax

After all, I had the hosting in place, web hosts offer so much nowadays that you can’t use more than a small percent of it. Not to mention he had a chance to make some real money off his own hard work.

It sounded rather simple in my mind:

1. Buy domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Install WordPress on the new site
4. Configure settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Export WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog
7. Import into the new setup

Looking back, that was a rather nice fantasy. If only it was that easy, I’d not be posting this right now.

What happened in summary was this:

1. Bought domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Installed WordPress on the new site
4. Configured settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Exported WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog

And then the fun nightmare started.

Let’s see what all issues cropped up as I intended to simply Import the XML file into the fresh install of WordPress on my host, keeping in mind, this is an XML generated by WordPress.com in their own special layout and destined for import into their own WordPress product, the only difference being its not hosted by them.

• Opened Import page within new WordPress Dashboard, Manage–>Import–>WordPress (there are a nice selection of Import choices)
• My host seems to have configured the php.ini file on their end to max the upload file size to 2MB, whereas WordPress had generated a 4.7MB file for me to upload. Normally this file wouldn’t be so big, but the blog had many, many images that were uploaded to WordPress.com
• That started my search on how to change the limit in PHP. I ended up contacting my host and starting a thread on WordPress.org’s support forum. After much back and forth and a lot of reading on my own, I had worked out I needed a script to fetch the web hosts php.ini file, make changes to it via that script and write it to my /home/ directory. In my case I’d need to only do this once as all I wanted was a temporary increase in the upload limit, whereas those wanting that limit to remain would need to create a cron job running the script daily, so as to keep abreast of any changes made to the web hosts php.ini file pre-adding their own changes.
• With that done, I was finally able to upload the XML file into the new WordPress installation…yay! NOT.
• This is where it got really bad, because the file was so large, after uploading the file it would import all the posts, comments, pages, etc into the new setup, and this was done in real time displaying the details on the web page, coincidentally if a php process takes more than 30seconds, my web hosts php.ini file says that it should kill the process, ding…Houtson we have a problem!
• So I go back, remake my new php.ini file to make sure the time limit is raised to a decent 300seconds and re-do the upload/import process. By now I have 5% of the posts and pages in the blog and it’s looking a right mess. That’s ok really, because after about half a dozen tries, and the import process not stopping half-way it finally reached the end. Breathe.
• What WordPress decides to do is tag every image that was ever uploaded into the WordPress.com blog (Note: The images would have to be moved over manually…more work, eh) was tagged with an ID and placed in the Manage–>Upload section (pic). It also decides to link to the now non-existent image files all on its own (pic).
• Not content having to re-upload every image from the WordPress.com blog over to the new host, editing every page and post for image links, we now had a huge amount of ‘dead’ files under the Upload section, which as I said, didn’t exist. I also think this is why the exported XML file was so big to begin with.

After much debate, we’ve decided to either ask the kind people at WordPress.com to delete all the images off the original blog and thus save us the hassle of exporting it incorrectly.

Either that or follow a very good idea by muhtar on WordPress.org’s support forum, where his suggestion is simple, yet ingenious.
Run a php/db server on your home machine, easy and free.

1. Import the XML file into a fresh WordPress install (again on the home machine acting like a server, running Windows XP if you like), this is way better than to a hosted server, because at home its all instant and no lag to a far off server.
2. Export it to a common format, i.e. SQL and import it into your self-hosted WordPress install (the new domain).

OK, so it’s not easy…but way less error-prone and hair-pulling this way. I guess many have had no issues, the moral here is, don’t assume it’s gonna be so easy to move over.

Better yet, make a good choice to begin with

Originally posted at techzonline.net

Related Posts:

• WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes
• WordPress Tip-Disable Visual Editor
• Simple Guide to Monetizing your Blog
• WordPress 2.5: First Impressions
• Fine-Tune Your Flash Drive

Just a quick note before beginning: this guide has been written for Windows XP (my operating system) and therefore the names of certain options or menus might be different.

Almost every single USB flash drive comes formatted with the FAT file system by default, which allows them to be used by virtually any version of Windows that supports USB.

Although Microsoft doesn’t make it either intuitive or straightforward, you can format a flash drive with the NTFS file system. This gives you the added benefit of a robust file system and a smaller allocation unit, which makes smaller files occupy less space on large flash drives (why NTFS is better than FAT).

In addition, you can take advantage of NTFS compression to create additional effective space on the flash drive or enable the Encrypting File System for added security.

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price and this statement is no different for the NTFS file system. The price you will pay for NTFS features is slower copying times (about 1.5x for USB 1.1 and 2x for USB 2.0), even without encryption or compression enabled.

To enable compression for the entire flash drive:

1. Open My Computer, right-click the flash drive and select ‘Properties’.
2. Tick the box that says ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ in the bottom box and click OK
3. In the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog box, keep the default ‘Apply changes to [drive letter]:\, subfolder and files’ and click OK.

You can also enable or disable compression for single files and/or folders, which is the only option for encryption.

To start either procedure:

• Right-click the file or folder and select ‘Properties’ and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab
• You can now tick either Compression or Encryption. Make your choice, click OK and see step 3 above.

Although you can’t enable both compression and encryption on the same file or folder, you could compress one set of files or folders and encrypt a different set.

With Windows XP’s default settings, NTFS isn’t included on the Windows format tool’s list of file systems, but you can add the option by changing the default on the ‘Policy’ tab for the flash drive from ‘Optimize for quick removal’ to ‘Optimize for performance’, as illustrated here.

Although you must have ‘Optimize for performance’ ticked to add the ‘NTFS format’ option, if you wish you can change back to the default after formatting. However, either policy gives the same time for copying files to the flash drive because apparently XP only enables the write cache for fixed USB drives.

If you frequently swap files on and off your flash drive(s), you should check out Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. This freeware program requires the .NET Framework 1.1, but won’t install if you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (weird, eh?).

The solution/workaround to this problem is to temporarily uninstall the later version of .NET Framework, install version 1.1, install USB Flash Drive manager and then reinstall the later .NET Framework.

And so ends this article on Fine-tuning your flash drive.

If you have any questions, comments or something was unclear, leave a comment or contact me on my site.

Related Posts:

• How To Flash DD-WRT Firmware
• Windows Vista Tip: Using WinRE To Repair Damaged Systems
• Geek Survival Kit
• Customizing Ubuntu
• WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes

It has been my experience and that of several of my clients who use WordPress that this visual editor can really mess your post up.

It can screw up your perfectly valid code and there is a better way to view your posts prior to publishing.

First, you will want to disable the visual editor. Log into your WordPress admin area. Click on Users.

Next, click on Your Profile. Under Personal Options, make sure the box in front of “Use the visual editor when writing” is un-checked.

Now, when you write a post you will see an editor with just a minimum of tags to use. You can add any XHTML code manually.

After writing your post click “Save and Continue Editing“. Now you will see a “Preview” link to the right of the allowable tags.

That’s right, even though you haven’t clicked “Publish” yet, WordPress creates a draft of your post, but it won’t be saved completely until you actually click “Save“.

You can click “Save” when you want to save your draft permanently to work on it later, and then click “Publish” when you are satisfied with your post.

Happy posting!

Related Posts:

• WordPress 2.5 Shortcodes
• Migrating from wordpress.com to wordpress.org or self-hosting
• Simple Guide to Monetizing your Blog
• WordPress 2.5: First Impressions
• Fine-Tune Your Flash Drive