Web Talk

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

A few months ago Google launched its new service to create web sites from scratch without knowing any programming language. Anyway the service was just reserved to companies and organizations that wanted to use it on their own domains. Starting from the 21st of May 2008 the service is open to everybody who wants to share their knowledge, hobbies, interests and such on the Internet. A Google website will have an extension such as: http://sites.google.com/[your-website]. On it you will be able to add as many pages as you wish and there will be no advertising nor any pop-ups, banners, buttons etc. It will be a space just for you. Your personal, free space where to experiment your creativity and let other people know about what you like. To help you create your website, Google Sites gives you a full set of tools to add pictures, documents, calendars, videos and gadgets to your pages. To start creating a website you need a Google account and sign-in to Google Sites. To know more about this new service visit this link.

Are you a podcaster releasing tons of podcasts on your blog? If so you may be interested in this nice website letting you create a lot of free podcasts with a nice skin. Blogamp is a web-based application that lets you create your own podcast to put on your blog. Just upload your MP3 file ( which doesn’t have to be bigger than 25MB) on Blogamp’s server and you will get a code to put on your blog right away! Its features include: customise your podcast skin color, track your listenership, add e-commerce and video links, embed or Pop-up player on any site or social network, add your own RSS Feeds. If you want to know more, click on the link to get a full list of Blogamp ’s features.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

In order to improve security in your Wordpress blog, the new version of this wonderful Content Management System has seen the birth of a new way of tightening your security by creating a unique and hard to find number when calculating hash value to encrypt password, especially on cookie authentication. This trick highly prevents hackers who use specific software to brute force your admin account. But, where can you find and use this new feature called “the secret key”? Simple, first of all open the Wordpress zipped file or, alternatively, gain access to your blog by using a FTP software. Look for wp-config-sample.php (if you just installed Wordpress) or wp-config.php (if you have a running blog), open it and look for the following piece of code:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Now, just change “define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’)” by writing a long and hard to guess password. I would like you to remember that the longer and “mixed” it is the better your will be protected against malevolt people. But what do I mean when I say “mixed”? When creating a new password you should keep in your mind what specific software used by hackers are and do. They are huge databases trying to fill in your admin form with all kind of words to gain full access to your blog. They also try to combine words, use capital letters and special characters and such. It is evident that the more messed-up a password is, the better. To give you an example you SHOULD NOT USE a password like this: johnthebest198606. You SHOULD USE instead a password such: RiGhTPaSs$56*8@2Ok. This lessen the chance that some program may, even by change, guess your password. In case you are not creative enough, you can use this simple Web Tool, directly provided by Wordpress that makes the hard job for you, namely find out a very hard-to-guess password. Here is the link.

If you have a Wordpress blog and you want to test a new theme just to see how it looks like or if it works, sometimes you maybe at loss about how to try it without putting your blog on maintenance mode, or letting your readers see what kind of online changes you are doing while you are testing it. These two plugins I am about to speak of are meant to solve these kind of issues. User Level Themes and Theme Tester let you test your blog theme without affecting your readers’ navigation. The way they work is rather simple. Basically they redirect visitors to a known working theme, while they leave you free to test and work on your new theme. But let’s see together their most important features:

User level Theme

• Two options are available if you want to test a theme namely: “Administrator Level” and “Visitor Level”.
• User Level Theme uses Wordpress Plugin Framework to work. WPF provides a standard administration interface and allow for simplified plugin management.

Theme Tester

• Simple to use. One click and you are done.

This website is a a web content management suite that allows you to edit a website in seconds, thanks to an easy interface that uploads your website and lets you work on it, even with the help of other people. Of course everything is done while you are online. No special knowledge is required, no back-end skills necessary, you don’t even have to look at any piece of code. Just drag and drop. Type in the name of your blog in the field and you can start personalising it right away. It is very easy to use and is highly advisable to people who know very little about coding or don’t want to spend too much time to modify their websites.

Some months ago I wrote an article where I spoke about how to secure your Wordpress blog with simple php pieces of code. Following that post, I have decided to write something more about it, to let you know how it is possible to further improve your blog’s security with some little tricks that don’t cost you a thing. As you know, I am always concerned about my blog’s security and, since no CMS is fully hacker-proof, it is always good to be prepared for rainy days. These are the tricks you can apply to better protect your blog. Continue reading »