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Timthumb vulnerability Scanner: Not Too Late

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 01:06:53 +0000

General principle in software testing is ” Every Feature brings Bugs with it”. Ever increasing popularity of wordpress CMS brings loads of feature rich plugins and themes and hence opens up vulnerability codes with it. The most recent one responsible for the buzz is Timthumb. I must agree for this delayed, but Better late than never.

Timthumb scanner plugin helps you to check your wordpress directory for any vulnerabilty caused by timthumb security breach. It traces old exploits and offers one click fix from your wp-admin. Doing so will protect you from hackers looking to exploit this particular vulnerability.

STEPS TO FOLLOW:

1. Login to your wordpress dashboard. Go to “add new” in Plugins section

2. Search for “TimThumb Vulnerability Scanner”

3. Install and Activate the plugin

4. Access the plugin in Tools ==> Timthumb Scanner. Click scan and check the vulnerability.

5. If your page is vulnerable “Fix” button will appear for you, click and move on.

History Behind Timthumb,

TimThumb is a simple, flexible, PHP script that resizes images. Timthumb.php famously used by “Mimbo Pro” themes. It opens up breach window for intruders to hack your site. Age-old method of injecting files into your hosting server space. Actual developer and other open source thinks tanks offered several solutions to curtail the problem and hence secure your wordpress site. Some references, http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/01/zero-day-vulnerability-in-many-wordpress-themes/, http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

Blog Tips: Let Your Facebook Work for Blog

Saravanakumar — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:29:53 +0000

Every blogger wants to have more reader, but not many could find a best workable tips to achieve greater readership. With this blog post i will be talking about one of the best way to expose your blog for loads of readership. This post on blog tip will not only help you to increase readership but also achieve greater consistency over time.

Not is FB but blogging, Shame on you! Those of you who blog but do not have have facebook profile with regular update, stopping reading this, Access FB first. FB is a very big avenue to place your opinions in to. Following stats are the eyeopeners for you. Every blogger should be in FB and all your blog posts should be in FB because,

FB hold more than 500 million active users
There are over 900 million objects that people interact with
since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month
more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites

There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

For More recent stats go to Facebook Stats page

Now the big question is how will i make bu blog and Facebook profile to talk to each other. They speak different language how would they communicate and correlate?

WordPress has some amazing plug-ins to ease your job. My pick is “Facebook Comments for WordPress“. This plugin integrates the Facebook commenting system (new, old or both) right into your blog site comment section. If a reader is logged into Facebook while viewing any comment-enabled page or post, they’ll be able to leave a comment using their Facebook profile. Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/

Using this plugin you can have,

Like button
FB comments by logged in users
option to share it in FB

Interaction between any website to facebook required application Id and application secret key. Getting an app Id and secret key is simple too Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php click on setup and application submit your domain name URL in the website section. Copy the app ID and key configure them in plugin settings page.

How Facebook will help you to improve Blog readership?

Whole internet world is going towards Social Networking Sites, These platforms offer best sharing mechanism. Your blog post around your friends/contact circle has better chance of getting shared. Every link sharing is additional readership to you. Every like and comment from Facebook is permanent and it will help to have better trust.

Publish all your blogs in your FB profile and keep it rolling. There is a way to configure facebook for automatic automatic post updates in Notes section. This will be published in my next posts.

Keep Blogging and Sharing.

Most Common Web Mistakes To Kill Your Web Business Growth

Madhu — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:08:42 +0000

Today it takes more than just having a Web site to make the Internet work for your company. Web presence needs highly competitive platform, and proper site design. Web platform, a prime most important factor has become an area of concern to businesses that want to use the Internet to the fullest. At Hexahost we deliver end to end support to keep going with your online business identity. Unlike other providers we don’t stop with just web space, our whole lot of feature rich online platforms offers best tools and support. In this article we analyze some of the common mistakes in building business web sites.

Most common Web mistakes that could kill your web business,

Inappropriate domain name: Pick a domain name that is memorable and relates to your business. Since people are likely to forget very long names, shorter domain names are typically better, but not always. Picking up attractive domain names and the names related to your products or services will serve the purpose.
Poor design and functionality: Websites should be easy to view and accessible. Why have a Web site with content if no one can access it? Good design is largely based on consistency. Menus should appear in the same place on every page, links should all be the same color , logo of some sort should be clearly visible at all times.
Too complicated or too slow: Although flash animation may look amazing, it may be too complex for casual Internet users. Though aesthetics certainly matter, it must be in balance with functionality and ease of use for the typical user. Also, a more complex design takes longer to load on many computers.
Stagnant site: Not only is content time-sensitive, so is format and design. There will always be new tools available to make Web sites better looking and better performing. It is not cost-effective to create a Web site and let it sit. Update content regularly and take advantage of (appropriate) new technologies to make the site look better.
Broken links and 404 error messages: Make sure every link on your site works. You’ll lose users quickly if they see a “404 file not found” error message or find broken or incorrectly labeled links. If you have a large site, consider adding a form so users can submit a broken link, which lets users know you are on top of any problems they discover.
No contact info: Users need to be able to contact you with questions, complaints, and suggestions. A Contact Us page, like an Internet business card, should be available from any part of your site. Also, be sure to actually answer these messages either personally or through an auto-reply.
Ignoring statistics: Detailed reports of visitor traffic are available for your Web site. This service may be offered by your hosting provider or obtained through a third party. By monitoring your statistics (such as visitors-turned-customers, users on broadband, etc.) you can tailor your marketing and design toward those who visit most or find weak spots based on who you are not attracting.
Avoiding spiders: Spiders are what search engines use to find your page. You want to make sure your pages are designed so that you show up high on search engine rankings. This process is called search engine optimization. There are, however, ethics and strategies to SEO. Some practices (such as hidden text, redirects, etc.) will result in you being banned from search engines.
Not hiring a professional: Search engine optimization is complex. To move up in the listings on Google and other search engines, you may want to hire a professional, especially if your business relies heavily on generating business from the Web.

Only a strong base can create strongest skyscrapers, Concentrate on above said five points create a firm base to your web presence and be a winner.

WordPress Blog Help: Post Comments in Multi Language

Saravanakumar — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:58:28 +0000

This post specifically addresses common requirement of many self-hosted blogs, Multiple language support in comment section. Comment section is an important place in blog, it plays an anchor role by leading from the front as a first level of author-reader interaction. World Wide Web is not just english driven, though it is a main stream real internet penetration is in the hands of native language supported websites. Contents written for local audience by their own people is perfect for all inclusive readership.

Widely used self-hosted blogging cms WordPress has many community driven free to use plugins to satisfy your needs. This blog post will list out various posts that will help you to post comments in multiple language.

There are so many plugins available to enable multi language comment feature. Out of which following five are easy to use,

Google Transliteration
WPGoogleLangTransliteration
Indic Language Comments
Indic Comment
Indic IME

STEPS TO ADD A NEW PLUGIN,

Login to dashboard

Go to plugins => add new => key in ‘plugin title’

From the given options choose plugins you like to integrate wih and click “Install” and activate the plugin

Out of above mentioned plugins, Google Transliteration plugin offers Complete language transliteration support for your wordpress blogs in Persian, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Arabic, Nepali, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu using google transliteration API. Visitors can use Ctrl+G key combination to toggle between english and selected language. This plugin is the latest of all, It has support for more languages with support for latest WordPress release version 3.1.

WPGoogleLangTransliteration Plugin also offers Complete language transliteration support for your wordpress blogs in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Arabic, Nepali, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu. No big development happened in this apart from initial few releases.

Indic Language Comments, Indic Comment and Indic IME plugins are stable, but support is limited to indic languages. This plugin works with 3.1, but the real development was done during 2009 releases issues are expected.

I strongly recommend every wordpress blog engine users to install multi language support and hence improve your websites reach.

Common SEO Mistakes in WordPress Blog

admin — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 07:01:13 +0000

This post will explain you some of the most common mistakes in wordpress blog. First and foremost push for every writer is readership, Having an online presence with just frequent post is not enough to improve readership. Unlike traditional medium like newspaper, books very special about weblog is “By Yourself”. When you maintain your own web blog very first thing you must concentrate is Search Engine Optimization.

Let me break some negative influence’s,

Add will fetch visitors – Do not waste your hard earned money in advertisement. Weblog does not require online advertisement, All it demands is quality content and participation.
Your first blog can not earn money. Think about blogging for money only after certain level of contribution
Assuming WordPress is Search Engine Optimized by default – Not at all

Lets get in to the core topic, Common SEO Mistakes in WordPress Blog

1. Come out of Free hosted Blog:

Free hosted blog platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.com provide a valuable service. Over 18 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com. If you care about SEO or monetization or branding or reputation free blogging is not a place to be. They aren’t flexible enough to install your own choice of plugins or themes/frameworks to trick out the blog with killer SEO. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t make your blog a sub-domain based against wordpress.com or blogger.com. For $12 per year, you can get self hosted wordpress account under your own domain name.

Did you know putting AdSense ad units on your WordPress.com blog is against the service’s Terms & Conditions? Much better to get yourself a web host and install the self-hosted version of WordPress so you have full control over the thing

2. Search Engine friendly URL

By default WordPress will give your pages and posts a number and display this in the URL, They are not user and Search engine friendly. For WordPress SEO purposes you want to have your keyword in the URL, so you need to turn on Permalinks.

Login to wordpress dashboard, Go to SETTINGS ->PERMALINKS to “/%postname%”

This will put all the words in the post/page title in the URL. Keep most of your keywords in page/post title. An URL with targeted keywords will get more visibility in SE than more keywords in your content. They form the first level of abstraction to your blog post.

3. Link Others and Get linked

Two important steps in link building is, Provider link to places where you sourced info, give links for the one linked to you. There is no escaping this, good solid links to your blog from high ranking sites is going to help, massively, a handful of links from high page rank sites are a lot better than 60 from page rank 1 websites.

4. Site Map

It is important for WordPress SEO to create a site map for the search engines and there are plugins to do this. There are many plugins available to do this, i trust google site map generator. Your site map should be automatic and the format it provides should be SE friendly.

5. Poor on page SEO

All of the various sections (pages, posts, categories, archives) do not have unique meta tags and/or h1 tags. Every page on your website needs DIFFERENT meta tags, a unique title, description and keyword tag. There are wordpress plugins which will help you do this automatically by using the content in the posts / pages themselves again see the All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin.

Above mentioned 5 points are only the beginning, Lot more to be done. Wait for my next post with some other important Blogging tips.