Do you use good Anti-Virus Software?

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Bloggers ought to be canny about their pc security. There are so many bad things that can find your way onto your pc, that it should be enough to give you nightmares! I don’t even want to get into the investment side of things!

It’s a priority for those of us who access our computers for financial or investment purposes to be extra careful. I’ll discuss my chosen route to software security for finances in a future post. In the meantime, rest easy, good anti-virus software is only a download away. I’ll be running a short series in the future on this issue… Don’t know exactly when! But soon!
Norton Anti Virus 2007 is an excellent choice for those of you running XP or Vista. Their Norton Antivirus Product Tour, or User’s Guide or Help & Support Forum should give you a much better idea if the product is suitable for you. In addition to the viruses, spyware and worms that are all common, I like the fact that rootkit protection is also included. Pretty much all the other features are standard: email, chat, updates, central control panel.

There are other anti-virus options out there, but whichever one you choose, for whatever system you have, make sure that you: run it, update it, and scan regularly.
For those of you using Mac, click here. But Linux users don’t have a choice here at all! However, do you Linux users lose much sleep over these kinds of things? I wonder…

This post brought to you by Antivirus Download

Our Feed isn’t working well, right now!

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I’m having problems with the Feedburner feed. I’ll try and fix it this weekend! Apologies.

There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed for the feed “InvestorBlogger”

The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 95: The element type “br” must be terminated by the matching end-tag.
(update: I fixed it. It was quite simple. I had two problems that I needed to fix. One lay in the format of a posting – a lonely
was looking for its soulmate. The bigger problem lay in the fact that I use a plugin, FeedBurner Plugin v2.2, which I had just updated. I forgot to reset the feed in Feedburner to the original feed, actually it’s an elegant solution, I just forgot!
Now I can fix the other problem with the .htaccess files so I can access my stats again! Yahoo! Things do get fixed around here. Time to fix the other blog, too.

Great Tips #3: Maintain your plugins

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Actually, because I had a little time to spend surfing over the New Year period, I came across these excellent suggestions “Check your Plugins this New Year“.

While WordPress is self sufficient to run as a system for a novice blogger, the more advanced bloggers like to enhance its functionality using Plugins. There are already a few hundred, if not thousand plugins … This wide choice of plugins can be very “tempting” and we end up installing a lot of plugins without giving a second thought; many of these we rarely use. … This post will stress on the importance of regular and continuous plugin maintenance.

While I won’t summarize the article here, I would like to say that some of the tips are quite handy, esp.

  • 1. Install basic and necessary plugins first
  • 2. Only install a plugin if you need it
  • 3. Find a better alternative
  • 4. Embed code in the template if possible instead of using a plugin
  • 5. Remove files of deactivated plugins
  • 6. Check regularly for updates. Security upgrades are mandatory

I do think that tips #2, #5 and #6 are quite within the realms of even the more basic users. If you know how to upload a plugin, I think you can manage #5 and #6. Tip #2 is quite difficult for beginners and even more experienced bloggers because we want to try everything! Tips #3 and #6 might require more effort and distract bloggers from getting their blogging done. But Tip #4 might be the MOST challenging even for experienced bloggers. And so I think perhaps #5 had best be done by those familiar with PHP to some extent, and who can understand that messing with PHP in their blogs can seriously damage the blog.

In general, I think that the best plugins are ones that enhance the reader’s experience either directly or indirectly. Indirectly might include making things easier for the writers/administrators of the blogs! After all, what is a blog without readers? Right?