tips

When blogging and traveling: five tips for bloggers on the move!

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I’ve been away, ’tis true. This is the sole reason I haven’t maintained a healthy posting schedule, and for that, dear readers, I’m surely sorry.

When traveling in the UK (my home country), I was pleased often to find hotels that offered various forms of broadband or wifi. During my stay, I stayed with friends, small inns, student accommodation, and a formal hotel, and I was quite surprised how many places actually had good broadband. It’s quite a different scenario from just three years ago. But …

BEWARE: high charges and poor connectivity

But I realized that there are still too many places that charge an arm and a leg for wifi service that is at best mediocre, T-Mobile, for one, had spotty coverage and iffy bandwidth. Worse, they promised a full 24 hours but I was unable to login the last sixty minutes or so, purportedly because of IP issues. It’s not a great idea to pay so much money for iffy and intermittent connections.

There are many coffee houses that provide both good coffee and free wifi to attract customers, including the BeanScene in Edinburgh, so it’s wise to check ahead and see if you can find such coffee shops or other free access. Checking accommodation to see if broadband is provided is now a priority on my list of criteria for a decent guest house, so much so that I would prefer a place to stay without a TV, if it had some form of WiFi. But why on earth are ethernet cables so expensive here?

Great Websites: for Travel and Hotels

There are many great websites for booking rooms and flights, both company specific sites (like BMI of http://www.flybmi.com) and vacancy aggregators (such as LateRooms of http://laterooms.com). I appreciated these sites for several reasons: online booking from abroad was possible, credit card payments were accepted, and there was little hassle – bookings were made, checkins were swift and payments were trouble-free. So, as a traveller, I don’t tend to prebook a lot of things as it’s always difficult to accommodate last minute changes into a rigid itinerary, and just sometimes very early or very late bookings can get discount rates that will make your eyes water.

Preparing BeforeHand

While away, my posting schedule was really awful. Some days none, some days just one across the entire InvestorBlogger network. Mmm. I discovered that I was only able to really focus when I had peace and quiet, a good internet connection, and a good cup of tea. But when I was in Scotland, I rarely had all three in one place at the same time. This was despite the best intentions to keep up a regular posting schedule. But it all fell apart, and I was powerless to prevent it, or at least, lacking willpower to insist on personal space. I should have at least prepared some more irregular filler posts or published some feature articlels that are half-written or mostly edited. But alas! I didn’t.

Travel Equipment: Tools on the Go

Since buying my AspireOne, I have found it to be a wonderful tool, fully capable of supporting quality blogging on my blog. I’ve installed nearly all my standard ‘blogging’ applications without a hitch, and found that with Skype set up, it actually becomes a very powerful, very inexpensive communications tool slashed the exorbitant fees charged by my cellular company. Of course, a USB handset really helps set the mood. Additionally, a decent camera is essential, but photos taken on the SD Card can be rapidly uploaded to the PC, incorporated in a blog, and published within minutes. I know I’ve already done it. When I get back to Taiwan, I will register for a mobile broadband account, and should be able to blog from almost anywhere.

There are three tools that I would consider adding: a GPS tracker for USB or BlueTooth so I can find out where we are whenever we are lost; a decent mouse as the trackpad is frustrating for big fingers like mine; and (maybe) a larger keyboard. Other than that, I can’t see what I’d buy… Though I was envying a solar charger or a handpowered charger (just in case).

Quiet Time: Well, quite…!

But most of all, I’d try to make quiet time, time away from everyone, time away from books/tv/papers, etc.. It’s too easy to be swamped by stuff, and to forget that I have to make that quiet time to sit and think and reflect and write.

Security in WordPress: Are you still showing YOUR plugins?

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Michael Kwan’s blog was recently hacked by a clever hacker who managed to hide his visit neatly. Michael will tell you all about the story at his blog. This event plus a couple of other events has got me thinking about blog security . I’ll be doing a fuller post on my own experiences, ideas and suggestions.

It’s going to be a long post, so it will take some time to put all the pieces together. In the meantime, why don’t you sign up for my feed… so you don’t miss it!

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For more interesting articles on running a business, making money, operating your blog, , and so on…, subscribe to the RSS feed or email newsletter. There’s a lot more in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.
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Apart from the obvious tactics of keeping your blog software, themes, and plugins uptodate, several bloggers have suggested ways to make it more difficult to find out which version of the blog platform, and which plugins, you are actually running.

The typical solution is to add a blank html file to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory which will show a blank page, or in John Cow’s case a Moo! But I was surprised to learn that this technique fails to stop an easy way around this. It is possible to discover quite easily any plugin that you can guess is installed and retrieve the directory listing for that plugin even though the higher level directory is masked. Take a gander:

johchow

(This image was taken from one of my other blogs with the WP-Cache plugin installed and active.)

I found the directory for the wp-cache folder for another blogger who had otherwised masked his plugins directory with the standard blank HTML file. Unfortunately, a determined hacker will be able to figure out which plugins you likely have, rifle your directory of files to see which files exist in the subdirectory of plugins, and perhaps hack your blog… I could see the contents of this wp-cache directory, plus all the other ones I knew this blogger to have been using. Mmm! I didn’t think that was particularly secure.

What alternatives are there?

Standard .htaccess

Yes, you could simply use an ‘htaccess’ file to secure the plugins from display but you would have to manually write and upload the file to each and every plugin directory that you already have. This could be done more than ten times on my blog, I think. It would look something like this:

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.your-domain.com/
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.your-domain.com/
Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.your-domain.com/

But I realized that with the most commonly suggested solution to prevent viewing plugins, namely a 301 redirect, it is still possible to view the contents of any directory of any plugin below the directory in which the htaccess file is placed. So even if you place the htaccess in the directory of any particular plugin, some plugins also contain subdirectories (for images, etc.) that will still be visible. Tiring work…, so…

IndexIgnore

If you have a lot of directories in the plugins folder, the simple and easy solution is to create an htaccess file with the following command: “IndexIgnore *” and place it in the /wp-content/plugins folder. This should prevent anyone seeing the listing in that folder or any folders below that level. It generates an error like this:

investorblogger

It’s not very pretty but it’s effective so browsers won’t display the contents. It could also be an opportunity wasted. Why?

HTML file

The standard blank HTML file mentioned above looks something like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Blank Page</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Type” CONTENT=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Then Michael Kwan suggested adapting it to a page redirect in a chat we were having. He wrote: “…i’m thinking that it’s also possible to do a index.php and then put in a redirect… if you keep this file handy then you can upload it each time you install a new plug-in…” I began to think: What a good way to turn a problem into an advantage! I’m using an HTML file, though, not a PHP file.

The blank HTML file doesn’t show anything, and inadvertent visitors will not know what’s wrong. And the 404’s only show that a page was not found. So why waste the opportunity? I’ve adapted some simple code that I use, and it should work a treat. I would like to attribute this code, but I can’t remember where it came from!

Page Redirect

With this page redirect, it’s easy to redirect visitors quickly and conveniently to the most recent posting or indeed any specific page you want:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your Domain</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=http://www.yourdomain.com;</script>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=http://www.yourdomain.com“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”>You are going to Your Domain Name now…
<br>If the page does load after 5 seconds or if you are (like me) impatient,
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com“>just click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

The only downside is that you’d have to add this to every plugin directory the first time. But you could easily keep a copy somewhere and copy it to any subsequent plugin directory before you upload the plugin.

Thanks to Michael Kwan, and others for providing information that helped to write this blog. I’d appreciate any updates on security, so just drop me a line, especially if I got something wrong.

(Post edited for language, clarifications, and so on.)

DashBoard Editor: Changing your Dashboard in WordPress

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Sometimes as a blogger, I get tired of the traditional feel and look of the Administration Panel, and the slow loading of the WordPress feeds drives me nuts. I’ve already tinkered with the Administration page before on more than one occasion, but recently, I’ve been trying two plugins that are pretty neat: DashBoard Editor (this post) and MyDashBoard (Thursday).

DashBoard Editor
The first is Dashboard Editor, which is a simple panel that adds a dashboard configuration switch under the Dashboard editor. Currently, I can’t get the website to load but you can try again later.

dashboard-clean

It’s very simple to operate. And, most importantly, it works in a non-destructive way, so you can simply disable the plugin, and everything’s back to normal.

At the top you will see a text area that you can type in. This text will appear in the dashboard. Formatting is very similar to the bb-code style of posts and pages. If you used to blog in WP1.0+, you will already be familiar with the switches.

Below that area are a number of check boxes, all of which are self explanatory. They will allow you to remove the feeds, incoming links, news and so on. Of course, you can simply clean everything and start from nothing. One of the neatest features is that you can use Plugins, too. If you look at the last switch entitled “Use Sidebar Widgets”, this will create a separate column under your Presentation >>> Widgets menu. Simply create, add or move any widgets you want to show up on the Admin panel.

There are some limitations that you may wish to consider:
1. There’s no obvious way to have a widget in two places, though, ie. in your Admin Sidebar as well as the general sidebar(s). Also, the Admin sidebar is only available to those who login.

2. If your blog has many users who can register and login, you may wish to think carefully about the information you enter. For example, putting passwords for your email account in there may not be the wisest thing to do! Currently, there is no way to change the Admin area for different levels of users.

Overall, it’s easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to remove. We are looking forward to the developer adding features in the future!