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WordFence: 9 WordPress Plugins Targeted in Multi-Year Spam Campaign

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I’m really happy to report that I’ve never used any of the plugins mentioned in this report on my sites or any of my clients’ sites.

Thanks to WordFence for all the hard work they do investigating things like this. As the WP ecosystem grows, there are more people looking to swindle and make a cheap buck (or cause a cheap disruption) using WordPress sites as their launchpad, and it’s good to know folks like those at WordFence have our collective backs.

People targeting a technology is an issue with any and every tech platform, really. From Android to Windows to Linux to Bitcoin, and even precious Apple. It’s not unique to WordPress. But what is unique to WordPress are the millions of users and developers in the open source community that are dedicated to making sure WP is a safe and solid platform, and that scammers, spammers, and malicious malcontents are identified, frustrated, and ultimately squashed.* Hats off to all of them for helping to cut the legs off of schemes like this one.

Source: 9 WordPress Plugins Targeted in Coordinated 4.5-Year Spam Campaign

(*I realize that other technologies, like Linux, also have large open source communities looking out for the user community. I’m simply saying WP’s community is better. ;-) Come at me, Linux people!! I’m ready!!!**)

(**Please don’t actually come at me, Linux people. I’m really not very ready. I’m in the middle of a move, I’ve got a lot of organizing to do…you know how it is.)

15 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

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This is a really solid post from Joe Foley at WPMU:

15 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

I wish I was following more of the rules here. If you’re trying to get serious about blogging, bookmark that post and re-read it every day until you have internalized the tips in it. I can’t argue with a single one of Joe’s suggestions, and while I might be able to think of some to add to the list, there’s no need to even bother–follow his advice and you will have plenty to do (and all of it wise and effective).

One of the Plugin Authors You Should Love: Christopher Ross

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You remember my post about how I love WordPress plugin people? In it, I mentioned the very cool phenomenon where one would randomly stumble upon some humble plugin author, and discover that said author has a whole page filled with eyebrow-raising plugins of every type. Stumbling onto such people with such pages, I said, was one of the experiences that helps open your eyes to the real vastness and variety of the WP plugin universe.

Witness: Christopher Ross, and his eyebrow-raising page of plugins.

I found Christopher when I found his External Link to New Window plugin, which makes all your links to external sites automatically open in a new window, so people also stay at your site when they visit links to other sites that you post. I’m glad I clicked through from the plugin search results and ended up at his actual site, or I wouldn’t have found the other 25 plugins he has created. And they are cool plugins. Check them out on his site where they have full descriptions and download links, or on his user page at WordPress.org, where you can see how (appropriately) popular his plugins are, and go right to their pages at that site. Then, if you install the WordPress.org One-Click Install Plugin ahead of time, you could install every one of Christopher’s plugins in probably 52 or 78 clicks. That might sound like a lot of clicks, but if you consider all the neato new tools and functions you’d be getting, and the fact that the total financial outlay would be $0.00, it’s a pretty amazing deal.

In fact it’s so amazing, that you should actually give Christopher some money, if you dig his plugins and have some money to spare for appreciation of them. (You can donate via PayPal right on his plugin page.) But even if you don’t/can’t, go check ’em out, and install 1 or 2 or 26 of them. If all goes well, you should feel a cool little rush, from the realization of all the possibilities that must be available in the world when things like Christopher’s huge page of free WordPress plugins exists.

Thank you, Christopher Ross! I love you and what you do, and have ordered my readers to love you as well.

Here are a couple other great plugins from Christopher’s big page:

Auto-Copyright – adds a copyright message to your footer that (here’s the brilliant part) automatically sets the date range based the dates of your earliest and most recent posts.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu – Add your own menu cluster on the side in the WP Dashboard area, with whatever links you want, including external sites (like Google Analytics maybe, or your other WP dashboards, or help pages for your clients…you get the idea.)

How about a fundraising thermometer? A frame blocker? A login redirect plugin? Those, and 20-odd more. All from one person.

This is why I love plugin people.

Thanks again, Christopher!

 

5 things you didn’t know you could do with Twitter

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The Next Web has highlighted 5 things you didn’t know you could do with Twitter in a recent post. the 5 things are: plan your meals, track your packages, post to Evernote, add to Google Calendar, and track your weight loss. Pretty neat.Check out the post for details on how those work.

I didn’t necessarily know that you could do these specific things using Twitter, though I do know there are a lot of little bots and tools like these that can be accessed easily if you know about them. For example: try tweeting “(sp?)” after a word in one of your tweets, and just wait–the spelling bot will reply with the proper spelling of your word. (Of course it probably won’t work for you now that I’ve mentioned it, but it is out there; I’ve seen it.)

Know of other cool bots and tools like these? Let the readers know in the comments!

Building Up Your New Social Media Audience

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Clare Lancaster at ProBloggingTools has been nice enough to compile a simple checklist of the 9 most straightforward ways to draw attention to your social media accounts. The short answer is: “promote it in various places”, but Clare has nailed the most important places, and explains why they are important quickly and concisely.

Print Clare’s list out if you must and use it as a checklist; make sure you are taking advantage of most of these methods, or you can’t say you are seriously supporting your own social media efforts: 9 Practical Ways to Start Attracting an Audience to Your New Social Media Account.

100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers

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I’m all about learning, and not so much about school, which means that online education is good cheese by me. I seldom go so far as to absorb whole courses online, but I’ve been educating myself on the web for 15 years now. And I’m pretty brilliant. So there’s that.

A site called Bachelor’s Degree Online has been kind (and savvy) enough to compile 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers–full-blown courses on a fairly comprehensive range of subjects, grouped into the various disciplines that a web worker might need to tackle.

About 75% of these courses are from MIT, which has been putting courses on the web for a while now. You may have heard of MIT. It purportedly does not suck.

So go get educated then already! And I don’t expect to hear “I’m bored” from you for at least a year.

Got more free education for our readers? Drop some knowledge in the comments!

100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration from Diana Adams

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Not much to be said here…Diana Adams at Ink Rebels has compiled a tremendous list of prompts to help you get unstuck if you ever don’t know what to blog about: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration

I’ve been planning on writing one of these “things to post about” posts myself, but it’s becoming increasingly unnecessary. Between Diana’s awesome list and the resources I linked to in this blog post here, the pool of potential content ideas is growing very wide and very deep. We may need to reclassify it as a pond soon.

Here’s a tip: bookmark this post, so you can find Diana’s list as well as my other post with three other lists on it. That should keep you busy for a while…unless you’re posting like 10 times a day or something (in which case you probably don’t need our help coming up with ideas anyway).

"24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources” (and the truth)

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I hate to be a stickler here, but before I praise Heidi Cohen’s excellent list of affordable ways to pervasively promote your local business blog, I have to take issue with her title:

24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources

A reasonable person could think from reading that title that the “24 Ways” mentioned could be achieved with no budget, no time, and no resources. But that reasonable person would be getting deceived by hype. And upon discovering, after briefly suspending disbelief enough to think the title’s promise could be true, that in fact it is the exact sort of hyperbolic overstatement that the reasonable person quietly suspected it would end up being, the reasonable person would have his mass-media-cultivated shell of righteous cynicism hardened by at least one additional layer.

I’m the reasonable person in that scenario, by the way. As are you. And we shouldn’t be toyed with. That’s all I’m saying.

The reality of that title is as sad as it is obvious: there’s not a single one of those 24 things that can be done with NO budget, NO time, and NO resources. Each item on the list involves an action verb–which, as an editor, I applaud. But, as an amateur scientist, I can tell you that nothing which involves an action verb can be accomplished without using either time or resources, or both. “Make”, “Use”, “Work”, “Write”, “Offer to help”, “Place a computer”…these are not things that do themselves.

So I deduct major style points for the over-the-top hyperbolic title, and for reinforcing the cynicism of an already-cynical generation. It puts an unfortunate cloud over things–but I still think the list itself is worth checking out.

The true promise of the article is stated in the second paragraph, which has the more grounded and accurate heading “24 Low cost tips to promote your blog”:

“The most important step is to start looking for low cost/no cost promotional opportunities for your blog. It’s easy but it’s not always obvious. Here are twenty-four low cost ideas to help you get started.”

Low cost. Not zero time or money, which is impossible, but low cost, which is both possible and desirable. (But which does not make for as exciting a headline, unfortunately. Stupid boring reality!)

OK, good-natured (but serious) ribbing aside, Heidi’s article has some really great ways to up the ante on your blog promotion efforts. A lot of them involve putting a promo blurb about your blog in places you might not have thought of,  some others involve local outreach and partnerships, and still others deal with squeezing more win-win juice from your existing customers and foot traffic. They are 24 solid suggestions…and while every single one takes time or resources, and most of them will cost at least a little money (unless you own your own print shop), they are all definitely in the low-to-no cost range. And some require as little as a pen and a piece of paper.

Pick a handful of those things to do now, and make sure all the print-material-related ones get worked into your next print shop order, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when it comes to promoting your web site locally.

Have more low–or-no cost ways for local businesses to promote their blogs? Might as well post them in the comments at Heidi’s post, since I’m suggesting we all go check that out anyway.

I might go post a comment about linking to your neighbors and getting listed in the web business directories, both of which I posted about here recently.

If you want to comment here, you could chime in on article titles that overstate their promise. Do you think I’m being too hard on Heidi regarding her hyperbolic title?

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