I often wonder what is worse? Having a server down time or having your blog hacked by a spammer? I would prefer a server down time over having my blog(s) hacked by spammers any time of night or day.

Recently I have been helping a friend of mine after her blog was hacked by a viagra spammer. I am sure some of my readers can benefit from the things I have learned.

How Do You Know If Your Blog Is Hacked?

It can take days or weeks before you can discover that your blog was compromised. But following are red flags you should pay attention to:

1. Your blog’s performance suddenly decreases. It takes forever for pages to load in your browser. It can be due to the fact that a PHP scripted inserted in your blog’s theme files is trying to “pull in” hundreds and even thousands of slinks. Your blogg may appear to you and your visitors the same, but if you take a closer look at the source of your pages you might see the link spam.
2. The number of regular daily visitors suddenly drops. This can be due to two factors:
   • Visitors become impatient that your pages take so long to load and move on.
   • Your search engines raking and position may be affected resulting in less

   traffic.

3. If you are regularly using an FTP client, pay attention if there are any suspicious files on your server.

Things you can do to help you out to make you blog less attractive to “viagra spamers and hackers”.

1. Always have the latest version of WordPress. Yes updating WordPress in the past was rather painful task. But there is no longer excuse not to update it your software since you can do it straight from your Dashboard.
2. If you still are afraid to upgrade your WordPress on thing you can do is to stop publicizing to the entire world which version you are actually using. Many theme developers please a code in the header of your blog that produces following result:
   
   You can fix this rather easy by removing following code from the header.php file of your current theme:
   <meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>" />

   In my opinion, it would be better to show your love and appreciation for WordPress by linking to them.

3. One of the ways you can find out your blog has been hacked is to set up a Google Alert for the following query “viagra site:www.yoursite.com”. Of course you can substitute keyword “viagra” with any other keyword you think your site might be targeted with.

It is probably impossible to prevent your blog from being hack at certain point, but there are few things you can do to make your blog less attractive to spammers and hackers.

If you need more advanced approach to dealing with spam hackers, I highly recommend to read “New WordPress Hacking Strategy Using Cloaking to Target Google IP Addresses” by Aaron Wall

Twitter users may find Twitter Tools very useful. It eliminates the need of services like TwitterFeed, and offers array of other feature that will help you to synchronize your Twitter activity with your blog(s).

Once installed you can configure the plugin to do following:

1. Create a tweet when you publish a new post. For me this eliminated the need for TwitterFeed, and is probably the only option I will use for now.
2. Create a blog post from each of your tweets.
3. Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets
4. Create a weekly digest blog post from your tweets

In addition it has a widget you can use on the sidebar of your blog which you can use to create new tweets.

If everything goes well and I have configured this plugin properly, it should notify Twitter about this post. If you are using Twitter Tools already, let me know what is your impression about this plugin in the comments below.

About over a week ago Go Beyond MLS was down for several days. In fact my entire hosting account was suspended. Evidently my websites were overloading the server and exhausting the server resources.

As attractive as shared hosting is, keeping low prices and all, every serious web master and/or blogger needs to look ahead and plan for a dedicated server solutions… eventually.

As much as I love WordPress as blogging platform, it uses good amount of server resources to evidently cause serious enough trouble for my web host to have my account suspended. So I had to do something. Optimize my sites so that they would not over load the server or move to dedicated web hosting solution (which would cost me about $1200 a year even with the least expensive solutions out there). So I opted for optimizing my websites (at least those powered by WordPress) with WP Super Cache plugin.

WP Super Cache along with it’s parental plugin WP Cache, where aimed primarily at allowing WordPress blogs to survive heavy loads of traffic resulting from websites like Digg or Slashdot. However, as it was in my case, you don’t have to hit the front page of Digg or Slashdot to cause some server issues.

So how does WP Super Cache do it? After you install and configure the plugin, it saves individual pages from your WordPress site and serves them to your visitors as plain old html as long as they do not leave comments. Statistically over 90% of your visitors are passing by without ever leaving a comment. Therefor it is save to presume that over 90% of your visitors will be shown the cached hml versions of your pages instead of heavy PHP scripts.

I know that down the road I will have to revisit the possibility of purchasing dedicated server. But if WP Super Cache can buy me a year, it will end up saving me about $1,200.00.

Side note: If you do not have your custom (“pretty”) permalinks configured on your blog, you will have to configure them- WP Super Cache requires that configuration. It is also good idea to backup your current .htaccess file before configuring WP Super Cache Plugin should things go wrong.

Ever since I begun blogging and falling in love with every aspect of it, I also wanted to try managing forums. Copyblogger has recently addressed few important reasons why every blogger should have a forum. It took me quite a long time to make my own conclusions.

My previous attempts to implement forums on few of my websites ended up in disaster. One particular forum was left unattended for a few weeks. It grew incredibly big- however 100% of those registered were spammers. Some times we bloggers complain about spam, but to be completely honest I think we have seen nothing in comparison to the owners of the forums. The spam on forums can really deter the owner from moving on.

For the last 3 years, after the last unsuccessful attempt of starting a forum, I have decided to concentrate on blogging. But the more I blogged the more I realized the need for a forum.

While my intention was to launch the forum on January 1st, an urgent reputation management issue stopped me from formally announcing the Go Beyond MLS forum. It did not however stopped few of my friends to join the forum and “take it for an extensive spin”: Matt (aka The Geek LordMatt), Matt Keegan (aka The One and Only Freelance Writer), Dennis Pease (aka Oregon Realtor)- thank you so much for taking a look at the my new forum.

I will be writing few follow up posts about the forum and what I will be trying to accomplish with it in 2009. For now I feel compelled to thank you for testing it so far. The forum is powered by Simple Press Forum Plugin for WordPress- just in case you wonder.

Note: I you have joined the forum but have not yet configured your profile, take a few minutes to do so. At minimum it will be good if you provide your web site’s address.a

If you are a blogger, chances are that sooner or later you will come across a phenomena called “splogs”. These blogs republish your content without your permission and without giving your a proper credit for your work. Some times they do link back to you but dressing up your links in pink colors of “nofollow” attribute. So how do you deal with them?

I came across an interesting discussion on AgentGenius.com on how to deal with splogs. Tom Royce of Real Estate Bloggers suggested a plugin called RSS footer- this plugin allows you to ad an extra link into your feed with a custom message, which can be used to expose and embarrass the splogger.

There is also another similar solution to the above plugin. I have been using it for quiet sometime without realizing it has a potential to insert additional links each of your RSS feed item- Similar Posts Plugin. This plugin undergone husge transformation since I first began using it, if you have it on your blog an kept with plugin’s updates make sure to look at every set of settings to appreciate more what this plugin can do for your blog. You can specify the links to similar post in RSS feed under “Placement” option in the latests version of the plugin.

Since many of the splogs are automated, the extra links to your website will begin to show up on these splogs. There is one more benefit from using the above described plugin- but revealing it means giving away a simple solution to the “developers” of these splogs.

So to all of you who think splogs are fun I am begging you: please go ahead and scrape my blogs.

Note: Above plugins are for WordPress.org powered websites only.