WebSiteCleanup.com

Interacting with Facebook

Emily — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:19:31 +0000

Frequently, I’m asked to add various and sundry methods of connecting social media to people’s web sites. Today I discovered a page on Facebook which has links to a bunch of their different services:

Facebook Developers

Even though I’m kind of into anti-social networking, this page could prove useful.

WordPress Links

Emily — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:18:52 +0000

Every so often I have to clean out my Opera tabs… I tend to leave a tab open if I find a useful page. Here are the latest things I’ve been looking at:

How to Diagnose and Remove the WordPress Pharma Hack from Pearsonified
WordPress Site Hacked at WordPress.org forums
What to do if your WordPress site is hacked at WordPress.org
Hardening WordPress at WordPress.org
The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout from Matthew James Taylor
Redirect index.html to index.php from Convoluted Brian
WordPress Mailing List Plugin from Tribulant
Making Comments Stand Out by Tamba2

Debranding PHPList Emails

Emily — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:21:06 +0000

We have a client that sends out resumes on behalf of her clients, and needed a way to remove the “Powered by phplist” footer on the emails, because we want to have it look like the resume is coming from her client. So, I found this page that told me how to do it:

Removing “powered by” tagline from phplist – by Wesley Tanaka

PHPList is a great piece of free software and I highly recommend it for sending out newsletters and such. Leaving the “powered by” text gives them some advertising, but in this instance it just wasn’t appropriate to leave it in there. If you find yourself in a similar situation, consider making a donation to the project to compensate.

Targeted WordPress Attacks

Emily — Wed, 12 May 2010 20:41:31 +0000

In the past few days, some web hosts have been experiencing targeted attacks. A lot of WordPress sites have been hacked, and some regular web sites, too. Here’s the story:

Large-scale WordPress Attacks – from the H Security site

Apparently it’s not too difficult to get rid of the hack, so it should not be a disaster if you get hacked. The big question is how are the hackers getting in. Nobody is quite sure yet. My guess is user names and passwords are being stolen by malware on people’s computers. So… the lesson here is always keep your anti-virus software up-to-date and have a good backup of your web site.

Transfer Large Files

Emily — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:11:18 +0000

Do you ever need to send someone a very large file? Email just doesn’t cut it for the big stuff. Here’s a site where you can transfer up to a 2GB file. Neat!

WeTransfer

WordPress Galleries

Emily — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:24:58 +0000

Lately I’ve been experimenting with WordPress galleries, for managing pictures. It’s a bit limited in terms of formatting the output of the gallery, but it’s simple enough for everyday usage. One of the minor bugs is that you can’t have the image not linked. Sators to the rescue! Here’s a little hack to fix that:

WordPress Gallery Shortcode with No Image Link

Unfortunately, this involves modifying one of the core files of WordPress, so you will lose the change every time you update to a new version. Maybe we’ll get lucky and future versions of WordPress will include this feature!

Also, here is the documentation page for using gallery shortcodes:

Gallery Shortcode

These shortcodes allow you to display a gallery in a page or post. The trick to setting up a gallery is to go into Media, Library and attach photos to a post or page. The shortcode will display all of the photos (or other media) that are attached.

Rescuing Your Computer From a Virus

Emily — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:33:17 +0000

AVG is a very good anti-virus program – every Windows user should have it! They also have come out with a way to make a bootable CD or USB stick so you can start an infected system and clean it up.

AVG Resecue CD

The best time to make the rescue device is before you need it, so don’t delay making your CD!

One Word Domain Names

Emily — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:25:45 +0000

This site is rather interesting if you’re looking for a domain name made of a single word. If you are considering a .net address, I would suggest checking the .com version to make sure nothing bad is there, since your (potential) customers may mis-type the URL.

Last Words Left

Show Me What’s Wrong

Emily — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:33:35 +0000

Here’s a nice little tool which will allow you to take a screen shot and send it to your tech support to show them what your screen looks like.

Show Me What’s Wrong

This is a nice alternative to a program like Log Me In, which allows your tech support person to take control of your computer.

Emoticons in WordPress

Emily — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:11:55 +0000

Today I was pasting in some articles in a blog, and some of the numbered lists were getting entry #8 turned into a image! So of course Google helped me figure out where to turn that off…

Using Smilies in WordPress

I never knew you could put so many different smilies into a post!