Tech

First step to WordPress security

No Comments » Written on February 21st, 2010 by
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The very first thing you should do with your fresh WordPress install is to change the login name of your admin user.

Since the admin username is well known it is an easy target for brute force attacks. When the login name is known it is just a matter of time before a bot has found a password that is usable to login. As far as I know; WordPress doesn't store the real passwords in its database, it stores the MD5 representation. That makes it possible, but fairly unlikely, to find another password that works for your admin user.

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Maintaining a lot of (WordPress) sites

No Comments » Written on February 18th, 2010 by
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In a lot of the literature about internet marketing the authors recommends that you use WordPress for even the simplest sites.

I do like WordPress and it has a lot of nice functionality for free, but it is a real pain to upgrade plugins and/or the main install for every update that comes along. A plain html site will never have security issues and it is blazingly fast.

I'm longing for a tool that probably already exists: I'd like a content management system that generates static html from a site wide design.

If your model for internet marketing is to set up a lot of sites making nickles every day a whole lot of the revenue is lost if you have to spend time upgrading the installs.

WordPressMU might be a solution, but I haven't looked in to that yet.

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iPad

No Comments » Written on February 3rd, 2010 by
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I must have misunderstood something about the iPad.

Did the iPod Touch just get a fat step brother without a camera?

I guess Apple will sell a bunch of them even though they seem to be in between everything else. As far as I know the form factor have already been tried and failed.

Are they trying to get a piece of the netbook market, the emerging e-reader market or are they trying to create a niche of their own?

It is a bit upsetting to me that the common man is not more interested in open systems. OK, it is nice when things work but the iPhone way is ridiculous. They could at least do like Canonical does with Ubuntu and let the users choose the level of freedom they want.

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