wordpress

Why You Should Avoid Hotlinking

Added: May 6, 2015

Have you started using the new WordPress bookmarklet? It’s the “button” you add to your browser that basically turns the current webpage into a blog post. One of the new features is that it “suggests” embedding an image from that webpage … an image that doesn’t belong to you (in most cases).

Free Technology for Teachers defines hotlinking as “inserting a picture into a blog post through a URL rather than uploading the image file itself to your blog.” This is fine, if you own the picture. However, if you are bascially “stealing” someone else’s image, that’s when it becomes a problem.

So, don’t hotlink your images!

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Source: What is Hotlinking? – Why You and Your Students Should Avoid It | Free Technology for Teachers

Image source: geralt / Pixabay

Protect Your WordPress Site

Added: November 22, 2013

wordpress-256-black WordPress is a great content management system. But it can be vulnerable if you don’t take steps to safeguard it. Problogger covers a few simple, and not-so-simple, steps to make your site safer.

A few to remember:

Create Strong Passwords. You should be doing this anyway. And change the default “admin” login to another username.

Keep Your Site Updated. And clean up your site (i.e., delete plug-ins and themes you don’t need to reduce the hacking options).

Back up your site. Really. Do it soon.

Be Vigilant. Don’t leave your site unattended for long periods of time.

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Source: How to Protect Your WordPress Site Before the Hackers Lock You Out! || Problogger

Learn WordPress.com

Added: November 20, 2013

Do you host your blog with WordPress.com? WordPress has a great online resource with instructions on how to set up your blog, set up a theme and even how to go mobile. Get started with “Get Started.”

Of particular interest is the part about setting up your public profile and gravatar. This is how you can determine the photo that shows up next to your name when you comment on others’ blogs.

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RESOURCE: Learn WordPress.com || Get Started

Online Marketing Mistakes

Added: November 15, 2013

Sometimes trying to do things the easy way just makes things harder in the long run. This can be seen with online marketing, as this article in Copyblogger points out. The article features three mistakes to avoid:

Going with “quick” solutions instead of self-hosted WordPress.
Thinking that Facebook is a valid content marketing program.
Buying all of your traffic from one source.

A friend of mine is dealing with the first — having to transition to a self-hosted WordPress site after going with a “simple” blog solution. Now she’s trying to figure out how to move her site to a custom domain and a self-hosted site that gives her more control over the site.

Short-term “simple” has turned into long-term headache.

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Source: Three Online Marketing Shortcuts that Take Too Long | Copyblogger