Super quick note here. Last week, my friend Elizabeth invited me to talk about WP security on her podcast. The podcast is published. I urge you to go listen to it.

This came about since WP sites and blogs have been a target of some malicious hacks. Just visit the WP forums and seach for hacking or security you’ll see a bunch of threads.

Is it because WP is in the dumps? Personally I don’t think so. It’s because too many WP installations are set up ‘on the fly’ and not locked down. Kinda like leaving your house door open day and night. An open invitation for people to enter and ransack it.

Anyhow, I talked more about what can happen on an insecure installation with some suggestions what you can do. Here’s a link to a previous post I made (in case you missed it). It has resources detailing the things you can

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Take a look at your blog (or website) categories. What do you see? A handful of easy to understand and navigate categories or a tangled mess?

I’ve had this blog for a long time. 4 years to be exact and it has grown up with the blogging ‘industry’. Back then, I created a few categories and over the years this just grew and grew. So now, I am forced to ‘tame’ them. But the problem is, with so many posts, I didn’t want to wait until I have time to re-organize each post. So how do I quickly keep unwanted categories from displaying, so I can deal with them on my own time?

If you’re running WordPress, you’re so in luck because they made is super easy.

Step 1 

Log in as administrator, go to you Manage >> Categories to pull up a list of all your categories. Hover your mouse over the categories you want to remove.

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Download - Edit - Upload
Download - Edit - Upload

That’s how I used to work on websites a long time ago. When WordPress came along and I started using it in earnest, I knew there was no way I’m doing that for every edit. Sure, you can edit themes through the Theme Editor but here’s why I don’t like using the Theme Editor.

• You have to make the theme folder writable. To me leaving a folder open like that is just an open invitation for exploitation.
• Your chances of making mistakes becomes greater. The Theme Editor is a small little window. If you make a ton of coding and style sheet changes like I do, adding stuff here and there this window becomes a long scrollable one. It is difficult to find the code you’re looking to edit. And after you save, you lose your ‘place’ and you have to spend a little

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Stats Junky appeared on my radar several months ago. Too busy to check it out then, I clipped it in my Read Later list and forgot about it until 2 weeks ago.

Stats Junky is not a site traffic statistics analysis tool. Instead it logs into all your different affiliate accounts to check your stats and earnings then reports them in a neat screen for you. It can even grab your Adsense earnings and track AdWords spending.

This tool is pretty simple in concept and it surely helps you quickly review what your clicks through rates, impressions if available and conversion looks like. It does all that calculation for you. For me, what really helps is seeing all the programs on one screen and able to see which programs are doing better over others.

I also like that I can quickly review how I’m doing this week, last week, this

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Do you ever change something on your site then realized whatever it is you made completely messed up the design. So you go back to take out the change but the problem still remains. You can’t get your site back to where it was. So frustrating!

Photo credit: Paul Fris

I’m not afraid to admit I’ve been in that place way too often. Thankfully, one of my developers got me in the habit of Versioning. Versioning is act of process labeling or logging each change you make to a file or software. Sounds so difficult and complicated right? It is totally not. Here’s what you do.

Before making any change even if you know you’re not going to mess up anything - this by the way is especially helpful when making changes to WordPress themes - make a copy of that file and append the date. For example, I’ll rename the sidebar.php to sidebar-080613.php. Only

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