I can tell you from personal experience that being hacked is not a nice experience. I was fortunate, or unfortunate depending on your view of things, that I suffered a double hack. The first to one of my WordPress blogs (not this one fortunately), the second  was to the same site but was a malware attack.

When I say fortunate, the malware attack was reported and my site shut down by my webhost. It was a tough job tracking down the actual malware but it alerted me to check through everything else. That is when I found the WordPress attack.

What is even more galling is that I could have prevented it with just a few minutes work. If you have a WordPress blog I hope you read the notices on the Dashboard page. There have been a lot of notices about attacks on older versions of WordPress. Upgrade to the latest version ASAP is my recommendation.

As to my site, my second piece of advice is also just as simple. Change your passwords frequently and make sure the passwords are easy for you to remember but long enough to be hard to hack. Include a mix of capitals, lower case, numbers and symbols. I got lazy and was using a six digit password which, on reflection, was easy to hack. Not now I can tell you.

It is very easy to take your blog for granted. We sail along posting each and every day – most of don’t give much regard to passwords or upgrading our sites. The latest versions of WordPress make upgrading much easier. My message to all:

Don’t take your blog or site for granted – make security at least a weekly priority. If you don’t, somewhere, sometime, when you least expect it, someone will come along and knock it out – you could potentially lose the lot. It’s your site – it’s in your hands.

There are a lot of WordPress plugins around these days and finding the best ones for your blog can be difficult. Here are four plugins that may add a little more to your blog.

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TweetMeme Button

If you’re a Twitterer and Tweet your posts then this little plugin is a must. It adds the TweetMeme button to your posts so your readers can re-Tweet the post if they think it is worthwhile. The button is also included in RSS feeds.

There is very little setup required – just upload it to your plugins folder on your site and activate. photo credit: NevilleHobson

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Cookies For Comments

This is an anti spam plugin that works by sending a cookie when a page is loaded. If the cookie is not present then the user is not able to leave a comment.

A cool little plugin if you are getting spam that is getting past Askismet. Bots tour around leaving comments, however, they don’t take on cookies and with no cookie, there is no comment. The downside, if your reader has cookies disabled, they will not be able to leave a comment either.

Upload and activate – couldn’t be easier. photo credit: Mrs Magic

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Post Teaser

This has the potential to be a neat little plugin. It truncates your posts on the home page and leaves a teaser. You can set the number of words to the teaser (default 100 words). It places a read more option and provides post data such as word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.

There are a couple of issues to watch. If you have graphics within the teaser section, it will make a mess of your site (just look at mine here). If you set the teaser to 100 words, place any graphics outside that 100 words.

Another issue that is worth remembering is that many visitors want to see the complete post when visiting your home page. Hopefully this will convince them to click through and so reduce your bounce rate. It would have been nice to have an option to leave the first post in full and place teasers for all other posts.

Upload, activate and edit the length of the teaser – or just leave it at the default 100 words. photo credit: Andy Woo

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WPtouch: WordPress on iPhone, iPod & Android

This is a neat not so little plugin that provides a slimmed down version of your site for iPhone, iPod and Andoid users. There are a few options you can tweak including the skin. If your site is a little heavy for mobile browsing, install this plugin.

Upload, activate and edit the settings. Great for sites that include content relevant to mobile searches.

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That may be a strange statement given the banner that will fly on this page throughout September. In all honesty – I don’t particularly care about the politics of Iran, or any other country really, even though I am a political person.

I have a serious distrust of all politicians as I feel they are not in office because they care about us, the general population. They are there to push their own agendas and often, we, the general public, suffer for that agenda.

Reports from Iran suggest the election was rigged. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t but in a way, tell me any election that isn’t rigged. Here in Australia we have compulsory voting. I didn’t like any of the candidates standing at the last election, yet I had to vote for one of them. Is that not some form of electoral rigging?

One of the arguments used to prove the Iranian election was rigged was that government opponents even lost in their home towns. Referring again to Australian politics, former Prime Minister John Howard became Australia’s only Prime Minister to lose his seat in office at an election. It does happen.

So why this post and why the banner? It matters not the politics nor the country. Where I will stand up and have a say is when free speech is denied. China and Burma have been classic cases of restrictions in free speech particularly when it comes to the blogosphere. Free speech is the life blood of blogging and I will always stand up for our freedom. I was struck by two paragraphs of a post by Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish:

“The forces of democracy have marshalled in Iran for accountability, transparency and fairness. Wherever they marshall, we should stand with them, especially in the blogosphere, where our Iranian brothers and sisters built the foundation for this moment.”

Putting aside the philosophy of democracy. The point that stands out for me is the use of the blogosphere to form a movement because this leads into a second paragraph later in the post:

“Ever since I penned The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media, I’ve been waiting for this moment, which I predicted, twelve years ago, would come: a great day when the corporate media got pushed out of the way by authentic media from below. What is occurring worldwide, with the Iranian crisis as catalyst, is the emergence of the very kind of media from below that the human race – particularly the working class and the poor – so desperately needs.”

The media that everyone has access to is blogging. Whether you’re a multi-millionaire or the poorest person around, if you can access a computer and the internet, even in a public library, you can voice your views. In fact you can do it almost completely anonymously. Of course I don’t support blogging that is anyway destructive on a person level or designed to malign innocent individuals, it can be an important weapon against injustice.

Add to the blogosphere the power of Twitter and other social media and you have the potential for a new political force around the world – at least – a huge voice.

I don’t care about the politics in Iran, or China, or anywhere else. I do care about the rights of individuals to have the freedom to voice their opinions – DO YOU?

I received an email recently inviting me to add my site to a new directory. This directory is geo targeted directory which, although my humble blog doesn’t target any particular part of world, is not new in theory still interested me. the directory is aimed at blogs, businesses, and Twitterers.

Let’s face it, a directory listing is a directory listing when it comes to links. The directory goes by the name LoadedWeb – not exactly an inspiring name for a geo-targeted directory.

Listing your site is easy and can be done in just a few steps. Entries are hand edited to ensure they are listed in the right categories and are not sites that could cause issues (gambling, porn etc). photo credit: Katey Nicosia

Whilst this is just another directory, it is probably well worth listing your site whilst it is still young and not overblown. If it does get traffic then you may well see some flowing through to your site. The sites homepage already has a PR of 5 so it has got plenty of links flowing to it.

Whether or not any of that juice comes back is another matter. According to the information provided when you first list your site, a banner placed on your site, similar to that tiny little one in my sidebar, will result in a do-follow link. Time will tell.