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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Table of Contents

What Is A Table Of Contents

As you can see from what I have included here, a table of contents (TOC) is just that, a list of what is in your post. However, it is not just any list. This list is created through the use of header (H) tags. Header tags have a range of H1 through to H6 – you can always find that one of those tags will suit your theme. The title of each section in this post is published using the H4 tag. This has been done in the past using anchors and hand coding the TOC – not any more!

Why A Table Of Contents

Generally speaking, you probably don’t need a TOC in a majority of posts. However, if you have a particularly long post then you should divide it into sections. For SEO purposes, each section should have a heading using a header tag.

There is another benefit to using a TOC. People like to scan a post before reading. With a TOC, they can scan the post above the fold. Add to that, if you check my TOC, by clicking on one of the titles in the list, the cursor will jump to that section. That’s pretty handy for your readers.

How To Create A Table Of Contents

To create a TOC in WordPress, you will first need to install a plugin. Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin is the one I am using here and these instructions cover this particular plugin. If you do a search there are others around.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, create your post. The TOC is generated from the use of header tags so include a couple of header tags throughout your post.

Once you have completed your post, place the cursor at a point where you want the TOC generated and use the (!–TOC–) command – note, replace the ( ) with < > symbols.

And there Any SEO Benefits Too

It seems there may be SEO benefits with Google taking on page navigation links as mini site links. Site links or internal links help the search engines find your content. For on page navigation, what you could be building is a set of long tail keywords – one for each heading in the TOC.

My thanks to Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal for her post titled “how to add intra-page navigation to your blog posts“.

Do you have a WordPress blog and at times have titles that are a little long? Are there times when a sub heading could be a nice addition? If so then there is a little trick to modifying your post’s title that you may find useful.

This post has a modified title. Because of the way the style sheet is setup, the various H tags act very differently to each other. You could add your own styles to the style sheet if you knew how (and I will write about that in another post), or you could just modify the titles when you need to.

I wrote in an earlier post about modifying H tags within a post. A similar set of commands can be used to great effect in the title. In the title to this post I have used the command:

[h3]Modifying WordPress Titles On The Fly[/h3>]It’s A Pretty Neat Trick

When doing it yourself, be sure to replace the square brackets with the code placeholder tags <>. You can also use the BR tag to wrap the text to a new line when you need to.

You will need to play around with your H tags to see what sort of effects you get. What it is does do is create a different style of heading for your post titles. It can certainly make them look more interesting.

A word of caution – if you have the post url rewrite on so that the post title is written to the url, you want to consider using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack or similar that allows you to rewrite the title. You can then strip the code away for a clean url – otherwise, you are likely to see some strange url’s for your pages – certainly not SEO friendly urls.