Google seems to have changed their Gmail spam policy recently. I have not
read anything about this, but have noticed that some of my email is
not getting through to people with gmail accounts. Since I have one
myself, I decided to check my spam.
Surprise, surprise! In among all the spam I found several IMPORTANT
emails – including some notifications and reminders that I had sent
to myself. It seems that Google thinks that I send spam to myself.
I never used to even look at my spam, but now find that I need to
check it daily to make sure that important messages are getting
through.
Here is the procedure I have developed – you may want to
follow something similar:
I trust that these hints will help you to get all the messages you
want to receive, while still allowing Gmail’s excellent spam blocker
to keep away the unwanted stuff. There are three reasons I suggest
doing it every day:
How many “not spam” messages did you find in your spam box?
WordPress plugins extend the capability of WordPress from a blogging platform to a full Content Management System (CMS). However, plugins present their own problems:
Given these issues, it is a good idea to keep your WordPress plugins to a minimum, and only use those that really help further your aims.
If you’re not already using WordPress as your CMS platform of choice, you owe it to yourself to take a look at it and see how it can help you to build and maintain your websites. But where do you start?
My friend Terry Anglin holds a free WordPress training webinar on Tuesday evenings, U.S. Time. This series deals with building a WordPress site from the ground up. If you are new to WordPress, he will be starting a new series, beginning with installing WordPress, on Tuesday, May 1: put May Day on your calendar and start learning!
With WordPress installed, he will walk you through the back office and teach you about the most useful WordPress plugins, one week at a time.
Yesterday evening, Terry introduced us to these two plugins:
For a website to be interactive, and thereby generate increased traffic, it is vital to allow comments. However, once your site becomes popular – and maybe even before – it will attract spam. The spambots crawl sites and generate comments that you will not want to see on your site.
SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam is a simple anti-spam plugin that requires a commenter to log in and enter a “Captcha” code. Spambots cannot do this, and most human spammers will not take the trouble. They will move on to an easier site instead.
Shortcodes Ultimate is powerful editing WordPress plugin. It include 37 different shortcodes allowing you to handle special formatting that would normally need a CSS stylesheet change. Shortcodes Ultimate is a giant step forward in allowing those of us who do not wish to become proficient in HTML, CSS and PHP the power to build elaborate websites quickly from simple templates.
The “across-the-page” headings in this post were generated using Shortcodes Ultimate.
If you want to build your own websites, but do not choose to spend time learning to program, then WordPress can most likely meet any need you could ever have. WordPress itself is free, and most of the useful plugins are also free, so apart from registering and hosting your domain there is no cost. And with Terry’s free training you can learn as you go.
Click Here for the training schedule – bookmark it now while you remember! 
Since my blog was hacked, I have learned how to keep it safe. Believe it or not, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to keep your blog safe from most hackers. It just involves taking a few simple steps and a few safeguards to make sure that you don’t have problems in the future.
Here are four things you can do right now.
You would be amazed at how many people use simple passwords such as their name, 
pet’s name or names like test, or test1234 as the password to their WordPress blog.
There are robots or spiders that comb the internet trying to find those websites that have named their passwords with these simple names. That means when you set up your WordPress account don’t call it Admin – call it something that is non-standard such as your name. And when you have a password, name your password something with at least one number, one uppercase letter or even one punctuation character to ensure that no one can guess it.
The next thing you should do is make sure that no one has access to your email account.
It does you no good to have a strong WordPress password but a weak email password,
because someone can always gain access to WordPress by using the lost password tool.
If someone has access to your email account, they can use the lost password tool and reset your WordPress password to gain access to your website.
This means that you should secure your email, change your password regularly and be
very careful whose computer and whose wireless network you use to check that email.
I use BulletProof Security, which is a free WordPress plugin. After I have installed and activated it, I activate the security modes and check the security status to see that I got everything. It shows that I still need to back up the .htaccess files, so I go to the Backup & Restore tab and back them up. Finally, I check the security status again and review the File and Folder Permissions to see if there are any I feel strongly should be changed.
Depending on your web host, changing file permissions may cause problems later, but it’s easy to undo those changes if you need to. If you perform this step, make a note of the original permission settings, or take a backup before you change them so that you can restore them if there is a problem later.
And finally, one thing that every blog owner who enables comments on their blog should do is to activate the Akismet anti-spam plugin. This plugin checks any new comments coming to your blog for spam. If you don’t have a plugin like this, your blog will at some point be flooded with thousands and thousands of spam comments flooding your site with all kinds of nasty links and garbage. Install this Akismet anti-spam plugin or turn off comments entirely and that will help your blog from being spammed to death.
Those are some very simple tips to help secure your WordPress blog. Use strong passwords, secure your email, use a good security plugin, and use the Akismet anti-spam plugin.
You should definitely back up, clone and protect your WordPress blog right now by going
to Back Up
If you have a WordPress blog or a website, you may be wondering how am I supposed to keep it safe from hackers and from accidental changes or deletions?
In my previous post I described how I had five sites hacked, and what I did about it.
In addition to any kind of fancy modifications or security plugins, there are a few easy
steps you can take right now within the next few minutes to make sure your WordPress
website is secure.
The first three things you can do are:
Do you know that when you connect to a website using unsecure WiFi, which means
airport WiFi, Starbuck’s WiFi, public WiFi, that anyone can see your username and
password? That means when you connect via FTP or simply log into your WordPress
dashboard anyone can see exactly what your username and password is and join for
themselves.
That’s why it’s very important to only connect to your WordPress site and only connect to
FTP if you have an SSL connection or you’re connecting a cellular 3G network instead of
WiFi. If you don’t know what any of those things are, then simply make it a point to only
connect to your FTP website and WordPress from home instead of in public.
Next, only use plugins that you trust. Are you aware that any WordPress plugin, if it so
chooses, can have access to your entire WordPress site? All of your users, all of your
content, most of the time, to every single file on your website.
That is the reason why it’s very important that you only use WordPress plugins that you
trust. Don’t go out and install 200, 300 plugins just because they all seem like they have
cool features. If a plugin is brand new, if no one seems to be using it, that is not a good
sign, and it may be a Trojan Horse kind of plugin where someone had simply put it out
on the internet in the hopes that someone else will install it on their website, and now
you have given the hacker complete access to your files and your content.
Finally, a very easy way to secure your WordPress blog is to keep WordPress up to date.
People find security holes all the time, and WordPress is quick to fix those holes, but it
does you no good unless you update your blog to the current version, which is
safeguarded against most attacks.
Luckily the most current versions of WordPress have a single button you can click to
update it, which means it downloads and installs the most recent version so you are now
protected.
Backup your blog quickly and easily at Backup Creator.
Bad Behavior has blocked 286 access attempts in the last 7 days.