Dew Point Productions Blog » WordPress

wp-blog-header.php hacked by chatbh.net, uaecem.com, 3trqatar.com

david — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:12:21 +0000

We’ve discovered a number of WordPress sites that have had their wp-blog-header.php file hacked. In these instances the hacker inserts links for a number of Arabic language sites in what looks like the footer but isn’t. The text reads ??? ??? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ???? ????? ??? ???????? ??? ????? and the sites are mentioned in the title. It appears to us that they’ve managed these attacks through servers and not individuals’ computers. The temporary solution is easy, simply reupload the wp-blog-header which is in the root directory of your wordpress install. Longer term you need to have a conversation with your host.

Hope this helps.

Wordpress Image Uploader Crashing Firefox

david — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:19:15 +0000

Since Wednesday there have been a rash or reports on WordPress.com about Firefox crashing when WordPress users try to upload images via WordPress image uploader.Chances are if you’re having this problem you’ve got gears installed. For the time being you’re going to need to disable Google Gears if you want to use the uploader. As far as I can tell this happened with an update of Firefox or Gears since the problem is new and WordPress hasn’t come out with more than a beta version update of WP.

How do you disable Gears? Go to Tools > Add Ons > Gears and click disable then restart Firefox.

Contact Us Tip in WordPress for Vacations

david — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:59:50 +0000

Here’s an example of how WordPress can work as a content managment system to simplify your life. A client who is going away on vaction wanted to make sure that her clients weren’t trying to contact her through her web site which forwards to her email while she was gone since she’s not checking email while she’s away. I told her to simply go to the contact page and under Status in the menu on the right to click Edit and then choose Draft from the drop down menu. That removed the form from her link from her menus and will push anyone wanting to contact her while she’s away towards calling her office where there’s someone to answer.

WordPress – it makes life easy.

WP e-Commerce 2.6.10 Improvements Included SEO so Upgrade Now

david — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:09:33 +0000

The team over at Instinct has been working away on the latest public release of WP e-Commerce and they set WP e-Commerce 2.6.10 free on Thursday. I was booked up on Thursday, skied Friday and so I am just now getting around to writing about it. Here are my thoughts.This release fixed and tweaked quite a few things. Some are visible and some invisible. With this release we shouldn’t have to see anymore questions in the forums on why the pagnation isn’t working, because now it does. For those of us in the US the tax options have been improved as has the UPS amdin ui which got some additional options.

The things that I am most excited about, however, are those that impact the carts performance in the search engines:

Call to “db_version” fixed so that it does not cause fatal errors in older versions of wordpress: Update to this version and no longer should you see your site being indexed for a fatal error.

A number of unneeded SQL queries have been removed and code has been cleaned up: One big frustration for me has been the slowness of page loading. This is a known negative factor for seo. A slow load time negatively impacts your quality score in Adwords which means lower placements and higher costs for your Adwords campaigns. My hope is that they will continue to reduce the number of queries. The faster they make this the better.

They also worked on the ping function. Imagine a shopping cart that tells the search engines when you’ve added a product. You must admit that’s a nice feature.

The addition of the Meta data that you can add is good, but could be so much more than it is. If your familiar with HeadSpace2, or the All in One SEO Pack you now they allow you to set custom title tags and meta descriptions per page and on a category basis. This is what we need the Advanced Options Meta Data to do in WP e-Commerce. Currently when you input data into the Advanced Options Custom Meta this is how it is output to a search engine:

Pen Recorder: Record with your pen

It’s part of the body text. For SEO what we need it to do is replace the title tag Your Website: Your Page Title and of course we need to be able to set this on categories (groups) as well as individual pages. The same is true for the Meta Description. This controls the snippet, as Google likes to call it, which is what users see when they see search results. Controlling your title tag and your snippet allows you to write your results to maximize your clickthroughs from natural search by following the same principals that you would in writing an ad for Adwords. At a category level this would make it so the default Your “Website: Products Page” which is truly horrendous could be written to be meaningful. Right now there’s none on product pages leaving the search engines to grab a snippet they think is meaningful from you page, but which may be totally irrelevant.

Dan is nice enough to ask my opinion from time to time on SEO so if you have other suggestions for SEO improvements please let me know and I’ll pass them on.

In the meantime, to see the entire list of upgrades, there are a lot, head over to http://www.instinct.co.nz/wp-e-commerce-plugin-3610/

P.S.

I’ll be updating the WP e-commerce SEO Manual

p.p.s

You can now get the updated version of our WP e-Commerce SEO Manual.

WP e-Commerce Friendly Themes

david — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:48:14 +0000

If you’re looking for WordPress themes that are designed specifically to be used with WP e-Commerce you’ve come to the right place. We’ll be creating many themes over the next several weeks that are optimized for use with WP e-C0mmerce.

Three Column Themes

Our three column themes are created with your visitor in mind. Online shoppers are used to looking for product categories on the left, products in the middle and their shopping cart on the right. Of course, our themes are widget friendly and you’re certainly welcome to arrange the shopping cart widget and the other widgets anyway you want. You’re also free to switch out the header image and play with the css as much as you want.

Download WP e-Commerce City

Coming Soon

WordPress Theme Contest $1500.00 Cash Prize

david — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:47:44 +0000

Okay Dear Readers – here’s a great contest for all you WordPress theme developers. Dan and the gang over at Instinct are gearing up for a WordPress Themes contest. They’re making the top prize $1500.00 for the best WP e-Commerce theme and an iPod for the second place theme.

I’ve also offered to contribute to the prize kitty for a search engine optimized theme. If Dan says “yes,” I’ll update this post.

Even if you’re not a WordPress theme developer I encourage you to leave comments for theme developers on what you think would make the best WP e-Commerce compatiable theme. I am in not part of Instinct so I have no sway but if you want to see what I think makes sense, see my WP e-commerce Friendly Themes post.

WordPress IE8 Fix for Display Problems

david — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:36:33 +0000

If you’re WordPress theme isn’t displaying the way it should in Internet Explorer 8 there may be a simple fix which isto put this line of code:

in your header. “Hat tip goes to Ed Bott for writing about this in his post “Which sites will make the IE8 Compatiblity Hall of Shame”.

Yeah I know, if the world would just move to Firefox or any other working browser without the Microsoft ego that assumes the entire Internet world should bend to its will we wouldn’t have this problem. However, as much as you may hate IE and while I may only use it for checking how Websites I am working on it render in it, the fact that 75% of your visitors are using it make coding for it a necessary evil.