Last week, Oprah had Suze Orman on her show talking about this economy and what we can do to protect ourselves. Anyone who’s ever seen Suze Orman knows that she’s a straight talker and uhh, how should I say this, a little scary. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I would want her as MY financial advisor because I couldn’t handle being face-to-face with her looking me in the eye asking what I spend my money on. (I know where my faults are and don’t need a lecture on it.. or do I? lol) But I understand that Suze knows what we need to do to become financially secure and even wealthy, so I take her advice to heart! Most Americans are spending money that we don’t have and there are many ways that we could cut back. We make excuses to hold onto the things we can’t afford and the time has come to “save ourselves”  as Suze says, “and save our children to make sure they have the essentials of life… such as health insurance, and not just THINGS.”
 
To protect ourselves in this economy we’ll have to downsize, tighten our belts and change our ways. We’re going back into a cash economy because there will be no more credit for some of us and for others, the credit we do have will be lowered and watched carefully. The institutions we’ve been borrowing from have been borrowing money to give us the loans, and they’ve been borrowing their money, and no one ever really had the money to back it up. We’ve been living on borrowed money for so long that we take it for granted and hope and pray everything works out. It’s time to get REAL and save ourselves from financial ruin because hoping and praying can’t pay the bills. We need to become proactive to survive in this economy.
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In the Part 1 of Back Up Your Blog, Andreas gave some great instructions on how to back up your blog and Secure your cPanel. A backup is the most important thing we can do to protect our blogs IF a hacking or any other trouble ever happens upon your blog. I think he made a fantastic point about practicing the back up process to make sure it works and to get used to doing it. It is very common for bloggers to have faithfully backed up their blogs only to find out the backup didn’t work properly. So, as Andreas said… practice the backup often until it becomes second nature and easy to execute when you REALLY need it.

How LloydLopez.com helped secure my site

Now here’s a few more helpful things you can do to secure your site. Lloyd Lopez secured my site after helping me with a Feedburner, and other problems I had after my data transfer fiasco. Lloyd works in the technological field and his blog, which he does in his spare time, is about techie stuff too. We’ve been in touch by phone a few times and he’s one busy guy because I know his work schedule! (Holy Smokes! lol)  But as you’ll see on his blog, he still seems to get in some time to have fun with his friends and goes to a lot of resorts for his work retreats… (Must be nice, Lloyd!! lol)  

Among the other qualifications that he needs for his work, Lloyd is also independently “Brainbench Certified” in the following: Computer Technical Support, Technical Desk Help (Microsoft), MS Windows XP Desktop Administration, Computer Fundamentals, Information Technology Terminology. Lloyd will do Blog Consulting if time permits. So if you ever need any extra help that you’re willing to pay for, I can attest to Lloyd’s good reputation and professionalism and I recommend him highly! I’m keeping his name in my “little black blog book” as I’m sure I will need him sometime in the future! lol

Automatic Update
The first thing Lloyd recommended and installed for me was the WP Automatic Update Plugin since it’s the easiest way to upgrade your WordPress blog especily if this is the first time that you’re upgrading.

Installation is easy…. you download the zip file, unzip it, upload the resulting folder into your plugins folder and activate it. Once activated, you have a new entry on your Manage page in your blog’s WordPress admin, called Automatic Upgrade. When you activate it, it will walk you through the steps. This way you can secure your site by upgrading to the newest verions, making sure your plug-ins are up-to-date and always having a backup.

WordPress Backup Utility
Lloyd also recommended and installed a WordPress Backup utility program. It will send your backups to your e-mail address on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (whichever you prefer). But remember, have it come to a different address than your blog webmail address, just to be safe.

Login LockDown
Lloyd installed a Login LockDown on my site. Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. After someone makes a certain number of attempts to log in to your WordPress within a short period of time from the same IP, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that IP. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. (It can be modified from the Options panel to be however many you want and within what time period you wish.)  If the log in attempt was from someone who as authorized to get into your WordPress account then the Admisitrator can release the locked out IP manually from the panel so that they can get in. If it was someone who was not authorized then you know someone has attempted to get into your blog and was trying out different passwords. As you can imagine, Login LockDown a great thing to have for security reasons.

Passwords

Both Lloyd and Andreas stressed that we should have a strong password. Some people use passwords that are easy to figure out, like a “favorite” word and a few numbers (birthday, etc) because it’s easy to remember. If it’s easy for you to remember… it’s definitely hackable by almost anyone! Instead, you should keep a little notebook of your passwords since the good passwords (strong ones) should not be memorizable… they should be “garbled”. As Andreas said in the previous post, don’t use dictionary words. Use a combination of letters and numbers and symbols to make a strong password and make a habit of changing your passwords often.

Ask Your Host About Backups

You should be asking your hosting company if they back up your blog and if they don’t, then get a different host who does. I use HostGater for MomsCashBlog and it is also what you will get when you use the Free Blog Tutorial. Hostgater backup blogs every Sunday. Get to know your host by calling them and seeing what they have to offer you and how they work. If a blog disappears or is having problems, you should call your host first thing. (sometimes you will find that they are having trouble on their end and it’s not your blog being hacked. lol). I’m the kind of person who does business best over the phone. HostGater and I have had a lot of talks and I would never deal with a host who I could not talk to in person. Trouble shooting requires good communication and phone conversation are the best form of communicating that I know of.

I hope this was helpful to some of you. If anyone has any further suggestions to help others secure their blog, please leave a comment to help others out. I know my readers get a lot of good advice from the comments as they’ve told me so thru e-mails. There’s a lot of new people deciding if they want to start a blog with the Free Blog Tutorial and they value the opinions of seasoned bloggers… (they also visit YOUR blog afterwards!) And, and always, if you’re thinking of starting a blog and have any questions, make a comment here and someone will answer you!

After writing The Hacking of Taylor Blue, I looked for some info and options for safeguarding our sites from hacking. What I learned is that there is no “surefire” way to keep your blog safe from being hacked! If someone with the technical know-how wants to hack your site, they can do it! What we can and MUST do is back up our sites as often as possible so if it ever does happen, at least we can save our data and start over with relative ease.

Because I know that we all have different ways of understanding information, this will be a two part series starting with some information from a good “techie” blogger friend of MomsCashBlog, Andreas of Xaviermedia.com giving us useful info on securing our cPanels. The next post will have more info on back ups and a little about hacking.  If you have any questions, make a comment.  Thanks Andreas!

Secure Your cPanel Account

by Andreas of XavierMedia.com

cPanel is one of the best control panels I know and my company Xavier Media is using it for most of our own hosting accounts. But as always a control panel (or for that fact any software) is not more secure then the users using them. Therefore you must make sure that anyone with access to your cPanel account is not the weak link causing your site to get hacked.

Get a secure password

In cPanel there’s a fantastic function that will help you to select hard-to-guess passwords for your accounts. You can even use it to generate passwords you’re going to use on other accounts too.

Login at cPanel and click on “Change Password”.

Then click on the “Generate Password” button to generate a random password. The nice thing with this generator is that you can select how long password you want, if you would like to use uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Just hit the regenerate button until you get a password that fit your needs. Please remember that a password should be minimum 6 characters (more then 8 is even better), should contain at least one uppercase letter (not the first or last letter) and if possible at least one number in the middle somewhere. If you add symbols like +, -, ? and % then you got a pretty strong (good) password already at 6 characters.

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Bloggers come and go, but when Taylor Blue went missing, I could feel that something was wrong! After I bought MomsCashBlog, Taylor Blue was a frequent commenter and she welcomed me with open arms and encouraging words from my very first post. I considered her a good blogging friend and of course I went to her site, taylorsentertainmentnews.com and I was hooked on it from the very first visit. She had a great entertainment gossip blog that was laid out beautifully with pictures of entertainers and the music industry, interesting stories, great ads, and it was updated constantly… sometimes even 4 or 5 times a day! (Wow, that’s dedication!) I went to it ALL the time to get my daily or weekly dose of entertainment gossip. Then one day, it was gone! I tried again and again and again and still could not find it. Althought it took me a while to find her (no site… no e-mail), I kept at it and I finally found another wonderful entertainment site that I liked a lot and something told me to e-mailed the admin and ask if she knew anything about Taylor Blue’s site. The Admin of TEN Gossip.com told me she WAS Taylor Blue, and she told me what happened to her taylorsentertainment blog. It was actually a horror story for bloggers because Taylor Blue’s wonderful blog that she put so much work into, had been hacked!

After a few e-mails back and forth, I asked if she would mind sharing her story with us on MomsCashBlog or if she’d rather just forget the whole experience.  She wrote back and said “YES,  I would love for people to know what happened and maybe they can prevent it from happening to their blog.” So I asked Taylor Blue a few questions thru e-mail about her hacking experience… a blogger’s nightmare! Read more »

I think I should explain some of the problems being solve on this blog…. like what happened with my RSS feed (see Questions About RSS). I know there are a lot of new bloggers and bloggers-to-be visiting MomsCashBlog and I don’t want other bloggers to think that they will have the same problems I have had. Where I’ve mentioned some difficulties with a “transfer”, I think I should explain my situation. I’ve gotten some feedback with people asking if I mean transferring a blog to another server. The answer is NO… My transfer was not having my blog moved from one server to another.. it was a “data transfer” and there is a big difference. The circumstances are rare, I would think, but it could happen so I will explain the situation of my transfer since some of this info could help someone in the future.

I bought MomsCashBlog in early May and in mid June I found out there was another server involved… which meant my blog had to be separated from the other server to be on it’s own. My host said we had to make a transfer in order to set things right. Krysti, the previous owner, and I made a conference call with the host and thought all was settled. Then about a half hour later, 2 months of post disappeared from the blog!! (we were not told that would happen!!) Krysti notified me and said to call the host and that the posts might be missing because of the transaction we had just made, so I called and they said “yes.. the data is being transferred”.

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Hey guys, I need some tech help. When they had to transfer a chunk of MomsCashBlog’s data from one server to another in June, things went whacky in my WordPress settings. I knew something was wrong, but couldn’t put my finger on it. Then a few weeks ago I got a message from either RSS or Feedburner that said “You Could Be Toast”… (Whoooaaa!! That’s a little scary!) It prompted me to put all of my site’s info in because it said I was NOT signed up with them. I assumed I fixed everything with the “Toast” message but I just looked at my Incoming Links on the WordPress Dashboard and it says: Error: Could not find an RSS or Atom Feed at that url. Obviously there is still a problem.

The Question: How do I get my RSS or Atom Feed back?

I have a new laptop since I got that “You Could be Toast Message” and I can’t remember where it came from. Is there something I should be doing in WordPress or do I go to another site to sign up for it?

Now it makes sense that it’s the RSS that has been causing me problems. After investigating I found that RSS has to do with trackbacks and links and all kinds of things…. which I didn’t know! I thought RSS only had to do with the feeds we get when we sign up for someone’s RSS. (I told you I was not technical… Live and Learn! lol) When the data was transferred I got some e-mails and a comment about my RSS Feed giving people the whole 2 months worth of data that was transferred from one server to another, but that seemed to fix itself.  I signed up for my own RSS after the complaints and I did notice that there is no date on my posts.

I will reward whomever gives me the correct answer and can help me get my RSS or Atom feed back on track… (or whatever it is I need! lol.. I don’t really know what I need!)  Hope someone can help me! Thanks in advance.

JJ

I’d like to know what other think about the partnership between Entrecard and SezWho? (check it out here.) Basically, Entrecard is getting together with SezWho in an attempt to encourage bloggers to start commenting. But it goes further than that. The system will encourage us to leave “quality” comments by using the SezWho comment rating system. Now normally I love the rating system… for hotels, restaurants, movies, and books, or whatever… but NOT for comments!

Graham of Entrecard says that people aren’t commenting enough and some aren’t commenting at all, so this is his solution. His motto for this partnership/campaign is “Comment or get out of the Blogosphere”!(and he says that should be our motto too!) Read more »