The WordCamp Toronto 2010 will be open at the Centennial College Student Centre on March 27 and 28. Here’s a map on Google map.

More information can be view here on the WordCamp Toronto’s website.

The price will be $35 CND for one person. So, I’ll be going there to check out what it is all about and maybe I can pick up something from it.

Here is the schedule for the 2 days event for The WordCamp Toronto 2010.

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Just two months ago (December 2009) this website www.keyframe5.com got hack by a spammer! I never thought I would end up as a victim, I always say to myself this will never happen to me.

Here is what I did to find out how my Wordpress website was hack and how to protect your Wordpress website from becoming a victim.

1. The fastest and easiest way to keep your Wordpress website protected from hackers and spammers is to always upgrade your Wordpress website to the latest Wordpress version.
2. Validate your CSS and source code with W3C.
   
   If some unknown html codes were added, you can easily pick it up the errors with W3C. If you don’t know how to validate your source code through W3C, you can still do it by remembering the amount of errors you have and later on when you check it again you suddenly have 100’s extra errors. Then that should tell you something is wrong.
3. Look at your web traffic statistic. If you notice a slow decline of traffic on your web site and you have a gut feeling something is wrong. Check and see what key words some of the people use on search engines to find your site. For example, I notice someone used the key word “3D penis mesh”. I know the word penis is not on my website anywhere (except on this page), but for some weird reason someone found my site with the word penis. That should be a good warning sign something is wrong.
4. Lastly, regularly check your source code. I check my source code all the time and I’ll admit I didn’t notice anything wrong when I got the hack but if you’re careful you might be able to find something out of the ordinary.
5. Yes, always upgrade Wordpress when in doubt.

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Intro and Splash Pages
The worst thing you could do is to have a Flash splash page and inside the flash object there is the enter link. This mean, the each engine spiders can not access the enter link inside the flash object. Therefore, your splash page with the flash object will be the only page the search engine spiders will index and not the other pages.

It is okay if you don’t care about search engines indexing your content, but for the rest of us this is the biggest mistake anyone can do with SEO. Your homepage is likely the highest ranking page of the entire site. Why put any splash page there? There is no use for splash pages, unless you want the users to have the options to select which language they prefer, but other than that I don’t see any good use of a splash page.

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Every time you update your posts or pages wordpress will automatically backup the last version of the posts. This feature can be very helpful when you want to go back in time and change your posts to the past version, but I find it clogging up the database as each update will add an new line to the database. Over time it can add up and I don’t really need this anyways.

To remove this Post Revisions.

First open up wp-config.php and add the line below…
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

To delete and remove all existing post revisions entries and rows from WordPress database Posts table, simply login to MySQL command-line interface, phpMyAdmin, SQLyog or other MySQL GUI tools. Select the appropriate WordPress database (if you have more than one databases on the same server), and then issue the following command (it’s also recommended to backup the database before performing the deletion SQL statements):

Click the Query Window icon on the top left corner of your phpmyadmin. See image below. Make sure you select the correct database first. When you click the Query Window icon, you should get a pop up, just past in the code DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”; and clcik GO. Again make sure you back up first before doing this.


More info on “How to remove wordpress Post Revisions” with the below links.

Lets say you have your wordpress setup and ready to go. But we all know that the current default wordpress can only have one single design and layout for all the posts even if you have multiple categories.

For example, you have two different categories called “News”, the other “Items” and you wanted all the posts under the category “News” to look different from the posts listed under the category “Items”. This is what you do…

1. Open up your single.php file. Should be inside your theme folder somewhere like this yourdomain/wp-content/themes/your-theme/

2. Paste in the code below to your single.php – This code should be the only code you see inside this single.php


3. You will need to create two new files call “single-news.php” and “single-item.php” (just copy the original file “single.php” before you add in the above code). Now you can have two totally different design and layout for your posts under the category News and Items.

4. The file “single-news.php” can now be alter to whatever you want and the same with “single-news.php”.

5. Remember to change ( in_category(‘1′) ) to match your category id.

6. And you can do more than two different design and layout to as many categories as you wish.

That’s it!.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

The power of high-pressure sales: From CBC aired on March 20, 2009 on CBC-TV
FYI: Universal Energy are the same people from National Home Services. They change their name to National Home Services because of the video above. Here is proof click here. Also, Just Energy acquired National Home Services. Read more about it here…

See what people are saying about Universal Energy, now acquire by Just Energy. Click here.

This post is not about the price for a water heater tank or about how much money we can save, it is not about saving the world and this is not about the energy efficient tanks. It is about the sleazy sale tactics by National Home Services. It is misleading from the first sentence that came out of their mouth. National Home Services “independent” energy agent lied by saying they were sent by or affiliated with our current provider, or they would say they were sent by the government for a check up. That was why I felt I had to let them in.

I would be more than happy to pay $2 or $5 dollars more each month for something we need, instead National Home Services tried to replace our water heater tank that is only 7 years old and doesn’t need replacement. National Home Services “independent” energy agent completely lied by saying our water heating tank was out dated, might blow up, and contain dirty water. When he only looked at my tank for 10 seconds. Also, he wasn’t a water heater technician, he was a sale man, an “independent” energy agents and he had no idea what was inside the tank.

On top of that the “independent” energy agent didn’t even mention the long term contract and left out many details on the contract or did not clearly disclose all the pricing, terms and conditions. For example, the “independent” energy agent left out the big fine for their cancellation fees and the a fine for transferring my contract if I was to sell my home within the next 15 years. For those reasons, I hope no one sign up with National Home Services.

Here is an article from The Star “Don’t sign sales deals at your door”, about National Home Services and other companies making sales going door to door.

Why you should not sign with National Home Services

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Lets say you have your wordpress website online and you want to remove the word “category” from your url.

For example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/category/wordpress

and you want to change the above url to:
http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/wordpress

Use the two plugins below.

Decategorizer Plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/decategorizer/installation/

Redirection Plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/installation/

1) Upload redirection Plugin first.
2) Upload Decategorizer.
3) Activate Redirection.
4) Settings are under Tools > Redirection. Just add “category” (without quotes) in the “Source URL” field. Target URL is blank. Save it.
5) Activate Decategorizer.

My top wordpress plugins.

1. Akismet – This plugin comes standard with wordpress for a good reason. One of the most annoying thing is comment spamming. With Akisment plugin it will stop spams about 99% of the time and it is a life saver.

2. All in One SEO Pack – This is the greatest SEO plugin you can find anywhere. All you have to do is activate it and spend a minute to write down your meta title, description, or keywords and on the long run you will get more traffic. See it in action here.

3. Breadcrumb – I love this pulgin and I have used it on all my wordpress websites.

4. Google XML Sitemaps – This is a must have for any website to easily integrate a .xml sitemap. Just download it, activate it and it does all the work for you.

5. Disable wpautop – This plugin is more for advance hmtl user. This removes the extra <p> and </p> when writing your posts or pages.

6. Exec-PHP – This plugin make it possible to use php includes on your posts and pages. Just remember to disable your visual editor then add your php includes.

7. Dagon Design Sitemap – Don’t get confuse with the xml sitemap. See it in action here sitemap.

8. WP-PageNavi
9. WP Super Cache
10. Redirection
11. Different Posts Per Page – Instead of having the same number of posts in the front page, archive, search result and category pages. Use this plugin to have different number of posts on different pages.

This article is aim at beginners.

Things you need before starting:

1. A web host with cPanel and myphpadmin.
2. Download the latest wordpress.
3. FTP software to upload files.

First, I will go through the wordpress setup with my HostGator account using my cPanel.

If you don’t have a web host already I would recommend you to go sign up with HostGator.com. They have everything you need and much more.

You can read more about my HostGator.com review or any of my other web hosting reviews here.

When you have your web host account setup. Login to your cPanel, then click on “MySQL Databases”, create a “New Database” and create a “MySQL Users”.

Once you created your new database and the MySQL user you will need to assign the MySQL user to that database. To do this go to the bottom of the MySQL Databases page where you find “Add User To Database”. Use the drop down to select the user and the database and click the “Add” button. That’s it. Your database is ready.

Then go to the wordpress website and download the latest wordpress. Extract the file and use your FTP software to upload all the wordpress file to your domain. If you’re using HostGator with their cPanel you should upload the files to the folder like this /public_html/MySite.com

Once finish upload all the wordpress files, go to your website on your browser by typing www.MySite.com, this is where you will install wordpress and just follow the setup instructions. You must remember your database username/password and your MySQL username/password.

That’s it!

For more info on installing wordpress go here.

Does your server memory or CPU over loading and your server always crash?

I have one web site that is currently getting about 2000 unique hits per day, which is not much and my share server should be able to accumulate the traffic and much more. Anyways, some time in October 2008 my server’s memory and CPU reached maximum capacity and crashed. So I restarted the server then it crashed again and again and again for about a week. I look at the traffic statistics and it looked fine. With my account I should be able to get at least 10 times that amount.

My current hosting company couldn’t help me out so I went through and sign up with about 5 other hosting companies hoping they can fix this. They all told me I was getting some kind of ddos attack on one of my domain. Their solution was to have that domain on a dedicated server which cost over $100 per month (that’s the cheapest I can find). There was no way I can afford that, so for about 2 weeks running around signing up with different hosting companies hoping to find the solution and I was about to give up. I finally went with Host Gator and their support told me about using my .htaccess to block IP from different country.

Here is what I did. This work for me and there is no way to know if this will work for you.

1. Open up your .htaccess file on your root folder.


2. In my .htaccess file I have block out China, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Vietnam and Korea. My targeted audience are North America and Europe. I don’t really care about Asia and such.


3. To find what to past into your .htaccess file go here Blocka Country, and follow the easy steps, then paste in the text into your .htaccess file. That’s it, just wait and see if your server performance gets better. You should see results in an hour or two (if this work for you).

Again Host Gator rock! They save my site.

Find what is DDOS attack, see here at Wiki.

More info on “Protection from Random DDOS (denial of service) Attack” with the below links.