I have read on a website that there’s an important security update for WordPress. My blog is bestlinen.wordpress.com. Do I need to upgrade it? If so, how do I go about it?

Looking at the name of your blog, I can tell that it’s hosted on the WordPress website, so you don’t need to worry about upgrades, they will take care of that for you. Nice Sferra linens by the way. Anyway, if you were hosting your own hosting service, then it would be advisable to upgrade the blog as soon as possible.

Instructions to upgrade can be found on the upgrade page on the WordPress website, however things are much easier since the more recent versions of WordPress, as you can now upgrade with a single click and let your blog do all the work. The one thing to remember is that you should always backup your site before kicking off an upgrade. Just in case, you can never be too sure; can you?

I hate not having word count with this new WordPress. Is there anything I can do?

I found this question on Twitter by Ang from Ang’s Chicken Coop who had recently migrated to the latest version of WordPress and probably found that her WordPress plugin that did her word count wasn’t working any more. The great thing is that WordPress now has a word count built into it, but she probably hadn’t spotted it, which can sometimes happen when you’re moving to new software and things suddenly change place.

Well, the great news is that you don’t even need a plugin any more; the word count is display on your screen right under your text editing area (shown below):

Voila, problem solved! I wish all my problems could be answered as easily as this one. Now if I had some home theater seating in my home office, I would just put my feet up, put on a good movie and relax in the knowledge that I’ve helped someone today

I’d like to add a Facebook badge to my blog similar to what I’ve seen on other websites. Where do I get the code from?

I was asked this question by Derek Richardson, a friend of mine who was looking to enhance his new blog.

Adding a Facebook badge to your blog is a simple matter of retrieving the code from Facebook and putting it in the right place on your blog. This page will take about how you get the code, but how you insert it in your blog varies from platform to platform, so I’m assuming you know how to do this. So, here’s how to get your Facebook code.

• First, log into Facebook and view your profile. If you scroll to the bottom of your left-hand column, you’ll see a link that says “Create a profile badge”

• You’ll be given an introduction to Badges if you’ve never created one before. Click “Create a New Badge” to proceed.

• When you click on the button, you’ll be asked if you want a horizontal or vertical badge, if you want it to be an image or Javascript (Javascript is better but may not work in all places) and what items you want to show on the badge.

• Make your selections and click Save. You’ll be given the code you need to insert into your blog at this stage:

As you can see, it’s quite easy one you know how. It’s amazing how many things you can do on Facebook, everything but finding out about repairing kitchen sinks it seems; well, I’m sure that information is there somewhere

I’d love to be able to use my free time to blog, but I don’t really type very well. Do you know any tricks I can use to help me blog?

I was speaking to a friend at work and this question came up. It prompted me to point him at a post I made on my other blog and talks about how you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to transcribe your speech into a blog post. In fact, here’s a short video I posted that demonstrates the idea:

I thought that was pretty cool and I managed to do that after only a few minutes of training. Now, it’s really easy to achieve 150 words per minute with this technology even if you don’t know how to type. I thought that was awesome. Ok, you might need to teach it how to spell a few word; I’m pretty sure “orovo detox” isn’t in it’s dictionary for example; but those words will be the exception rather than the rule.

Check out Dragon NaturallySpeaking

I have been trying to put Google video on on wordpress page with out success. Any ideas? Help?

I got this question from my friend Leo who’s quickly becoming a WordPress fan. I knew he wasn’t talking about WordPress.com, because they have extra functionality to allow bloggers to embed Google Videos. In fact, inserting a piece of code like this:
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8459301055248673864]

allowed me to add a video directly to a post. You can see this on my test blog.

It’s a bit less straight-forward on a self-hosted blog, but it’s not hard once you know how. Here’s what you do.

1. Get the embed code from the Google Video you want to embed
   
2. Insert it into the HTML view in your WordPress editor
   

And voila’ here’s the video

It’s an amusing clip of a biker driving his Harley off the road. He’s going to need lots of Harley parts to repair that bike! Hope he didn’t get too hurt.

Now. A couple of things to keep in mind. If you try editing your post again in “Visual” mode, WordPress messes up the embed code for you and you’ll need to embed it again. Also, this technique works for Youtube and other video clips too.

Anyway .. I hope this helps.

The blog of the day over at PPP has a post up about how our blogs can be hacked. I guess with the last WP upgrade there was a security issue and many hackers took advantage of it. Do you think I should be concerned enough to contact my host and figure out how to see if my sites have been hacked? If so, how do I find out and fix it?

Karen dropped off this question a couple of days ago and given the impending release of WordPress 2.6, I thought now would be a good time to answer it. Everyone who set up a blog or website needs to understand how their site can be hacked or defaced, what are the risks they face and what, at the end of the day, are just hyped up incidents who you can safely ignore.

First of all, let’s look at this from the villain’s point of view. Why would someone want to hack your website. Well, there are a number of reasons. In the past it was done simply to show up. There was a certain pride in being able to break into, say the UN’s website and leave your name all over it. High profile sites were the main target back then and the little guy didn’t really need to worry too much about these threats. Nowadays, unfortunately, there is money to be made by breaking into someone’s website. I’m not talking about high-profile cases where for example, a medicare advantage website suffers a DDOS attack and held at ransom by the people launching it. Instead, smaller outfits now try to get into people’s website to embed links to sites that will pay them for the privilege. And it’s usually adult website who are ready to pay a premium for traffic, so those are the link to watch out for. However, if someone broke into your website and changed your AdSense code so that THEY get credited with your income, then there’s still something worth doing for them there.

So, with that in mind, here are some tips to protect your blog from getting hacked:

• Make sure your administration password is secure: This is the key to your website. In the same way that you wouldn’t give the key to your house to a stranger, don’t throw this around. Instead, make sure it’s secure and DON’T GIVE IT TO ANYONE. If you need to give access to your website, create a new account, then delete it when they are done. The more people who know your administration password, the more chance there is that someone can intercept it and use it against you.
• Make sure you’re always running the latest version of your software: As you may be aware by now, new versions of your WordPress blog and WordPress plugins come out all the time. Whenever an exploit is found for a particular version, manufacturers can release a fix quite quickly. However, if you’re running an older version of their software, you are leaving yourself open to people using that exploit to get through your defenses. Always make sure you are running the latest version of any software.
• Always keep backups: Make sure you have a recovery plan for your  blog. If the unthinkable happens, you can always throw it all away and recover from a backup. And try to keep multiple backups too, if the last one you took was compromised, it’s always good to be able to go to an older one. Backups can mean the difference between looking a few days of posts and losing everything you ever posted to your blog.

I hope these suggestions can help you feel more confident in what you’re doing. The nice thing is that you’re not alone out there, there are thousands of WordPress users out there and if there’s a problem with the software you’re running it will get fixed pretty sharpish.

I’ve started playing with Plurk today and think I like it a bit better than Twitter. I don’t get the whole Karma thing though. What’s that all about?

I actually got this question by MSN from a buddy I introduced to Plurk. I had actually also introduced him to Twitter, but he seemed to have less problems getting his head around that. Actually Plurk seems to have greater depth than Twitter, but that carries with it a cost, the cost of understanding and using all those new features, one of which it Karma.

First of all, what is Karma? Karma is a system of points given to each user based on how much they use Plurk, how much time they spend using it, and other factors. Here’s the definition on the website as to the different levels of Karma you may have:

Every plurker has his/her own karma value. It is recalculated every day and can be within these intervals:

• 0.00 to 21.00: You are in the state of creation
• 21.00 to 41.00: You are in the state of maintenance
• 41.00 to 61.00: You are enlightened
• 61.00 to 81.00: You are so close to Plurk Nirvana
• 81.00 to 100.00: You have reached Plurk Nirvana!

Obviously, the more Karma, the better. More Karma gives you more emoticons you can use in your Plurks, but also shows that you’re supercool and should be the envy of all your friends.

So, how should you go about increasing your Karma. Again, the answer comes from the website:

Some tips on getting more karma:

• Updating your profile (picture, location, birth day etc.) will gain your more karma
• Quality plurking each day
• Responses from other plurkers will gain you karma.
• Inviting your real friends will boost your karma

What will lower your karma:

• Karma will be lowered if you request friendship and get rejected
• Getting unfollowed by friends will lower your karma
• Spamming other users will lower your karma
• Inactivity for a long period will decrease your karma

All it takes is to spend some time on Plurk whenever something interesting happens to you and let all your friends know about it. So, if you’ve found a kitten on your lunch break, booked your holiday and got one of those great hotel deals or even just changed your socks, pop onto Plurk and let everyone know.

Sounds cool? Well, if you’re not on Plurk yet, you can find me and sign up here

I’m not getting my comments emailed to me any more. I use WordPress 2.5.1 I still get emails that I have comments pending. I’m not sure when this stopped. What should I check?

This question was submitted on AskOwen by Connie who runs BrainFoggles and judging by the questions on the WordPress forums, this doesn’t seem to be an isolated issue. Unfortunately, I think there are probably a number of probable causes for this issue and just like termites in your home furniture, if you don’t notice the problem straight away, it just gets worse and worse; but I’ll go into a couple of things to watch out for and a way you can explicitly cure the problem.

First of all, what can stop automated mail from being sent to you? Well, one factor that can contribute to this is the anti-spam measures that your hosting provider implements. There has been a move in the last few months to try and reduce spam by ensuring that the email they send only comes from legitimate accounts on their system. Now, since WordPress 2.3.1, there are cases when WordPress sends email originating from “wordpress@yourdomain.com”. If this account doesn’t exist on your host, then this email will get blocked by your provider. To address this, create an account on your mail server using the account name of “wordpress” (thus creating an account “wordpress@yourdomain.com”) and forward this to your usual mail account.

It’s also possible that some plugins send email from the Administration email account in WordPress (the one under Settings -> General Settings), so make sure that this is one your host recognises. If you prefer using your Gmail account for example, set up a local email address and forward that to your Gmail account, then configure WordPress to send to the local account.

If you’re *still* having problems, there’s a little WordPress plugin called Comments Notifier that can be quite useful. This enables you to send notification of comments to multiple email addresses. It might just solve your problems.

Good luck, and let us know if this solves your problem.

When a blog theme automatically puts new pages in a tab at the top, how do you make a page but put the link in the sidebar?

I got this question from from Elizabeth from Getting My Blog On over an MSN chat session. She’s been learning more and more everyday about WordPress, but you know how it is, the more you learn, the more there IS to learn, and sometimes committing it all to memory can be quite hard.

I gave a quite look in the WordPress codex as I seemed to remember there was a parameter on the function that lists pages, and indeed there was. You see,the function that lists all the pages is as follows:

<?php wp_list_pages('arguments'); ?>

This has a number of parameters, shown here with their default values:
$defaults = array(
'depth' => 0,
'show_date' => '',
'date_format' => get_option('date_format'),
'child_of' => 0,
'exclude' => '',
'title_li' => __('Pages'),
'echo' => 1,
'authors' => '',
'sort_column' => 'menu_order, post_title');

You can change any of those details by specifying the value that you want. In this case, let’s say the page to exclude had an ID of 5 (you can see the ID in the URL when you’re editing the page), all she had to do was make sure that the line in her header containing wp_list_pages had a parameter with exclude in it, a bit like this:

<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=5' ); ?>

It is possible for a WordPress theme author to give you a configuration page to do this, but most of them don’t so it’s good to know how to do it.

I’ve been running my blog on WordPress.com for some time now and suddenly I have a section titled “Possibly Related Posts” at the bottom of all my posts, which is distracting my readers. Where did this come from and how do I remove it?

I came across this question from the webmaster of a Maltese political blog on WordPress.com, who was worried that the links to other blogs on WordPress really affect the readability of the website and is very distracting for the readers. More disconcerting was the fact that these had appeared out of nowhere and didn’t seem to be able to be removed. They look a bit like this:

Well, these have been added by WordPress.com as a way to promote traffic from one blog to another on their estate. Don’t forget, WordPress.com is hosting your blog for free, and at the end of the they, they are the ones who have full control of the platform and set the rules. They announced the feature in April and this is how they describe it:

In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.

Now this may be fine for some people, but others have found this bothersome and think it should really be a nofollow link, as you’re not really recommending the page behind that link. Also, the pool of pages that are displayed on your blog are out of your control, and there’s nothing stopping WordPress.com from putting content you don’t agree with, or even commercial links in this space.

So, how do we turn off the feature. Turns out it’s not that hard:

1. Go to the Administration Panels > Design > Extras.
2. Check Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way.
3. Click Update Extras.

As the links suggests, if you don’t want to display “Possibly Related Posts” on your blog, then your posts won’t appear in the “Possibly Related Posts” on other peoples blogs, but I’m sure most of you can live with that.

You may be a bit upset that this change was forced up on you, but don’t forget, using a free blog means you don’t really have control over the platform your blog is running on. You still maintain editorial control, but there are aspects of the page you have no control over. (It’s like being a kid and having your clothes picked out for you. However, when you grow up, you might want to wear boardshorts instead of trousers). If you want full control, you might want to consider getting your own self hosted blog. It’s not that hard, you know