contingency planning, backups, bandwidth, analytics, Easter, volume
Posts under ‘How-To’
How to improve Wordpress widget SEO in 2 edits or less
How do you quickly change the default
tags to
on widget sidebar titles without hacking into the core WordPress engine? Glad you asked, as below I’m going to explain techniques I used at blogJordan.com that demonstrate how find what needs to be edited in your current theme, and them some approaches in how to make the edits – including a global search and replace for the brave.
How to use Google Moderator to crowdsource your questions (almost)
Crowdsourcing describes the act of outsourcing a task to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. Moderator is a new tool from Google that facilitates this practice by posing your question to the entirety a select portion of the Internet … almost.
What do I mean by almost? Glad [...]
FREE WordPress theme for churches
Tim Bednar is offering a free theme for WordPress that makes building, customizing and maintaining a ministry, para-church, nonprofit, political or small business web sites as easy as cake.
How to make ‘find -perm 777′ your first ssh security stop
Want to get hacked? It’s easy, just ‘chmod 777′ everything the next time you install a bbs or photo gallery application. Don’t want to get hacked? Read on and ‘find’ how hackers see, and exploit the unsecured areas of your system.
How to lovingly respond to Christian spam
Who knew joining a new church or Bible study could be so dangerous? That was my thought at my last church after I mistakenly shared my email with other members of the Sunday morning Bible study – as no sooner than I had gotten home I began to receive emails about how Madalyn Murray O’Hair is conspiring with aliens from the grave to take images of the Cross off the airwaves.
find-a-bot.sh – a nice little script to ID bots bugging your website site
Already demonstrating earlier this week how to block spambots and rogue spiders. Today I’m completing the lesson with a nice little bash script sample that can help you identify some of these non-browser ‘candidates’ by parsing your access logs and placing the results in an easy-to-read text file.
How to block spambots by user agent using .htaccess
Spambots and spiders that ignore robots exclusion file can kill your site both in bandwidth and by potentially exposing information you don’t want ‘harvested.’ With that in mind, here is a quick-n-dirty guide to blocking spambots and rogue search engine spiders by using .htaccess. First the essential example codeblock, followed by a working example:
ip2Country.pl – A fast little script to bulk id IPs by country
Yes, I know, all cool programmers use Python these days – but to this old-school programmer, PERL is to my antiquated PC what GWBasic was to first computer at work back in 1983. That is a nice little tool to get things done, like identify a list of IP addresses by country – fast.
Making a Ready Defense by Planning for Failure
Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. While this aphorism is very worn, it is also very true. Here are some simple things you can do with mysqldump, crontab, tar/gzip and a little contingency planning to insure you don’t lose your sanity when your server crashes upon the shoals of of virtual disaster.
Spring Cleaning, or time for a HealYourChurchWebsite do-over.
The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and WordPress 2.5 has been ‘in the wild’ for a couple of weeks. These factors, and the fact that my own blog is getting a bit crufty has me thinking it is time for yet another Heal Your Church Website do-over. That and I’ve been getting some [...]
How to quickly check your error logs for oddities
With more church webmasters taking advantage of free, one-click installs provided by inexpensive web hosting solutions, I figure it is time to provide a quick tutorial on how to harvest useful operational, user and security information the error logs using a variety of commands already at your disposal – free.
