mixx.com

I’ve created my account at mixx – feel free to add/follow me as I’m a bit of a Billy No-mates at the moment.

Site Revamp Update

I’ve continued tinkering with the site revamp and it’s coming along fine. We’re now using a new logo and thanks must go to Amy Fairhurst at Orangutan Creative (also on The Wirral – which is handy for us!) for a great design service. Stumbled upon Orangutan purely by chance – I was reading Fused Nation where the author Scott also recommended them.

I’ve still got more work to do; I want to add more pages, fix thumbnail graphics and move things around a little, but it’s getting somewhere near now. If you spot any funnies please leave a comment or get in touch.

Cache Back

How odd. After reporting yesterday that this site’s homepage didn’t have a cache in google, I check again this morning and it’s back (dated 4th April). Not at all sure why the cache wasn’t available yesterday?

Great opportunity for this post title!

No Cache?

This is a little odd and is something I can’t recall seeing before. Currently (at time of writing) google has no cache for my homepage, though it does for others – like my about page for instance.

I’ve checked my webmaster tools account and that all looks fine. The site is certainly being indexed because my last post of only a couple of hours ago has already been indexed and is searchable – which is fine. Visible pagerank as shown in my toolbar is 4 and not greyed-out or anything.

I’ve just tested for an iffy robots.txt via webmaster tools and that’s fine too.

I upgraded to wordpress 2.5 yesterday but then I’ve upgraded other sites and they have cache.

hmm? Not sure if it’s just a temporary blip or a problem somewhere?

The Masters

Hooray! It’s that time of year again when I spend four evenings glued to the television watching golf on BBC2 – The Masters is back! Notice the social networking aspects of that site; you can upload your own photos, watch live video, read blogs and play online games – some common ways to attract visitors and build site loyalty.

I don’t play golf at all myself – never have done other than to swing a few clubs inaccurately at a driving range – but I really enjoy watching The Masters. The course always looks great, even if it’s chemically enhanced, and you can usually expect to see some great golf from a certain Mr Woods and his comtemporaries.

As I live in Hoylake I got to see quite a few of leading golfers including Tiger when my hometown hosted the 2006 Open at Royal Liverpool (a mile or so up the road from my house). Admittedly the fantastic weather helped enormously but it was a great event that I hope will return in the next 5 years or so. I might have even done something with my Wirral golf site by then!

Theme Tweak

We’re currently giving our website a bit of an update and a nip-and-tuck here and there. I’ll post an update with more info when it’s complete.

In the meantime, please bear with us whilst we slowly peel off the bandages.

Wordpress Security

One of my wordpress blogs was hacked last week – some swine had stuffed some iffy links into the theme’s header.php file.So it’s got me thinking what sensible precautions should be taken to protect a wordpress installation. Here are some things to consider/action:

1. Keep on an up-to-date release of wordpress and make yourself aware of patches by subscribing to the wordpress development blog.
2. Keep your plugins up-to-date too. Wordpress 2.5 offer automatic plugin upgrades.
3. Ensure you backup your wordpress data. I mentioned a backup plugin a while back.
4. Get your themes from trusted sources.
5. Matt Cutts offers 3 security tips here. Additionally, I think it’s okay to create a empty index.html in your /themes folder to stop snoopers seeing what’s in your theme folder.
6. Use strong passwords and change regularly.

Additionally you can modify your .htaccess file to restrict various actions, though some people may not have the confidence to change that file.

What other precautions do you take to secure your wordpress installation?

Searching In Wordpress 2.5

I’ve upgraded a couple of my blogs to wordpress 2.5 (without a hitch) and it looks good. Auto updates of plugins is an ace timesaver.

Having just read the official wordpress development blog I notice that search now works on pages as well as posts. I’ve tried it and it does of course – this is a great feature as your visitors can obviously now find text within the content of your static pages.

Must get round to upgrading my other sites, including this one – with a new theme perhaps!