So you have your own blog using WordPress and want to install a custom theme. It’s easy to do — depending on your web hosting platform and how it is configured.

The easiest way to do it is using cPanel control panel. If your host has this control panel it’s follow the instructions. If your host does not provide cPanel contact me and I’ll get you fixed up. As always, I’m At Your Servers at Gmail. 

Issues: Installing a new WordPress theme is a low impact process and at the most you may have a compatibility problem later if an update includes functions the custom theme does not support. In that very rare case you can revert back to the stock theme while you get a new custom one — or have it adapted for you.

Make sure you get your theme from a reputable site! There are many sites out there that do a shabby job of theme building and are only providing free themes so they can embed links in them to monetize your traffic — or worse. So use the WordPress theme directory or some other mainstream site to make sure it’s safe to download your dream theme.

Once you have acquired the zip file, upload it into your hosting storage area using the cPanel control panel. I recommend using the ‘File Manager’ feature of your control panel instead of an FTP client because the control panel application will unpack the zip file for you making theme installation virtually effortless.

Ready to rock? Let’s get started. Step by Step…

continue reading "Install a Custom WordPress Theme"

A client recently reported some strange entries in their website statistics referrer logs. The entry was from a bot probe by a nasty outfit that is up to all sorts of evil malware stuff. The issue did raise a good questions about the security of sites and what even novice webmasters can and should do to protect themselves from site compromise.

Bot probes from a slimy outfits are common. Properly secured systems will block offending IPs but the attacking bots switch IPs all the time. This form of vulnerability probe or referrer spam is very common — just like email spam. We do everything we can to prevent it but that does not stop the evil bastards from trying… all the time.

This is why it is so important to have a strong password and to change it every few months. You should also look around in your site file structure frequently for things that don’t belong — like .c files or .exe files or even php files that you did not install. I recommend you check your site once a week for this kind of activity.

Remember, no matter how secure our servers are, your website is an open door to the world and malware developers have a powerful monetary interest in gaining control of your server resources to make money. The days of malicious teenagers gleefully scrambling your home page and laughing through a mouth full of hot pockets is long gone. Hacking websites to install malware is serious (and big) business.

So it’s also up to you as a webmaster to make sure you don’t let these demons in the door.

By the way. Take care which backlinks you click on while scanning your stats reports. That is one way referrer spam works. The malware developer creates an attack routine and embeds it in a web page. Then they deploy botnets to spider websites constantly — leaving nice little fake ‘visitor’ entries in the log files and stats. Then if you click on the link to see who visited you the malware site hits your machine with a payload. Even though you may have a great antivirus / antimalware program, pages can be constructed in ways to overwhelm your computers resources and tie up your system as the payload is being installed.

It’s a jungle. And your website is part of the food chain.

As always we’re, At Your Servers

Dwayne

One of the most common tasks clients ask me for help with is how to paste Youtube or Google video into their Microsoft FrontPage website. It’s really a snap to embed videos but there are a couple of foundation principles you must know to do it.

You’ll need to know how to use your clipboard to select, copy, and paste. You will need to be able to look at, copy, and insert (paste) html code into your page HTML. Now don’t get nervous…HTML is just some formatting that makes the page appear in your visitors browser. Normally FrontPage isolates you from working in HTML. But this is going to be easy, so follow along. Let’s get started!

The best way is to start a new page for this to practice on so you don’t mess up a working page while practicing. So open up FrontPage and make a new page in your site.

Notice in FrontPage at the bottom of the page editing window there are tabs for Normal, HTML, and Preview. If you click the HTML tab it will show you the HTML code of the current file. So if you started a video.htm page for example you can look at the code of that page. Now go back to normal view and put some text on the page. Just write a couple sentences, then go back to HTML view and see the changes. Now minimize FrontPage and go to your Web Browser.

Now go to YouTube or Google Video and locate the first video you want to embed. Both sites have embed code they create for you on the video page. Find the video you want to embed. Locate the the embed code on the video page and select and copy it to your clipboard. Then go to FrontPage and look at the html code of your page again. This is where you’re going to ‘paste’ this embed code. (Please note that some publishers block embedding so if you can’t find the embed code try a different video.)

Switch to normal view and locate the spot where you want the video to appear. Put your cursor there. You may need to hit a carriage return to put the cursor where you want it below the text. Once the cursor is there, hit the SPACE bar a couple time to make a couple blank spaces on the page. Then select these blank space with your mouse, or you can hold your SHIFT key down and hit your left arrow key to select the blank space. Either way, all you need to do is highlight the space. (This is basically creating a bookmark in the page you can see in the code.)

Now switch to HTML view and you’ll see the highlighted section that corresponds with the selection you just made in normal mode. Now if you followed the steps so far you should still have the video embed code in your clipboard so you can ‘Paste” the code into the html area where the highlighted spaces are. (A quick shortcut is just to hit CTRL+V on your keyboard to paste the contents of the clipboard. This should insert the code into the page for you.

Now go back to normal to keep working or save the page and use Preview to see how it looks with the video. Once you do this a few times, you’ll be a pro at it so have fun and start embedding video!

…

Well the talks are off for now.

Tempers flared, ties loosened and negotiations abandoned…at least for the weekend.

Let’s call the whole thing off shall we?

The proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo! may make for good theater, but it’s more disaster film and corporate drama. When two 800 lbs gorillas try to dance, someones banana always gets stepped on. The latest snag Friday was an insurmountable + $4 share demand that Yahoo! won’t budge from and Micro$oft wont meet. So get ready for banana splits all around this week.

This is one time I say, ‘Can’t we all just NOT get along?’

Microsoft buying Yahoo! will be just another super merger that makes the web smaller. The bigger these monsters get, the more narrow the public data pool becomes.

No, I’m not wringing the anti-corporate crying towel here folks. I’m Mr. Marketing remember? Hey let’s all get so rich we can buy Bill Gates breakfast, or better yet buy Bill Gates! However, my short hairs get stiff when the mega-powers start bowling for eyeballs at this level.

The only thing worse than Microsoft is Yahoo! — powered by Microsoft.

Get your spoons ready…

…