If you visit a website and don’t happen to proceed to make a purchase, you’ll then you are targeted to continue to see ads from that website on other websites you visit.

One particular site is LiquidWeb. I don’t know why I visited their site but now I see their adds pushed in my face with just about every website I visit., hence the motivation to put up this post.

So how is this possible?

It seems that good folks at Google have managed to turn Google AdSense into a great success, since it is activated on just about every website I visit. Once I took the bait, every AdSense enabled website simply continues to bombard me with adds for LiquidWeb.

The final answer for me was to clear my browser cookies and cache. I am sure Google and LiquidWeb must be disappointed with my actions of pulling the plug on their game.

So should I really have to delete my cookies just to free myself from this ad.

I am not saying LiquidWeb are a bad company or have bad services. No not at all, in fact I ask you to try it for yourself. Visit them at LiquidWeb and then watch as your Internet experience turns into a LiquidWeb billboard freak show!

If you do use Google AdSense please re-consider using the behavioural retargeting feature.

We have chosen CloudFlare as a partner as they have developed an effective yet simple solution which protects and accelerates websites. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, your users will experience faster page load-times and improved performance.

What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) with a security layer.

CDN is a collection of servers which are distributed across many global locations to deliver your website content faster and more efficiently to your users. Depending on the users location, CDN selects the server which is nearest to the user and loads your website content from that server.

It works in conjunction with your existing hosting service and caches static content for your site. This lowers the number of requests to your servers. There are several advantages in using the CloudFlare system.

Advantages of the CloudFlare system:

• Site Performance Improvement: CloudFlare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your users, which means they will likely see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly from our server. There is a lot of research which shows that the faster the site, the longer a visitor stays
• Bot and Threat Protection: CloudFlare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third party sources, as well as the data from its community to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they get to your site. You can see which threats are being stopped through your CloudFlare dashboard https://www.cloudflare.com/your-websites.html.
• Spam Comments Protection: CloudFlare leverages data from third party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site
• Alerting Visitors of Infected Computers: CloudFlare alerts human visitors that have an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine
• Offline Browsing Mode: In the event that your server is unavailable, visitors should still be able to access your site since CloudFlare serves the visitor a page from its cache
• Lower CPU Usage: As fewer requests hit our server, this lowers the overall CPU usage of your account
• New Site Stats: You have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and threats. With CloudFlare, now you do.

How does it work?

CloudFlare powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. People view your site through an accelerated path that uses the shared security knowledge of thousands of other sites to automatically detect and block malicious traffic.

The end result being that your pages load faster and are more secure.

Unable to fulfil its role as an accredited registrar, auDA gave NetRegistry Pty Ltd its consent to acquire Distribute IT’s .au registrar accreditation and customer base on Wed, 22nd June.

The security attack was so sophisticated and calculated that customer data, emails and websites hosted on four of its servers were deemed by experts to be unrecoverable. Subsequently, Distribute.IT advised that 4800 accounts had been affected by the hack. The demise of Distribute.IT looks well and truly sealed.

Distribute.IT had always been a valuable supplier to Net Solutions. Alex, Carl and the rest of the team were always approachable, helpful and provided superb support. This is a devastating situation, and I sympathise with everybody who lost their content.

So what can we take away from this?

The domain names were largely under control with many resellers hitting the airwaves at whirlpool.net.au. Net Registry’s Larry Bloch and Brett Fenton were there to listen and offer support.

Some 4800 customer websites were totally wiped with no chance of recovery. Even though Distribute.IT had backed up data from their clients’ sites, all the backups were on-site and subsequently targeted by the attackers. Some customers found themselves scraping the ‘Way back machine’ to recover whatever they could.

What I can suggest is backup, backup and backup! Backup your data on the server, backup your data off-site and backup your data locally or to your computer. It’s not good enough that your only backup exists in the same place as your website does. Ask your web-host about backup options. It will more than likely cost you more money, but ask yourself what would it mean if you lost all your data and how much would you be prepared to pay to recover from a disaster such as Distribute.IT’s.

For CMS’s and Blogs use a tool like MarsEdit to write posts and duplicate them. There’s a lot of information and plugins out there to help you backup your data easily and seamlessly.

You cannot afford to be too over-protective of your data.

The original post is at http://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/passwords-reset/

“The WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavoury.

We’re still investigating what happened, but as a prophylactic measure we’ve decided to force-reset all passwords on WordPress.org. To use the forums, trac, or commit to a plugin or theme, you’ll need to reset your password to a new one. (Same for bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org.)”

Some people have interpreted this to mean that WordPress itself has security problems which has caused concern from some of our users.

Please note that this exploit does NOT impact individual WordPress installations that individuals have installed through their cPanel or had Net Solutions install for them.

If, in the last week or so, you have installed updates for the WPTouch, AddThis or W3TotalCache I would suggest you check your copy from the repository (or plugin search) ASAP. The particular exploit gained access to WordPress.org and the plugin repository.

There are always risks associated in hosting any CMS but many of these risks you can mitigate through good password management, security updates and choosing a great web host that offers WordPress maintenance.

You also must not forget to do frequent off-site backups to deal with any potential catastrophe.

It is not unusual for self employed individuals such as web-designers, plumbers and electricians to operate using a P.O.Box. They don’t want users to know where their office/bedroom is located if they must publish their home address. To simply assume that businesses who operate using a P.O. Box is illegitimate is just not helpful to small business owners, who are the very people that Google to help.

Lina Paczensky from Google explains this decision as follows:

“Google Places is meant to facilitate customer interaction with brick-and-mortar businesses and service providers. Therefore, the business owner or employee who is officially authorised to represent their particular business location must have a physical address in order to comply with our quality guidelines. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.”

With a major shift towards online local search, a free business listing in Google Places is very helpful.

So what does one do? A few small business owners I know have simply lost their Google places listings as their address was a P.O.Box Numbers?

They were not given the opportunity or notified to edit their listing, instead it was removed and they had to go through the process of recreating a new listing. They need to lease an office or publich the location of their bedroom/office.

Since SMS verification has also removed during the application process, you need to wait for your postcard to arrive.

Have you suddenly found that your Google Places listing has been removed?

If so, we would love to hear from you.

Updates

The only constant thing is change, so as Operating Systems and Virus definitionas get updated, Softwares must also be updated. The Internet is made up of the good, the bad and the ugly. People will attempt to break into your website on an hourly basis and if you fail to secure your website, they will get in. You have to take proactive measures to check and update all software used on your website.

Check

Despite all your attaempts to keep a site perfect some site errors are just inevitable. Broken links, slow page loads, codes or pieces of software that suddenly stop working. All these things can affect the browsing experience for your users. Aside from these, and perhaps even more important, is to check for security loopholes or areas where a website is vulnerable for malicious attacks. This is critical especially if important transactions are being conducted through the website.

Repair and Clean Up

if errors and other defects are found, they must be addressed right away. Installing security patches, new tools and softwares, removing unnecessary programs or even re-writing code maybe needed to keep the website in optimal state.

Back Up

E-commerce and business websites often keep a database of sensitive information. Nobody wants to lose such a valuable asset that’s why having a backup is a must. Websites run on servers and servers are not immune to disk crashes and other faults leaving the webmaster powerless. For this reason proper backups should be performed on a regular basis regardless of maintenance schedule. This is to ensure that when the unwanted happens, a backup will come in handy to save the day.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is an activity that aims to keep a website maintained and running as expected. Regular maintenance is critical to the function of a website. Websites, like cars and computers, must be tuned-up and checked for errors to ensure that it will serve its purpose well. Ideally Website Maintenance should be performed on a regular basis.

What Goes On During Website Maintenance Period?

During website maintenance, any one or all of the following may be carried out:

• Check for errors and broken links
• Check for security holes
• Install new tools, plugins and functions
• Update contents
• Update back-end platfom and software patches
• Back up database and content

Because of this, a website may be required to temporarily shut down in order to facilitate these maintenance activities. If this is the case, a webmaster can send notifications to users and readers, put up a “maintenance page” whenever someone views the site, or redirect the visitors to another site or page providing them with limited but important functionalities to ensure that business or transactions will be not halted completely.

Why do websites need to be maintained?
The answer is obvious. A website needs regular website maintenance to function properly amidst update and changes on the internet, malicious attempts and attacks, data server crashes and other online issues.

Why aren’t I coming up first on Google?
We used to be ranked higher, now we are lower, why?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical process that optimizes Web pages to rank high in search engine returns. This is accomplished by optimizing certain sections of web pages so that when read by search engines and, depending on the level of optimization, can create a greater probability of free referral traffic.
Once an high degree of understanding of how search algorithms work, SEO becomes a powerful marketing tool. The end goal is to create pages that contains words for which people will likely search when looking for information such as that contained on your site.

Also, it important to note that when I say search engine, I mean Google. It appears as though the others don’t matter anymore, especially sensis.com.au.

SEO can be a 60-minute job or a recurring activity. For instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get good placement. But in most cases, you will need to pay special attention to keywords used in your pages, because in the eyes of Google, you are an individual just like everybody else.

Here is some free advice

Since SEO relies so heavily on these keywords, the most important keywords and key phrases should be used liberally in the first two paragraphs of the content of each page. They are then sprinkled throughout the body and once again be keyword rich in the last paragraph of every page.

A suggested rule of thumb is to reach for keyword density between 5-15%. Judgment must be used to invoke keywords liberally without getting too repetitive. It may also help to use bold or italics on a keyword or two, but avoid doing this to excess. Another important placement for keywords is in the H1 and H2 header fields of each page. The most important keywords or key phrases should be found here.

Other strategies include naming image files and anchors with keywords. Anchors, also called crosslinks, are references to other pages within the site. Finally providing links to and from external sites, called backlinks is also important, as search engine spider bots navigate by links.

Sounds really easy doesn’t it. Well thankfully there are many SEO companies that will provide this as a service. However, caution should be used in securing a contractor to make sure that what is being promised is feasible, realistic and cost-effective.

But even if you engage a contractor to do your SEO, don’t just expect to be ranked at the top Unless you have keywords that standout ahead of everyone else on the internet.

* jacky.yourdomain.com
* johnny.yourdomain.com
* harry.yourdomain.com

You may be installing WordPress 3 to use the Multi Site features that will require wildcard DNS hosting. In any case your domain should be functioning and propagated before you attempt setting up a wildcard subdomain.

In cPanel Login to your account and look for your subdomain control panel applet.

Now you want to add a subdomain that will point to the location of your content. For WordPress 3.0 install choosing the directory with your .htaccess file as your target. If you only have one domain and site on your account you can point to your base public_html directory.

Click Create and you are ready to add subdomain hosting including WordPress 3.0 Website.

If you have problems because you are hosting many addon domains meaning many domain names with independent sites then you should make sure that the wildcard is pointing to the directory with WordPress 3.0 in it.

You will need to go into WordPress and enable your Network Options after you add your wildcard.

Please also see the cPanel’s website and review documentation .

It is not unusual for individuals who are busy with their day to day work to overlook which registrar the domain was registered with. The Domain Renewal Group try to take advantage of this fact. They feel it is quite legitimate to catch people off guard and scam them for money. A quick google search on their company turned up lots of information about this scam. In fact all the results I see in Google are complaints about this company rather than any services they provide.

If you read the letter carefully, you realise that they are using an approach called slamming, which tricks you into switching your domains to another company. Specifically, they are highlighting each domain that is due to expire and that I risks associated with losing the domain name unless you renew with them. They don’t highlight any risks such as losing all your email and website when you switch over to them.

Although the letter states that it is not a bill, it has been designed to look like an invoice. An interesting aside is that they offer other variants of your domain name in the hope they can SCAM you registered other domains too.

If you receive a letter like this from Domain Renewal Group or from anyone else contact your own registrar or the person who maintains your website before parting with any money.

Firstly, the MU (multi-user) version is now merged into the mainstream product. WordPress MU enables you to install a single version of WordPress for multiple sites. The multiple sites would then have the features same plugins. This seems to be aimed at organisations that want to offer users/members/staff their own blogs.

Version 3 now has “Custom Post Types”. Previously this was restricted to Posts and Pages. For example, let’s say you want to have a Parts catalogue: in 3 it’ll be possible to create a new type of post called “Parts” that will contain the appropriate fields. This is a significant improvement in capability and also allows wordpress sites to resemble a CMS without the need for hacking the back end.

WordPress 2.9 has an option allowing you to create category templates using the slug, i.e category-slug.php. In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.

The menu system has been enhanced with Ajax so that you will be able to drag and drop pages, posts and categories in a similar way to the widget management screen.

The existing default theme, a study in boredom, is much smarter, easily customisable and a long overdue improvement. The theme has Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus and a lot more.

Version 3 includes a number of other more minor changes, including allowing you to change the default user from “Admin” to your choice and easier management of a theme’s background graphic.

I’m a huge fan of WordPress but I don’t believe that this update, useful though it is, does enough to open it up to non-technical users. There’s still a lot to be done to encourage users to customise their blogs more radically and effectively – it’s still all too easy to identify a WordPress site within moments because even simple design changes require knowledge of CSS.

Lets see what WordPress 4 promises!. To stay updated with WordPress Development follow: http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/