Shaun Low

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet. Huge red flag there. It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there. Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

Blog #2 - Hidden Random Links - With this blog, Google actually caught the issue first. They put a lovely note on search results that said the site may be unsafe to visit. Even when someone did click on the search result, Google sent them to a warning page. So not cool, but understandable.

I immediately looked though the theme files and re-uploaded any admin files with no luck. Oddly enough, the issue presented itself only on a few posts, not all pages. This means that the issue was not part of the theme or any other main files. The badware was actually embedded in individual posts.

Using Google Webmaster Tools, they listed out a number of infected pages. I then viewed the sources of those pages and was able to see an empty link that went out to a known badware site.

To fix, I edited each post with WYSIWYG editing turned off. This allowed me to see the raw HTML and it was easy to see the infected posts. Within a day or two of cleaning up the code, Google cleared the warning message.

Blog 3 - Spam Links - If you’re not running the most recent version of Wordpress, you may become affected by old security issues. With blog #3, someone added a couple hundred invisible spam links to the footer of the site. We were lucky with this one as a visitor tipped us off early. The fix was simple, remove the links from the footer file and update to the latest version of Wordpress.

Hack Attack Tips

If you do find your blog has become infected, here are a few things you should always do.

1. Clean up any infected files as soon as possible. It’s your reputation and your visitors safety at stake.

2. Delete any blog and plugin files you can and re-upload new ones. Don’t get rid of your configuration or theme files though.

3. For those files that you can’t just delete (like config and theme files) open each one and check for issues.

4. Update your blog software and plugins to the most recent version. The newer the files the safer they probably are.

5. Change your passwords. Your blog user, your ftp and any others you can. You never know how hackers get in.

6. Backup everything. In the three cases above, no files or information was deleted by the hackers, but that doesn’t mean they will always be as nice.

Hackers are out there every day doing what they can to harm innocent sites. You can take steps to protect yourself by keeping your blog software and plugins up to date and creating good, strong passwords along with frequent backups.

Do you have any words of wisdom to share about keeping blogs safe?

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About the author:
Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer for TopRank Online Marketing in Minneapolis, MN. His specialities inlude technical optimization of existing web sites, creating search engine friendly web designs, and blog optimization. He has also created a number of blog marketing tools, WordPress plug-ins and FireFox add-ons.

Blog: http://bloggerdesign.com

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Embedded comments, and star ratings

Google’s Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are:

• Star ratings: Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box.
• The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post. Blogger’s old comments functionality had very low usability for a couple of reasons; one of them was that it took you to a separate layout when you wanted to comment. To enable this change bringing better integration, switch to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve. Who would’ve thought the day would come…
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. You can now follow a dashboard link reading Webmaster Tools. Automatically, all your Blogspot blogs will be added to the tools suite, though they still remain to be verified. With Google webmaster tools, you can utilize statistic information and diagnostics, for instance.
• Exporting and importing your blog. Google announced you can now export all of your blog posts into a single (Atom-formatted) XML file to allow for a backup… or perhaps, to allow to move to another blogging system, or do something else with the data. Reversely, you can also import that file back into your system. To give this a try switch to the Settings page for your blog; you’ll find the links “Import blog” and “Export blog” on top. Exporting will trigger a download named e.g. “blog-06-27-2008.xml” (this might fare better with the ISO date format yyyy-mm-dd).
• A new post editor. The new post editor has a different image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Also, the HTML editing mode saw a couple of improvements; <br>eaks won’t be added automatically, and there will be a clearer formatting with new lines for generated HTML.

These features are also further detailed in the Blogger in Draft blog. If you don’t want to always visit the special draft.blogger.com URL, you can now also make the Draft mode your default mode; look for the checkbox reading “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” at the top of your dashboard.

[Thanks DPic and Mrrix32!]

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About the author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

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Question: I’m running a weblog for my company and we have some people from the business community who are adding comments after our blog entries, which is great. Other people who we don’t know put in incorrect or off topic remarks and I want to just delete them, but I’m not sure whether that’s okay or not. Specifically, isn’t it censorship if I delete the remarks people leave on our site?

Dave’s Answer:

Let’s start by defining our terms. Here’s a simple definition of censorship for us to work with: “The practice of suppressing a text or part of a text that is considered objectionable according to certain standards.”

If you host a party at your office and someone comes in off the street, spouting obscenities and saying comments that are patently offensive to the rest of the participants, should you ask that person to leave? Of course you should. That’s because they’re violating the standards of behavior expected of people at a business party or other social event. Of course, those standards are going to vary based on the group too, so a clique of rough and tumble bikers or street gang members is going to have a very different set of behavioral standards than the symphony society tea, but in both cases, there is a definite expectation of acceptable behavior.

When we turn to the written word, be it online or physical documents, there are similar standards, similar expectations of behavior and discorse, and if those standards are violated, there’s no reason that those comments or letters should be published or retained.

Ah, but what about freedom of speech, which is defined as “the concept of the inherent human right to voice one’s opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment.” That’s critically important too, but there’s a contextual element to this freedom that is often forgotten. The Constitution actually says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” It’s about laws restricting this freedom, the amendment to the Constitution isn’t about the freedom to say anything at any time or place. That’s actually restricted by libel and slander laws, among other things.

Your weblog is a private publication, as is the Boulder Daily Camera, my hometown newspaper, and while it may serve the public good, there’s no law, no legal nor moral obligation that every terrible, crude, rude, offensive or hostile comment left need be retained.

It’s okay to delete comments that are in violation of your site’s standards of conduct, whether stated explicitly or not.

The Daily Camera has just such a standard of conduct defined too, summarized as “You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy.” Post something like that and odds are very good that it’ll be promptly deleted.

To learn more about how the paper applies this guideline, I asked online editor Jennifer Falor how they determine whether a given comment is over the line or not. Here’s what she said: “We don’t actively monitor the comments. Users flag comments they believe break the User Agreement and that sends an e-mail to city editor Matt Sebastian and I. We quickly look at the comment and then have to make a decision whether to delete it or not. Usually it’s cut and dry.”

That’s for the easy stuff. What about the less obvious comments that one person might find offensive but others might think is an important voice or perspective to hold in the debate? Jennifer: “Some comments are more difficult. Users post things that I personally believe are inappropriate, insensitive or disgusting. However, as long as they’re not explicitly breaking one of the rules, we really can’t justify deleting the comment.”

Finally, she’ll get opinions from other members of the Camera staff, and “if we both come to the same decision, it’s an easy call. If we don’t agree, we usually err on leaving the comment up.”

Is it censorship? Is the Daily Camera violating the constitutional freedoms of the online community by managing the comments left on the site and deleting those that are considered inappropriate or in violation of the user agreement? Jennifer explains “I do not believe that it’s censorship when we delete comments. We are a private business and can make decisions about what kinds of content we want displayed on our Web site.”

So there you have it. I manage the content on my weblogs closely to ensure that the discourse remains high quality, and with a different mechanism and are more careful approach, the Daily Camera does exactly the same thing. I suggest to you that it’s not only acceptable but critical that you do the same with the comments left on your company’s weblog too.

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About the author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

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I think the hardest thing for a blogger is the moment that the initial newness and excitement wears off. You are faced with what is perhaps one of the hardest realizations: and that is, “I have to keep this going”.

As I have completed my first 100 blog posts on the Ignite blog, it is apparent that I’ve had ups and downs in blogging. There were some weeks where I would be on a roll and write a blog post daily, and yet other weeks when I breathed a sigh of relief that Jim or another Igniter posted something.

Surely, having a large of amount of client work has been one culprit to these inconsistencies, but quite often these were due to the difficulties of blogging itself. Many times I had come to a place where I thought, “I can’t think of anything to write about”, and felt the pain of scraping to find something else to write.

Last week, I finally read a blog post that put this feeling into writing, and if you are a blogger I highly suggest reading it. It was an article entitled, “Leaning into the Blogging Dip“, written by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger, and was partly a review of Seth Godins book “The Dip“, combined with his own experiences as a blogger and his commitments to overcoming his struggles. In short, this article put a finger on exactly what I have felt as a blogger - while giving perhaps the best advice I’ve heard in how to deal with it.

His advice? You’ve got to lean into it. Don’t try to convince yourself you need a “blogging vacation”, or that you need to wait until you are “inspired”. Instead, he has shared the following promises he is going to use to push through his “blogging dips”:

* I need to write when I don’t think I’ve got anything new to say
* I’ve got to write when I’ve got too much to say.
* I’ve got to write when I learn something new so I can share it with my readers.
* I’ve got to write when I find something “old” that’s valuable and convince my readers that it’s worth examining.
* I’ve got to write when I feel confident and relaxed.
* I’ve got to write when every word that comes out seems like crap.
* And I’ve got to write during all of the times in between.

After reading these, I’ve decided to commit to this same philosophy, and will probably pick up a copy of Seth’s book to get even more inspired.

So here’s to 100 more posts, and pushing through the dips along the way!

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About the author:
As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

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I got several emails when I had published my new site design about how to style only the first post of the blog in Wordpress. This tactic can be handy to call out the very first post so that the readers attention is on the most recent topic for your blog. It is actually very easy, and may not be the best PHP in the world but it works perfectly.

Now the only problem with using this method is that you will have every first post on every index page styled this way. I haven’t played around with how to avoid that because that is the way I intended to design it. Perhaps someone has an idea on avoiding that if it is needed.

In your index.php file for your Wordpress theme you want to find your post container div (or whatever markup wraps your entire post). In the class area of this post you want to add a space after the first class (assuming you have a first class) and use the following PHP:

What this PHP will do is check to see if the variable $post is set with the string “set” and if it is not set with that string then it will echo out the class “firstPost” and then set the variable. Once the variable has been set each post afterwards will not echo out that class. Thereby creating a unique class for your first post that you can style however you want.

May be a little sloppy for the PHP gurus reading this— but it works.

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About the author:
Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.

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I’m a regular reader of Fred Wilson’s blog. Fred posted an article today that he is planning to clean house on his blog. He will remove many (if not most) of the widgets that adorn his site.

There was much rejoicing!

I can understand why Fred installed all these widgets in the first place. He’s got a natural curiosity and he’s a venture capitalist by trade — and invests in this stuff. There’s no better way to get to understand a technology or trend than to actually use it.

But, I’d argue that very few of his blog readers appreciate the widgets (except, perhaps the people that developed them).

Benefits Of Widget Removal And A Cleaner Blog

1. It focuses readers on the core content, which is (hopefully) why they’re there.

2. It makes pages load faster. Think of the bandwidth saved across the web!

3. Search engines like Google appreciate fast-loading sites (and possibly reward them with higher rankings).

4. It makes things simpler and more likely to load across a variety of browsers. (Yes, yes, I know things are supposed to work — but they often don’t)

So, if you’re a blogger, follow Fred’s lead and clean things up a bit. Your readership will thank you.

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About the author:
Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.

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Dear Rich,

I’m looking to identify influential bloggers in my niche who might be interested in reviewing products and linking to those products on my Web site. How can I find them?

–Blogging in Bowdoinham

Dear Blogging,

There’s a couple of issues raised in your question, so let’s hit the obvious one first: where to find influential bloggers?

One easy place to start is Technorati. At Technorati you can search for specific keywords that bloggers in your niche might be writing about…anything from “Paris Hilton” to “Paris, France.”

The default search type (at the point of this blog post) is “posts.” You can choose to see all posts, or filter by the amount of authority each blog has. In addition, you can choose to search by “blog” and then Technorati will sort by authority. (Technorati is constantly changing…so everything I write is as of right…now!)

Technorati currently throws two numbers at you: Authority and Rank. What do these mean?

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Hopefully this will direct you towards the influential bloggers you so desperately covet. If you’re not specifically interested in a particular niche and just want to find the most popular bloggers, check out the Technorati Popular list.

The second issue is more thorny. There’s nothing wrong (IMHO) with sending products or services to bloggers to review. This has been part of public relations for just about ever. However, some companies pay bloggers for positive reviews or pay them for writing about the product or service and linking to the Web site.

Although there is a cottage industry of pay-per-post bloggers, I find the practice shady, even if the blogger in question admits this is a paid link. (Many do not.) Google is now cracking down on paid links to boost search engine rankings, and these pay-per-post scenarios may come back to bite a company in the ass.

I’d recommend staying away from pay-per-post situations, but I think sending influential bloggers demos, samples and PR packets is an understood cost of doing business.

In case you’re wondering, I’m open to reviewing software, books, beers, bourbons, travel and sweets.

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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients’ sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.

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Many of our readers use Wordpress, and frequently run into the common mistake of copying text from Word or some other program, pasting it into Wordpress and finding it has numerous formatting errors and rich text code errors they didn’t know where there.

PureText is a free little utility that allows you to copy and paste items from rich text editors (Word, Outlook, Browsers, etc) and strip all the garbage code off of it.

“PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”

To use PureText- simply copy as normal, but when you need to paste the item in Wordpress or your blog platform, use Windows-V (or an assigned hotkey) instead of Ctrl-V. In an instant, now you have some clean text. Check out PureText and streamline your blogging today.

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About the Author

Barry Hurd is a fifteen year veteran of online marketing and interactive advertising. As president of Social Media Systems online marketing company, he is an evangelist for emerging social technology and shares his daily thoughts on the 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog.

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For a long time when mentioning Twitter in one of my This Week Month In SEO posts a comment usually accompanied the mention along the lines “I still don’t care what you’re doing right now.” A funny thing happened in the last few days. I began to care. I started tweeting a couple of days ago and am quickly getting addicted. I thought I’d share some of my early impressions of Twitter.

Twitter seemed rather pointless to me from the outside. I figured there would be a lot more noise than signal and perhaps if you’re following the general public there is going to be too much noise to wade through. On the other hand if you can use a little discretion when choosing who to follow you’ll find a lot more signal than you might think.

I’ve seen a number of posts over the months about Twitter and had signed up sometime awhile back, but a few recent posts convinced me to start tweeting.

• A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter

It was probably the weight of all the posts I’ve seen in recent months, but they all reached a tipping point within the last week.

I’m only a few days into Twitter and won’t even pretend to be an expert. In fact I’m barely sure what I’m doing at the moment, though I am learning and I do see quite a bit of potential in microblogging.

Early Impressions of Twitter

In no particular order here are a few thoughts on why I might need to sign up for Twitters Anonymous before long.

1. Easier to make connections - Something about the nature of the tweets removes a few barriers to networking. You don’t have to get someone to open your email. You can send a tweet directly @ them, though overusing this feature is surely a quick way to find yourself on the outside looking in. Tweeting also seems to be a good way to strengthen connections you made elsewhere.
2. Listen in on the conversation - Even if you don’t manage to connect with some you can still listen in on their conversations. Sure it’s a bit voyeuristic. but it can also be a great source of learning.
3. Quick feedback - It doesn’t take long for people to start responding to something you say. The feedback loop is very quick. Ideas you tweet can spread far in a short amount of time.
4. 140 char limit - Forces you to remove needless words from your writing. For someone like me who tends to write very long posts, having to keep tweets brief will hopefully refine the style of my blogging voice in a positive way.
5. Place to store random thoughts - A lot of random thoughts cross my mind during any given day. Most are long gone before I can make any use of them. Twitter offers a place to store and share your thoughts and the feedback loop above will give some clues about which of your ideas might spread and be well-received.
6. Branding - It’s another place to get your message out. Anywhere you maintain a presence is another place to build your brand.
7. Find information sooner - Twitter has a real time feel about it. Someone can share a thought and within a few seconds you can be acting on that thought. Being able to get to information a little sooner than everyone else has a lot of advantages.

Again it’s still new to me and each of the above points has likely already been said in more detail by someone other than me. Once I’ve gotten more used to how Twitter works I’ll be able to expand on some of the thoughts above. For now those are my quick and early impressions.

If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter I highly recommend Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide, which I read through last weekend. Caroline if you see this how about a PDF version of the guide?

Caroline has some great tips for using Twitter and links to a variety of tools you can use instead of having to go directly to the site. I chose to use the Twitbin extension for Firefox since I always have Firefox open. There are several other tools and you can also send and receive tweets from your phone via SMS.

Vanessa Fox has also written a great post complete with podcast with helpful advice and links to more resources.

My extremely quick guide is to simply sign up and start following some people you know or some people who you think will have interesting things to say. If you want to follow me you can find me at twitter.com/vangogh. I can’t claim to be the most interesting Twitterer to follow at the moment, but I will try to get there soon and if I know you I’ll gladly follow you back.

Andy’s list of 75+ Marketing gurus is a good place to look for more. The list has now passed 200 mark and counting. If that seems like too many people to find and follow try the tool Rob created at Seocracy to start following a lot of people at once. Thanks Rob.

I’m guessing my quick infatuation with Twitter will fade over time, but hopefully as it does I’ll have become a more mature Twitterer and will be contributing a lot more signal than noise.

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About the Author

Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build and optimize websites and market them online.

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