AdesBlog.com

Last year I wrote a post titled “What will happen to your blog, if you die?“. Today someone posted a comment giving a link to the wp plugin called next of kin. I thought I should post about this plugin since it’s a pretty good solution for the above mentioned topic.

What the plugin does?

It’s a configurable plugin that monitors your own visits to your wordpress system, and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (or whatever interval you put in) you didn’t login to your blog. If you fail to login to your blog even after that, the system will send a pre-configured email that was written by you beforehand with all the login details to your blog and other important information (e.g login to your adsense, advertiser details…etc) to whichever email you choose. Isn’t that something?!

First of all, God forbid that such thing happen to anyone. But if it does happen, especially to someone who is making quite a lot of money from blogging, and if he didn’t tell all the necessary information to his family — then that would be a very unfortunate thing! It would be a pity for his family to be left in the darkness, knowing nothing about what to do next.

So it’s better to be prepared. For we know for sure that the death will come, God says in the Quran “Everyone will taste death, then to Us you will be ultimately returned.” [Quran 29:57]. The only thing we do not know is, when it will come? And that is the point of this plugin — to be ready for this unexpected reality.

Plugin URL: tzafrir.net/nextofkin/

Let’s say you want to have your own website. You tell freelance webdesigner to design a nice looking website, and you give him some websites as references.

Usually you would just pass him the URLs and tell him that you like this part of this particular website and that part of another website etc.

Better way is with Flowgram

So how Flowgram.com can improve this process? With flowgram you can add live pages to your presentation, make comments on the surface of those live websites, add photos, add powerpoints and even add RSS feeds. Once you are done with your presentation, you can just send him a link that looks something like this http://beta.flowgram.com/p/f4xhdtkgp7usnv

You can also use it to bookmark sites, like what I did on the above link. I have put together a list of wordpress related websites.

Flowgram is in Beta

Flowgram is still in beta, so you need to apply to get an invitation. I do have 10 invitations though, I can give them to the first 10 commenters for this post. I had subscribed a while ago, but it too many usability issues to mention it on the blog. Now it looks quite stable.

URL: beta.flowgram.com

Nice looking magazine theme for free (see screenshot to the left), view demo here. You can download the theme here.

I have put it on my shared folder as well, under WordPress Themes. In case the source goes offline, you can always download from my folder.

I have talked numerous times about .htaccess on this blog before. Here are the posts:

• .htaccess basics
• Tip: Increase your blog’s chances to get Stumbled(Upon)
• How to redirect traffic that comes from certain URL to another
• Why you should redirect yourblog,com to www,yourblog,com

With .htaccess you can do so many things, but the risky part is almost all the time you need to edit your .htaccess file manually. However, now there is a special htaccess wp plugin for wordpress blogs that does so many things (full features are below the screenshot). All you need is “enable” a particular feature and it will rewrite your .htaccess file automatically.

Full Features

• Directory Protection
  Enable the DirectoryIndex Protection, preventing directory index listings and defaulting.
• Password Protect wp-login.php
  Requires a valid user/pass to access the login page
• Password Protect wp-admin
  Requires a valid user/pass to access any non-static (css, js, images) file in this directory.
• Protect wp-content
  Denies any Direct request for files ending in .php with a 403 Forbidden.
• Protect wp-includes
  Denies any Direct request for files ending in .php with a 403 Forbidden.
• Common Exploits
  Block common exploit requests with 403 Forbidden.
• Stop Hotlinking
  Denies any request for static files (images, css, etc) if referrer is not local site or empty.
• Safe Request Methods
  Denies any request not using GET,PROPFIND,POST,OPTIONS,PUT,HEAD
• Forbid Proxies
  Denies any POST Request using a Proxy Server. Can still access site, but not comment. See Perishable Press
• Real wp-comments-post.php
  Denies any POST attempt made to a non-existing wp-comments-post.php
• HTTP PROTOCOL
  Denies any badly formed HTTP PROTOCOL in the request, 0.9, 1.0, and 1.1 only
• SPECIFY CHARACTERS
  Denies any request for a url containing characters other than “a-zA-Z0-9.+/-?=&” - REALLY helps but may break your site depending on your links.
• BAD Content Length
  Denies any POST request that doesnt have a Content-Length Header
• BAD Content Type
  Denies any POST request with a content type other than application/x-www-form-urlencoded|multipart/form-data
• Directory Traversal
  Denies Requests containing ../ or ./. which is a directory traversal exploit attempt
• PHPSESSID Cookie
  Only blocks when a PHPSESSID cookie is sent by the user and it contains characters other than 0-9a-z - *** Safe, Use
• NO HOST:
  Denies requests that dont contain a HTTP HOST Header.
• Bogus Graphics Exploit
  Denies obvious exploit using bogus graphics
• No UserAgent, No Post
  Denies POST requests by blank user-agents. May prevent a small number of visitors from POSTING.
• No Referer, No Comment
  Denies any comment attempt with a blank HTTP_REFERER field, highly indicative of spam.
• Trackback Spam
  Denies obvious trackback spam. See Holy Shmoly!
• SSL-Only Site
  Redirects all non-SSL (https) requests to your https-enabled url
• Anti-Spam, Anti-Exploits
  Denies Obvious Spam and uses advanced mod_security protection

Go get it tiger! ;)

Plugin page: www.askapache.com/wordpress/htaccess-password-protect.html

This is like a freelancer’s dream come true. You pay one time and access all the premium wordpress themes designed by professionals.

WooThemes is a project launched by four respected WordPress theme designers - Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Pricing starts from $225 for 3 months subscription, and $375 for 6 months. This is a developer license, suitable for freelancers.

However, if you - as a blogger would like to subscribe and change your own blog’s theme often, then the license for 3 months costs $150, and for 6 months $250. It’s called single user license.

I think the single user license is a bit overpriced, don’t you think? Because who will change their blog design every 3 months? or even every 6 months? I think yearly plan would be a good idea for this.

http://www.woothemes.com

With this WP-Theme called Prologue (yes it was difficult for them to zip the file) you can turn any wp-based blog into a community-twitter-like-blog (see pic below).

I have zipped the file and put it at http://www.adesblog.com/files.php, see Fav WP Themes folder.

You can see Prologue powered blog demo here.

Basically how it works is when someone has the ability to post to a blog they see a short form at the top of the home page with a post box and tags. There they can post short messages about what they’re doing.

Below the posting box is a list of everyone’s latest tweet or message, with their Gravatar next to it. You can click on an author to see all their messages, or a tag to see all of the messages in a given tag (which we use for projects). There are RSS feeds for everything: the entire prologue, each author, each tag, and even combination or searches can be subscribed to in your RSS reader. source

This theme is very suitable for like-minded group of people or friends to use it as a platform to communicate and stay updated with each other. You could use Facebook or Twitter for the same reason, but most of the time your Facebook and Twitter accounts get crowded with people you don’t even know.

So, if you want to create a twitter-like site for your friends only, then Prologue is — it!