WordPress is a great blogging platform and its ease of use means its use has become very widely used by both blogging pros and amateurs alike.   If you are using WordPress.com as your blogging platform this post does not apply to you, but if you have your own self-hosted installation of WordPress you may want to read onward in order to see how your blog may be showing its backside like a patient in a cheap hospital gown.

The many fine folks who contribute to the official releases of WordPress do a phenonmenal job of addressing security concerns as quickly as they pop up for the most part, and the stuff I am talking about here is not a security problem in terms of WordPress itself.

When you install WordPress for yourself the first step is unzipping the WordPress software and putting it in place on a webserver.  One of the folders you have uploaded is called wp-content.  This folder is home to your plugins, themes, and uploaded images by default.  WordPress includes a nice PHP page containing this:

<?php
// Silence is golden.
?>

What this does is present a simple blank page if someone browses to http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content and that is nice,  but we can do better.   The problem with this solution is that as you create folders under wp-content those folders are not protected in the same way.

As soon as you start uploading pictures for use in your blog posts your site will grow a whole tree of folders starting at /wp-content/uploads.  These folders are created as needed by your WordPress blog and will start with a year and then a month.  So all of your images used in posts in April of 2009 will be stored in http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04.

Armed with this knowledge and the knowledge that many many webhosts out there will display a list of files and folders if you browse to a folder without an Index or Default page you can see exactly what content has been uploaded to a “unfixed” blog.  This is more of an annoyance than a security problem, but if your blog is heavy with high resoluton photograph this little problem allows vsitors in the know to rip down all your photos without ever needing to see the actual blog posts they belong with on the “front” side of your WordPress blog.  If you pay for bandwidth it could even get expensive.

If you would like to see exactly how widespread this problem is, click this link to a Google Search (should open in a new tab) that will show you your exposed backside looks to the Google indexing bots.  Currently Google sees about 148,000 of these.  If you would like to see if yours is one of them, just browse to http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/uploads.  If you see a list of folders then you may benefit from this post.  If not, particularly if you get your blog’s homepage or a 404 error, you are in great shape!

There are many ways of addressing this problem for WordPress users who are experiencing it.  One way is through editing the main .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress install, but I am of the firm opinion that most WordPress users should stay out of that file to avoid messing up their permalinks.   Instead, we will use a .htaccess solution that allows us to avoid touching the main file.

A dot htaccess file allows you to tell the webserver to behave differently for a folder and the folders underneath the folder where you upload the file.  If you are a Windows user, you may want to work on a file called htaccess.txt for this next part and rename it to .htaccess when its up on your server.

What we are going to do here is essentially sew the flap closed on the back of the WordPress hospital gown and direct people who try to look at your butt to another location.

We will do this with two lines of text.  Its that easy.

Instructions

1. Open your favorite text editor and create a file called .htaccess (or htaccess.txt).
2. On the first line, enter:

   Options -Indexes

3. On the second line enter:

   ErrorDocument 403 http://blog.techfun.org
   
   Replace the http://blog.techfun.org to your blog’s homepage or Search or 404 page if you have one.

4. Save the file.
5. Upload the new .htaccess file to the wp-content folder on your site.  (Be Very Careful doing this to ensure you upload to the wp-content folder and not your root WordPress Folder.  The .htaccess file in the root has an important and special purpose in handling your custom permalinks and should not be overwritten.)

The first line tells the server use the option Indexes.  This tells the server not to generate a webpage listing files and folders in the absense of a true start page for that folder and its child folders.  This will cause the webserver to generate a 403 Error instead.  We all know a 404 Error means “resource not found” essentially.  The 403 Error means the viewer does not have permission to view the resource.  In this case, the resource is the directory listing of your wp-content folder and its subfolders.

That first line does the real work.  The second line tells the server what to do when issuing a 403 Error in that part of the WordPress site.  In my example, after the server issues the 403 Error it sends the visitor  to homepage of my blog.  This could be any URL or even a file on the server

If you would like to know more about the magic that is the .htaccess file, check out http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html

I’d like to thank @tcwaters & @ellejohara on Twitter for encoruaging me to write this and Heather Weaver over at GeekMomMashup.com and BellaTwilightShop.com for testing this process out before it went live on her HostGator account.

“Let me Google that for you” is for all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.

Take it for a spin and tuck it aside for your more annoying friends.

Got a question? Let me Google that for you

The idea came about yesterday during a lunch between Garvin and fellow software developers, he said in an e-mail. “‘Let me Google that for you’ is something I think most people in the IT field have had to say to someone they were frustrated with,” Garvin wrote. “For me and a few people I know, it happens with regular frequency.”

After the lunch, Garvin immediately went to work on coding Let Me Google That For You. The website, which launched this morning, has already racked up more than 250,000 hits.

The applications are endless. Let’s say, for example, that you are my brother and you get an e-mail from me about how to hook up my guitar to record music on a Mac. You reply to my message with this link, then revel in having knocked off a piece of my dignity. Fun, right?

As many readers here know, I have big problems with the way the news media in the US tends to drop stuff from their news cycles, making it hard to follow a story or news event from start to finish.  In fact, that is one reason I blog.  I often go back and look at items tagged with "news media" and remind myself about what I considered important last month or last year.

To get a real view of an event, it helps to look at it over the long term and see when events happened in relation to other events.  This is key to grasping when an event is "out of the blue" and when it is a reaction to something that may not have made headlines.  Reuters makes this easy for you by using the terms CHRONOLOGY or RPT-CHRONOLOGY in the title of articles designed for this purpose.  Since both types of titles, you can just use CHRONOLOGY in your search at http://www.reuters.com. 

For example, if you wanted to look at the chain of events involving the militant attacks on the oil infrastructure in Nigeria you can search Reuters for CHRONOLOGY oil nigeria attacks and you will find this article:

    CHRONOLOGY-Nigerian militant attacks on oil industry

In which the attacks are summarized and keyed by date.  This gives you enough information to start looking for news coverage of each event if you want to dig deeper.

Google has started doing something similar with its search results by introducing in the experimental Timeline view.  This feature is very flakey on some searches, but you may find it useful for searches where there is a time factor to the information you have located.

If you search Google for Linux Adoption as a basic search you get about three-hundred and four thousand hits in an order that Google hs determined using their own criteria.  However, if you repeat that search for Linux Adoption and then add a space and view:timeline to the end of the search field you get the articles sorted and grouped by time.  At the top of the search results you get a nice timeline muxed with a bar graph so you can see the time period where most of the hits occur as shown below.

You can also fine tune the date range via the filter beside the timeline.  I’ve played with this feature and it seems to still need work.   As you can see in the timeline, 2007 has the most hits for the search term linux adoption but if you try to filter on 2006-2007 using the format given in the example, you get no results at all.  Hopefully this feature will be fixed and fine tuned in the future.

If you do use this feature, even jut to play around, please consider answering Google’s Feedback Survey and letting them know what you think.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

If you have limited your search for add-ons for Firefox to the official Firefox sit at https://addons.mozilla.org you are missing out on some cool stuff. I make a point of checking out the Google Labs site every month or so to see what those smart folks at Google are up to. I tend to avoid beta or experimental software unless it is designed to address a real need that I have or unless its just really really cool.

Over the last few months I have added a third and then a fourth computer to my list of often used PCs. I have my main PC at home, my main PC at work, a work owned laptop, and I use one of the laptops we have around the house. I do a lot of work on the web and mail servers at the office at all hours of the day or night and I need to be able to do those things quickly and easily no matter which machine I am using. My biggest problem involved keeping my bookmarks synchronized along at LEAST my home and work PC’s. Keeping the laptops synced was less important but still a hassle.

I tried a few different add-ons that I found through the Mozilla site. They all had problems. I had given up and was using a bash script to just copy my bookmarks.html file up to a website nightly. I would then download it to another machine, blow away all my bookmarks, and then import the latest version. It was not a horrible hardship since with practice, this can be done in under two minutes. The biggest problem I had was remembering which machine I had added the new link to and often I would need a link now and stopping to do a new import would destroy my chain of thought.

Google Labs has come to the rescue. If you have a Google account and more than one PC, I highly recommend the Google Browser Sync to keep your bookmarks, passwords, and cookies synchronized between both machines. Google has put together a fairly extensive FAQ for the Browser Sync component.

This tool will let you use Google as a encrypted storage location for your Firefox bookmarks, history, cookies, and stored passwords. It’s such a wonderful thing to browse to a website at home that I logged into at work and find myself still logged in. As Google points out, even if you only have one PC, this tool is an excellent way to make sure that your bookmarks are always backed up. Like most Firefox Add-ons, this tool works with Firefox 1.5 and newer regardless of your platform so you can use this to synchronize between a Windows and Linux system or Linux and Apple, or Windows and Apple.

While the extension runs beautifully once its up and running, I have a few tips that will help anyone who plans to use this on more than one PC. My first attempt resulted in a huge mess in terms of my bookmark organization. I had named some bookmark folders and bookmarks with slightly different names on various PCs. The Google Browser Sync tool synced everything so I I had a lot of duplicates. I uninstalled it, and did a little reorganizing, and started over and it’s been peachy ever sense.