Smackdown!
Just a quick test to see if WordPress by defaults redirects slug changes using a 301 or 302 redirect. The original url for this post is:
https://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/18/test-of-wordpress-default-slug-redirect-301-or-302/
and I am going to change it to:
https://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/18/wordpress-redirect-302-or-302/
I never use my uploads directory or WordPress’s built in media management here on Smackdown, instead preferring to upload and manually insert the html for images myself in my posts (I know, I am weird that way), but my friend Donna has when she has guest blogged here in the past. I therefore knew that the uploads directory existed and had a few images in there, but never really had any reason to look at them. It was totally by accident that I clicked on the Media link in the admin section this morning. I am glad that I did, however, since otherwise I never would have known that I had missed a bit of leftover data from one of the times that I had been hacked last year, a reference to a file named rzf.php.
I use an early warning hacking detection system that Donna came up with last year with and I helped refine, MonitorHackdFiles, that alerts me whenever there are any files modified or added on my blog. This script has been indispensable in helping me to clean up damage from hacks before either my rankings were harmed or an infection spread to my readers. However, based on the folder structure
The following “guest post” was a comment left on “How To Completely Clean Your WordPress Installation” by a gentleman named Daniel J. Dick. He makes some excellent points, and due to it’s length I decided to feature the comment in it’s own post, rather than approve it in place. Enjoy.
I think Nick sums up how most of us feel about malicious hackers, script kiddies, and spambots that wreck other people’s stuff.
My apologies to everyone that reads this that are searching out how to fix your blog. It is obviously meant for the little, no good, no life having, soulless human maggot out there that creates viruses, malicious scripts and hacks other peoples stuff. YOU SUCK BIG MOOSE C#&@!!
– Nick
Most of my sites
Last year I wrote this handy little script named EasyWP. It makes installing WordPress much easier for those without Fantastico or shell access, and is many times faster than having to upload all of the files individually. It’s very useful, especially if you install WordPress on a regular basis, or if you need to do a complete WordPress reinstall for whatever reason. Lots of people use and enjoy the script.
Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:
Today over at ReadWriteWeb Sarah Perez wrote an article on how Google was gaining ground on their share of the search market. In the article she talked about the latest buzz from Google Analytics blog having to do with changes to the way Google.com handles clicks in their serps, which were a implemented as result of what Google would break in analytics packages by implementing AJAX driven search results. She notes that even though the speed benefit Google gains from going AJAX would be minimal on a per-search basis, when multiplied by the millions of searches performed every day it would eventually add up to more of a market share for them.
Although a change to AJAX technology would only make searches milliseconds faster, those milliseconds add up, allowing people to do more searches, faster. And that would let Google grow even more, eating up percentage points along the way. – Sarah Perez
However, what was missed by many
Last month I blogged about the fact that I had noticed that Google was playing around with delivering the SERP’s via AJAX. I pointed out that due to the way that referrers work, using AJAX to generate the pages would cause all traffic coming from Google to look like it was coming from Google’s homepage instead of from a search. This means in turn that analytics packages, including Google Analytics, would no longer be able to track what keywords searched on in Google were sending traffic to the webmaster’s websites. There was a bit of a buzz about it, and Google seemed to stop the testing shortly thereafter. Google’s only reply on the subject was “sometimes we test stuff”, to point to a post from three years ago that also said, “sometimes we test stuff”, to say that they didn’t intend to break referrer tracking, and that was it.
Shortly thereafter, the tests
On Friday I wrote a piece on how it looked like Google was testing AJAX results in the main serps. Some discussion followed as to whether, if this change were to become a widespread permanent one, this would affect Firefox plugins that existed (definitely some existing ones would stop working), break some of the rank checking tools out there (they would have to be re-written I’m sure), and even some people asking if it would thwart serps scrapers from using serps for auto page generation (not for long, no).
While those things would definitely be affected in at least the short term, there is a much greater impact from Google switching to AJAX. All of the issues mentioned involve a very small subset of the webmastering community. What actually breaks if Google makes this switchover, and is in fact broken during any testing they are doing, is much more widespread. Every single
Yes, I know… Google has been offering AJAX driven results through the API and other services for ages, but now they have rolled that out to the main Google Search. It appears to be only on Google US (I tried manually switching to Google UK, and it redirected me from the AjAX version to a static HTML page), but that of course could change in the future.
I noticed this as soon as I started searching for stuff today, from almost the first query I typed in. When I looked at the url, instead of seeing the normal /search?= at the beginning:
I found myself looking at this:
Again, I’ve been hacked. Well, not me personally… I wear the most up to date tinfoil attire, I assure you, and no one is getting into my head… but my blog was. This time I was running WordPress 2.6.5 when it happened.
Those who know me know that I always prefer to do manual upgrades, wiping everything out and starting over completely fresh each time, whether I have been hacked or not. This way if there was an intrusion it should still clean the hack out completely, even if I don’t know it’s there. As it happens, when I upgraded to 2.6.5 from 2.6.2 I did not do this. I merely upgraded the 2 files involved in the security portion of the WP 2.6.5 upgrade (which were wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php). However,
Adding images to your blog posts can make them much more visually appealing to your readers. This in turn can increase the likelihood that someone will link to that post or subscribe to your feed, which will of course in the long run help to improve your rankings and traffic. The internet is chock full of images, many of which will fit perfectly with that blog post or article that you are writing. The problem is, however, finding images that are both high quality and that you are actually allowed to use.
Two internet no-no’s that beginner web publishers often perform, many times without even realizing that they are doing anything wrong,
