Author: willc

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Nextgen Gallery Instruction Manual & Help

If you’ve ever used the Nextgen Gallery plugin for WordPress, you may be aware of how daunting it can be to figure out. There are a lot of settings which take a large amount of trial and error to figure out. If you have given it any time, you know that once you learn the basics, you see what a powerful tool the plugin can be for managing galleries and slideshows on a WordPress website.

Here are a few resources you can use to help find info in case you are in need.

Jenn Mears has taken on the task of creating the missing manual for Nextgen Gallery. It’s a few years old at this point, but it covers a lot of the basics which still apply to the current version of the plugin.

If you can’t find what you are looking for there, you can always peruse the WordPress Codex for Nextgen discussions.

There is also the all-too-brief FAQ on the plugin author’s website.

And, of course, you can always ask for help in the Geekamongus WordPress Forum.

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Hide Yourself From Social Networks (and others)

Did you know that Facebook gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook “Like” button, even if you never click the button, are not a Facebook user, or are not logged in?

That, and more you should be aware of here in this Consumer Reports article.

Priv3 for Firefox will silently prevent the cookies from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ from being installed in your browser, thus protecting you from being tracked everywhere you go online.

Take it a step further and install CSFire to block not only the big four social networks, but any site that surreptitiously makes requests to third parties without your knowing it. It takes a little more management to unblock sites you want to function this way, but it will greatly increase your overall online privacy (and safety).

One of the above, paired with AdBlock Plus and NoScript will go a long way toward keeping you safe online.

 

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The Geekamongus Discussion Forum is Open

We’ve set up a shiny new discussion board here on the Geekamongus site. Come join us for professional shop talk related to a wide array of subjecmatter. From infosec to web development discussions, we can accommodate it all.

And uh, yes, this is the first post of 2012. Kinda lame, I know, but we are busy keeping things running for people!

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Better WP Security

I have been cleaning up a lot of hacked websites/malware and doing security updates and hardening for WordPress websites lately. Ideally I’d be able to lock down a client’s server more thoroughly, implement a good firewall, and run some intrusion detection software, but since many people can’t afford this sort of thing and are on shared hosting environments, I have to lock down what I can.

For hardening WordPress I have traditionally been a fan of Secure WordPress, but lately it has seemed a little too simplistic and not proactive enough. Malware infestation on websites has been spreading like wildfire lately for whatever reason, so staying on top of things is a must.

WordPress Firewall 2 seemed to work pretty well in the past, but it would often kick back false positives which caused issues with plugins and prevented things from working that should otherwise not have a problem. Not to mention it hasn’t been updated in a while.

I was happy to see that Sucuri made their premium plugin free recently. It is pretty slick and has some cool features, and I really like what Sucuri does for web security.  But with this plugin they are trying to walk the line between simplicity for the end user and comprehensiveness for being secure. It’s kinda weird to use for that reason, as you don’t really get a good understanding of what is being done behind the scenes.

I tried this a few weeks ago and orginally gave it up, but I have since returned to Better WP Security, especially now that I can specify an email address to send notifications to and can disable warnings in the WP admin area. These are things that mattered a lot to me, as they would inevitably lead to clients or bosses emailing me asking what all these warnings were. The recent update to the plugin fixed all that, and I’m a happy camper.

I really like that the plugin shows you what needs to be done, makes it easy to do it, and keeps you well informed about what is going on behind the scenes. There is intrusion detection, there are logs, there are password strength policies, there are database tweaks, there are database backups, and there are many other ways to tighten up security. You don’t find so many useful tools in one place with any other plugin.

You should try it – Better WP Security (website) – Plugin Download

 

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