I recently wrote a post with a glaring typo in the title – I wrote loose instead of lose (one of those late night posts). I hadn’t noticed until someone pointed it out to me. Since the post had already been cached by the search engines I thought I’d do the right thing and make the correction but also ensure it was all nice and search engine friendly. Here’s what I did:

1) Edited the title under Manage > Edit
2) Edited the post slug (you don’t have to do this if you don’t use the title as the post slug)
3) Added this line in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /top-5-ways-to-loose-rankings/

http://www.reubenyau.com/top-5-ways-to-lose-rankings/

(Note the code above needs to be all on one line, it’s wrapped here due to space constraints)

This will ensure that link popularity from the old URL is pushed on to the new one.

Obviously an April fools joke… I mean look at all the references to known SEO/marketing people…

scbl – Robert Scoble?
davenator – David Naylor?
RandomFish – Randfish?
Z-man – G man?
Shchoeoe+npMMo – Shoemoney?

You need to do better than that Matt :)

Here’s a screenshot for prosperity:

I decided to install the SEO Title Tag Plugin by Stephan Spencer, since I wanted to clean up the titles. WordPress by default puts in a bunch of extra stuff in there which just doesn’t really look very good.

Ironically, by installing the SEO Title Tag plugin, it allowed me to clean up all the titles so I can avoid seeing things like:

blogname » Blog Archive » Title.

One of the cool features of this plugin is that you can set custom titles by post (or page) by using the custom fields and specifying title_tag as the key, then entering the custom text in the value.

I was using the Social Bookmarks WordPress Plugin by Apostolos Dountsis which places a bunch of small icons at the bottom of each post. I don’t know how successful they are because popular social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and reddit have browser buttons, so you never really know which button they’re clicking on.

I’d like to know to make sure that whatever plugins, widgets, thingies and whatsit’s I bolt onto this blog are going to be useful and not just there because other sites have them.

I decided to try out Pierre Far’s Socializer. It uses one link at the bottom which takes you to a page where you can then select which social bookmarking site you want to use. Pierre has some great instructions on his site, but I decided to install the wordpress plugin, which was originally written by Anders Bergman.

Edit 2/5/2007: Pierre just wrote a post on his blog about the popularity of social bookmarking sites and which are the most popular through his service.

After reading about greywolf’s blog being defaced as well as a few others, I thought I’d tighten up security a little. According to comments by shoemoney, it looks like the vulnerability is exposed by accessing some of the files contained within the /wp-admin folder. This should be fixed with the 2.0.7 WordPress upgrade [2.1 is also now available], however, let’s add a little extra security with a htaccess file. This will limit access to this folder by IP address. Any attempts at accessing any file within this folder will be greeted with a Forbidden error message.

I placed this file in the /wp-admin folder (DO NOT REPLACE/EDIT THE .htaccess FILE IN THE ROOT FOLDER OF YOUR BLOG)

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Example Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx
</LIMIT>

Update: Note that this is was temporary fix until the next version of WordPress came out. If you do limit access to your wp-admin folder by IP address you may have to update it if your internet provider assigns you a dynamic IP address, you move to another location or you have authors at other locations.

You may also want to check out Michael’s Login Lockdown plugin which will prevent attackers trying to brute force their way in. Failed login attempts are recorded and after a set amount of failed logins, it blocks an IP range for 1 hour by default.