I love playing around with graphics even if I’m not a Graphic Artist by training. In my soul I am an artist so when I play with images I am a graphic artist, no? So last I was in an artsy mood and got a bug up my butt to do something. I have been a little bit antsy from staying at home with the new puppy so now that I have moved my desktop computer into the family room so I can keep an eye on little Guy and work with a bit more power than my iPad provides, I was absolutely itching to create. I decided this site looked too “Summer.” And Fall is definitely here. We’re supposed to only get up into the 80s today and down into the low 60s at night here in Tucson! Yes!
INFRASTRUCTURE
I use the Feather theme by Elegant Themes which allows me to easily upload header images which are called logo images, for some reason I cannot fathom, by Nick Roach, the guy who creates these WordPress themes that I use on my stand alone WordPress installation through the hosting account I have with Host Gator. It works well through the Firefox browser on the 2009 upgraded large screen iMac that I have.
PREVIOUS IMAGE REUSE
I started out by searching my computer for the layered graphic I created for the header I was using up until last night.
I found the single layer version of the image that was a .png file, but I could not find the layered ArtText file in which I’d created the image. Grrrrr. I hate it when I skip over such a basic step as saving a copy of my creation in the native format of the program I am using. Art Text allows me to export images as various types of files. I chose to export a .png format with an alpha, or transparent, background.
ART TEXT STEPS
So when I am using Art Text I remember to do this:
And not this:
So because I had not done this second action, I could not rework the original image and just replace the dragonfly with the bat. So I had to recreate the image. I can never leave things alone when given a chance to change them, so I altered some elements of the image. I replicated the overall feel of the image but made a few changes. You can see the Art Text tool bar showing some of the layers at the bottom of this image:
As you might have been able to tell, I do the logo image and the text as individual images both of which I export as .png format images.
LAYERING IMAGES AS LAYERS IN GIMP
Once those two images are created using ArtText, saved as an ArtText file .artx and exported as a .png, I open them in GIMP. I create a blank transparent image in the size that I want the new image to be. It looks like this:
Then I insert one of the images as a layer:
Then I add the second image (of the words) and position it to the right of the first layer image and save it with the title I want:
THEME INTERFACE
Then, finally, I save this image in a format that my theme’s GUI (graphic user interface) can recognize and upload it.
MANY WAYS TO CREATE IMAGES
I use ArtText because it a very functional and easy to use logo, icon, and button creator. If your were greatly skilled in GIMP or Adobe Photoshop you could do all this in one graphics program. I had to get something out quickly once and bought ArtText and learned to love it. GIMP is Open Source, which is not the same thing as free, but there is no cost to download the program, and it is available for most platforms. Since I don’t have a lot of money to support the project, I promo it whenever I can, such as in this post to help the project. You can also donate money. If you regularly use an open source product, giving back as much as you can is the proper way to support it.
LESSONS LEARNED
Save or export as many versions as you will want at the end of the process immediately upon creating any sort of file! That is the most important info to take away from this post.
I now have a header image that I can alter for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Winter, Spring and so on. I wanted to alter the header as a way of keeping a site fresh but familiar while reusing elements of pre-existing projects to save time and energy. Wheels are wonderful, but there are no good reasons for reinventing them.
Blogsy Is App of the Week
I don’t really know why it has taken me so long to try out and sing the praises of Blogsy, the multi-platform iPad blogging app. My life would have been so much easier the last couple of months had I been using it rather than the WordPress App or direct web access to the WordPress client via a browser.
Editing blog posts on an iPad is problematic no matter whether the blogging platform used is WordPress, Typepad, Joomla, or one of ten other commonly used platforms. Images are the bugaboo that stumped me time and again when I tried to edit directly from the browser I was using, Safari, or with the Wordrpress native app. that can be downloaded for free through the App Store.
The new site I’m working on is a Joomla platform, and I’ve previously hosted multiple active blogs on different platforms such as Blogspot and Live Journal in the past. So I have used software that provided a single interface because it allowed me to have one familiar GUI (graphical user interface for those non-nerds among us!) from which I could write, post, and store drafts. For years Mars Edit was my software choice when using a laptop or my desktop. But now with the iPad pretty much replacing the laptop in my life, I realized it was time for me to find something equivalent to my dear old standby Red Sweater software that is, unfortunately, not available for the iPad.
Image insertion troubles were the bugaboo that made me start checking out other apps.
Most bloggers who use iPads know that a direct edit or change of almost anything on their blogsite, without the use of an intermediary app, is problematic. Using forms, sending any kind of instruction, or manipulating an image while using a standard iOS browser is either impossible or problematic with respect to what information will actually be sent or how it will be interpreted or come out on the screen.
I also had trouble with the WordPress App creating a new draft if I had not already created the draft post through direct browser access. Something would happen and what was supposed to be a draft I’d saved would end up being published. There is nothing more embarrassing than premature e-publication.
But seriously, direct browser access of a WordPress site in edit mode displays the entire webpage, including sidebars, titles, and icons, and takes up way too much of the prime real estate on the iPad screen. Of course touch interaction is not reliably functional during editing. Heck, until responsive website design becomes de rigeur just viewing blogs, on mobile devises such as phones and tablets, will be a big enough challenge for most of us, let alone creating and editing them on mobile devices.
But there are enough of us weirdo techy, geeky goddesses out there who want to throw our business in our handbag and be able to take effective charge of our online businesses no matter where we are, that editing from a tablet is an essential ability we need to have.
So I paid the $4.99 for Blogsy in the App Store a few days ago, and I wish I had done it far sooner!
This is what the interface looks like:
It is clean, easy to read, and functionally intuitive. The WordPress app, below, is cluttered, crowded, and difficult to read, and gives you no preview of images or links.
For me the decision was obvious, Blogsy, is the way to go. I have no doubt that it will pull its weight when I start intensive use of using other platforms, such as Joomla, for blogging. Can’t wait. I love it when I find products that work!
By the way, I am using Blogsy, Cerberus, version 4.1
Buy it. 5 Stars! Woot.
Site Security, Again…
There is a security update for self-hosted WordPress sites that you need to install. It is numbered 3.4.1 and it contains security updates.
- Back up your site.
- Run the update.
- Update your BPS Security installation, or update whatever site security softwear you use. You may have to create new, updated .hta accesss files. Then you will have to reactivate the BPS coverage of them.
I have invested too much of my soul into my writing to risk losing all those captured thoughts, or allowing someone else to control them. I also wanted to host my own images for the same reasons.
Wordpress was the logical choice for me. I will admit that at first I did not understand what a huge security risk I was taking with this step. Live and learn. I learned a great deal about the real differences between a url, a domain, a site, a host, the site software, intellectual property, and a huge amount of other information about how I put my thoughts out on the web.
Because I had next to no funds to pay someone else to create and maintain sites for me, when I first started doing this,I learned how to do it myself.
I’m continuing to learn how to do as much as I can for myself. I have played aroud with Drupal CMS (content management system) sites in the past and will eventually use Drupal for some of my sites. But some of my main strengths are my skepticism and my DIY attitude. So I am not apt to give in and 1) believe everything I’m told, and 2) allow anyone else to do for me what I cannot do for myself.
One of my friends simply delights in telling WordPress users that something like, he says, 87% of WordPress sites are infected with malware. I say, that may be true, but 50% of those sites have taken absolutely no steps toward securing their site.
Get http://www.akismet.com to stop spam comments. Require that people leaving comments prove they are human the first time they leave a comment by having to fill out name and website; this is an option under the discussion settings on your dashboard.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY of all, make sure that your cpanel settings, through which you access your hosting services, have anonymous ftp disabled. You do not want to allow anonymous access through which someone could upload files, malware, and all sorts of nefarious software onto your server. Seriously, if you don’t know how to do this, or how to find out whether it is enabled, talk to your hosting company or the person or company you use to maintain your WordPress site and make sure anonymous ftp access to your server is disabled.
Don’t be freaked out, just start doing and eventually it all falls into place.
Working on My Empty Nester Site
I spent the last couple of days working on Done Nesting. I purchase reliable and flexible themes that I can customize without doing any alterations of code. I buy themes to be certain they work and will continue to do so. It isn’t that there aren’t good free themes out there. There are. Free themes are a great way to assess different designers work. I find the securrity considerations to be more thoroughly addressed in the commercial themes. I use themes on my own blogs that I may also use on client site. Should I have a problem, I like to be able to access support that will respond quickly so that I may respond quickly. My clients deserve that.
I decided to install BuddyPress on my Done Nesting site so that I can have blogging challenges, groups, events, and I will be adding group tweeting capabilities soon.
I did a bit of graphic design for a possible logo, banner, and icon to use for an icon set for the site. This may change. Hubby says the flower looks too mean and pointy. I will probably soften the colors a bit too. Let me know what you think of my design work. I love the process of honing something into a viable, aesthetically pleasing construct.
Most of the day was spent on setting up the theme I finally purchased, after wrapping up the research I had done on themes that integrate with the BuddyPress plugin on the WordPress platform.
I decided to go with the Custom Community theme by ThemeKraft. ThemeKraft provides support at the Pro level, over the free, and there is more flexibility in style and color options. This is the first time I have bought a license to for just one theme. I usually go with packages such as the one offered by Elegant Themes in which I have access to all of the themes offered by them, and there are tons! But not all WordPress themes work with BuddyPress.
Intensive research over the last few days added to the preliminary information gathered on community blogging over the last few months. There was one theme I really liked from Theme Loom, but the company was just too small for me to be comfortable relying on it for software for a group site. Maybe if the company owner had been a woman, then I might have been more disposed to accepting the risk/investment ratio.
Theme Forest had some beautiful themes, but they sell derivative work from individuals and small companies under a standardized umbrella of terms, services, and licenses. One use on one site per purchase. I do a handful of sites for friends and small businesses and sometimes I will want to use the same theme for more than one site. Multiple use licenses at Theme Forest start at well over a $1000.00. It is not clear that I could purchase multiples at the single price for every new site without violating the terms. I steer clear of any gray areas when it comes to business law.
There were also some great individual designers and coders who were very clear and almost threatening in their one use theme terms and who sounded like negotiation would be needed and with an individual who cannot be contacted easilly, that can be risky too.
Themekraft had good reviews, a tiered customer support system, a freebie basic version that can be used as a limited, but non-demo version, and a clearly written, logically structured, helpful, detailed website. I took advantage of playing around with that free version, before I made my final decision to purchase the Pro version this afternoon.
I still have to set up the membership side of the site. I hope to have the unofficial or semi-official site launch on the Solstice later this month.
If you are interested in being a beta tester for Done Nesting let me know and I will contact you and get you set up with a login and the level of access you will need… just as soon as I figure all that out!
Zombies! IP Deny Those Brain and Bandwidth Eaters.
Gotta love the attention getting factor that any exclamation of “Zombies!” carries. The CDC even understands this one. They used an outbreak of flesh eating zombies to reach a difficult to engage demographic group with information about emergency preparedness. I can’t believe I didn’t know about this until I Googled “Fox News Zombies.”
And look at how successful Fox News has been shouting “Zombie!” every time they want to distract from their own brain eating activity; actually they use a bait and switch tactic and substitute “Liberal” for the word zombie… but hey, really this is Fox we are talking about and strictly truthful reporting on them would be out of character with spirit and tone of how they stick to “truthful” reporting and their eating of mainstream American brains.
And how could I possibly have a contemporary discussion of zombies and brain-eating without mentioning spammers and their other nefarious Romanian kin. You know the word discussion is problematic, because if you are not out there reading this, we are not having a literary discussion and I am spending an awful lot of time impressing myself with my own cleverness…. but I digress. If you do not know about Romanian IPs then you are a sweet innocent person in the blog world and I’m not sure I want to poison your rosy colored view of the world. Read on at your own peril.
To take care of such techno zombies who will eat your bandwith at best and steal your server in the worst of living nighmares, you ban their IPs. To accomplish this on a self-hosted WordPress blog:
Start at your WordPress Dashboard > “Settings” > “Discussion” and enter the IP in the box labled “Comment Moderation.”
Now this sounds easy, and it actually is if you know how to obtain the IPs of your blog or site visitors. One of the easiest ways to find the IP addresses of your visitors is to add a stats/maps plugin.
Start at your WP dashboard > “Plugins” > “Add New”, > search box, just enter what you are looking for such as “Visitor Maps and Who’s Online” and install and activate if you want to do so. This plugin gives your the IP address of your visitors. You then know which visitors have which IP addies and you can can ban them via comment moderation as mentioned above.
I’ve always found out what IP addresses were accessing my sites through Cpanel, but if Cpanel is a vague concept, or perhaps group of physicians or politicians deciding for women about how women should give birth, then you may need this brief tech digression.
The easiest way, for me, to figure out which IPs are accessing my site, is to gets stats from the server that hosts my blog. I do this through Cpanel. I also like to ban them from this level because if they actually are getting far enough into my blog to comment, they are still eating my bandwidth even if I do ban them from commenting. But I do not recommend this for the novice or the faint of heart. You will end up in a world of hurt if you do not know what you are doing.
So I am just going to list a few of the key ingredients you will have to have on hand if you are going to whip up a dish without spam.
WordPress I primarily talk about WordPress issues and how-tos when I talk tech, but many of the same practices I mention are equally applicable to other blogging platforms, only the details for how to implement those practices vary. If you use another self hosted platform via a Cpanel installation, you can probably get to the IPs in the same way.
Plugins Do Not, I repeat, do not add unverified plugins to your website. Check the details. How long has this person been around making plugins? What version of the plug in is it? Is it 0.1.2 or 1.5.9? Bigger is usually better. How many users have reviewed the software? If it is only three reviewers they are probably the maker’s mom and two friends. What do they say about it? Is the review detailed and does it refer to improvements over time in later versions? I am currently using the Bullet Proof Security Plugin. It is your choice to download and activate a plugin, I’m not recommending us of one, one way or another, and I soon may actually purchase site monitoring services from an interwebs security firm. But if you want to give it a go: Start at your WP Desktop and Go to Plugins > Add New, and in the search box just enter what you are looking for such as “Bullet Proof Security.”
And now to return to today’s theme of zombies. Zombies are such great allegorical vessels! This is the main reason I so adore the unfortunate undead. Only Godzilla rivals Zombies in mass cultural acceptance and symbolic adoption and adaptation of a cinematic character. (Say that 10 times, fast.)
Anyway, this “Z” post is the last entry for April’s A to Z Blog Challenge that I found out about through GBE 2. It has been a fun month, but May will be even better although I will not be posting every single day of the month. Can you hear my big sigh of relief?
W is for WordPress (continued) Widgets and for Weekday Blogging in May
I had intended this “W” post to be about weekday blogging as a variant of the daily blogging challenges that are popular with the more vociferous of bloggers. I started a series of articles on WordPress security and easy fixes with updates to various parts of blogs that use this publishing platform that is overlapping with my intention to write about the frequency of posting I will be doing May. I will just, for now, say that I will not be doing NaBloPoMo on BlogHer in May. Writing every single day is not a problem for me, but writing a publishable blog post every single day of the month can be problematic. I do like the structure and camaraderie that group writing challenges provide to me. I will be writing about the quandary in which this places me within a couple of days….
…so now for WordPress Security, part tres..
The basic and relatively easy security fixes for WordPress blogs covered so far have been version updates to the WordPress itself. Plug-in updates have also been covered. Themes should also be updated as new releases are made. If the creator of the theme you are using does not release updates, you need to find a new theme provider.
Software evolves over time to include new features and fixes. Themes that were created using prior versions of HTML to that of HTML 5 for example have to have API or plug-ins to adapt websites to mobile devices while HTML 5 has divided object tags to define various specific type of media that may be included such as video. If these things are not done then the them that defines how your website elements appear and mesh will show up as garbled mumbo jumbo on phones and other portable devices. Themes also have to co-evolve with the new versions of WordPress. The WordPress dashboard should let you know when a new version of your theme is available.
As promised, I am including links to other sites on some other security topics. These cover some of the other easy fixes for common security mistakes made by lots of people and exploited by lots of bad guys.
Passwords
This Mashable article lists the most commonly used passwords from 2011 as determined by hacker compromised accounts. Don’t use any of these or anything like them. It also suggests methods you can use to create secure passwords. User names are a lot like passwords. Don’t use “admin.”
Site Scans
Sucuri provides a free scan of your sites to let you know if you have been infected by malware. It also has a good blog that talks about current threats to WordPress from malware. This blog also posted a video of a security webinar that occured yesterday and that lasts for about an hour and a half if you have the time and interest. It is informative if you are new to WordPress, and maybe if you aren’t. I learned a few new things when I watched it.
Widgets
Prepackaged widgets can contain code that links to malware. Use widgets with caution and read about what can happen with javascript links in widgets in a Sucuri post from last year.
There are a ton of other things you can do to secure your self-hosted site, but I am not a security expert, at least not when it comes to WordPress, but as I learn more I will share. I do use noscript for my Firefox browser and I recommend it for folks who are not put off by having a few steps extra when you want to load a flash or javascript bit of code when you are on a site you trust and automatically block it on other sites. It stops a lot of malware.
Other Platforms
I don’t know a tremendous amount about other platforms, but I can share why I decided to move my blog from Blogger at blogspot.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. And I will do so in another post; I will link it back here when I write it. In the meanwhile, here is a link to a Google post on security on blogger blogs for those readers who asked about their blogs on this other platform.