Wordpress Site ever get Hacked?
Often people ask me how important is it to upgrade your Wordpress blog or CMS if its 3 or 4 versions out of date? Well its very important! Not only are you missing on great new added features to the system but also expose yourself to less security threats. In the last few days a number of big Wordpress blogs have being hacked. Most of the back-doors done by the hackers who are often the guys that are aware of these flaws in older versions of Wordpress. Most common hack they do is to add malicious code to the index.php file ( like a iframe redirecting traffic to there ad revenue sites).
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Typography Design Inspiration
Today’s post is so often overlooked and never really seen as Design inspiration. Here we take a good look at some great typographic artworks. Not only is it used in everyday design but can also inspire to create beautiful and creative ideas. Typography is needed!
Page Rank Extension for Chrome
- Use a recent trunk build or the Chrome dev channel release.
- Add –enable-extensions to your Chrome command line.
15 Great Business Card Ideas
I thought it would be appropriate to show some beautiful ideas and there’s no better representation of your visual identity than your business card. Most business cards are dull, boring, and don’t say much about the person or business they are in. Here is a list of 15 great business cards that really show what the clients venture is all about.
Free Wordpress Theme “Gallery” Dowload now!
I so often sit around browsing the pages from the SM boys and always on the look out for great freebies. Today i stumbled across a great Wordpress template called “Gallery”. Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine. Dark sites are often very difficult to pull off. I must say that Christopher did a great job in doing so.
Baby Girl Vector Free Download
Came across a great vector that i would like to share with you guys. Baby Girl Vector made by webdesign-easy.
5 top wordpress themes from WooThemes
I’ve always being a big fan of adii’s work at Woothemes and there innovation to design the best wordpress templates around. Here’s 5 great wordpress themes that one should not miss and i’ve included 1 of his free templates that you can download.
1:)WooTube
2:)Foreword Thinking
3:)Geometric
PR update April 2, 2009 - it’s go time
No one was expecting such an early PageRank update in 2009. I noticed that some big sites lost PR’s and others gainned PR’s. Please feel free to add comments on some of the big boys out there that have gainned and lost PR’s. Keep in mind there is nothing confirmed, but several people started to notice changes both in PageRank and backlinks count numbers. So please jump on the waggon and see if your PR has updated.
Woo Themes 4 in 1 template special
Woo themes
The guys at Woo Themes are having a April fool’s offer, so best to check it out. If you buy 1 template you might get 3 others. Prank or not, it could be worth it. There templates for Wordpress are made from absolute class and they are well profound for their themes.
They quote: Hurry though April Fools jokes are supposed to be made before midday on April 1st. We’ve extended that a bit, cos we nice people, so you have until midday tomorrow (12pm GMT, April 2nd 2009)
Custom made plugins and web 2.0 effects for Sobi2
The guys behind the Joomla accommodation directory SA STAY, have given us inside information on all the tools used and modifications made to there joomla system and sobi2 component. There use of extensive frameworks and WEB 2.0 effects is phenomenal. Today we take a look at some of these great features that they have applied to there Joomla system. The components used where Joomla and Sobi2 as there base system. There aim was to remove all Mootools frameworks and plugins and build Jquery into there base system and design some custom plugins.
We’re not going to go into full detail with regards to that, but will highlight some of the modification and plugins made there.
First one, which i thought was really useful for sobi2. It’s a view more listing plugin within a category, build upon Jquery scroller. This plug-in allows users to view other listing within there details page based upon the details page location. So if a listing sits in a certain state, only those listing will show.(As per image below) Once the arrow is clicked only then is a new instance fetched. This way all response times and headers sent remain small and you don’t end up with unnecessary query’s and slow responses.
3 Must Have Web Developer Tools
To create a website you need a toolbox full of tools - software, add-ons and some more software. Perhaps in theory a simple text editor is enough to create necessary code. But in real life comfort comes first and you will need the following three tools to create a website as smoothly as possible.
1. A Ftp Client - FireFTP
Uploading files to your shared hosting account is a common bottleneck in the web development process. It is thus important to minimize programs used and make sure they include all the functions possible. FireFTP is a FireFox add-on that allows you to manage your files through an FTP client in one tab and preview the changes on your site in the other tab. This is integrated web development and will save you much time and sanity.
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Captcha For Joomla 1.5.x and integration with Sobi2
OK so we finally managed to crack this bad boy for Joomla 1.5.9 . This script allows users to add a Captcha form to there Sobi2 contact page, helping the prevention of spam. Snake was kind enough to modify and donate this script to us. This Captcha script can be used for any component in Joomla 1.5.x. If you need help setting it up please use our forum and we will assist with the setup and integration into your components. But this should be easy to setup.
This specific demo will show you how to set it up using joomla 1.5 and Sobi2. I’ve attached the files to be downloaded from here.
Firstly you need to download the Font file and Capctha file ( Download Here: Captcha (113) ) ( This script is built of the one from Simon Jarvis ). Copy these two files into your root folder. Then open your details template “sobi2.details.tmpl” and copy and paste the code below. ( please note if you wish to use this function else where, you can ignore the sobi2.details.tmpl and add the form to your component of choice.
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Posting twitter posts with Curl using PHP, Sobi2 and Joomla
Being experimenting with the API of Twitter. I started out playing with curl to send updates from a joomla directory, once a user added a listing. The concept was to have followers follow the updates live via twitter. Tools used: Joomla , Sobi2 and some basic PHP.
Firstly make sure your server supports curl and that the extension is active. A simple install to linux would look something like this.
sudo apt-get install curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl
Now you have PHP cURL installed, the next thing you need to do is to restart apache2, run the following command in your terminal:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
In the command terminal run the following command to test the connection to twitter. You can use the -v dump method to post any errors on the screen if connection fails. example curl -u -v ( and then the command )
curl -u username:password -d status="twittering from curl" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
I then used the PHP curl features to do the same thing from PHP:
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SynthaSite rolls in $20m investment
Once again, South Africa born bread Vinny Lingham continues to inspire. SynthaSite brings in a whooping $20m further investment to expand the infrastructure, systems, process & support for his business. SynthaSite’s main goal is to make it easy enough that anyone with a computer to create a website for their small business, organization or personal needs with a simple click with the mouse button. Vinny believes that with this $20m investment he can now grow very quickly and become the DE-facto standard amongst for business & personal website building.
With over 40+ staff members, vinny hopes to take SynthaSite to various large ISP’s & PC Manufacturer and to further more distribute SynthaSite to a mass market level.
Admin Password Hack Vulnerability in Joomla 1.5
I’m only posting this because the impossible happened to me today. Running Joomla 1.5 I ran into one of these so called Hackers. (nice try)
Well trying to destroy info and uninstalling of components, I managed to switch the account to suspended. Buying me enough time to fix this leak. Now not only is this a critical fix released last year by the joomla.org team but a very good lesson learnt too. Learn to back up your websites, db and lookout for critical updates for your Joomla version. (Or even update it)
A flaw in the reset token validation mechanism allows for non-validating tokens to be forged. This will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id). Typically, this is an administrator user. Note, that changing the first users username may lessen the impact of this exploit (since the person who changed the password does not know the login associated with the new password). However, the only way to completely rectify the issue is to upgrade to 1.5.6 (or patch the /components/com_user/models/reset.php file).
South Africa launches SA Elections website
WOW, being following allot of the launches and start-up’s in the South African market and here is a prime example of what they are capable of doing. Along with Avusa labs, South Africa has launched it’s very own SA Elections website. Users and the world will now be able to view happenings of the SA elections from the net. The use of sharp and professional colors, complimented with awesome Ajax effects, this website will press bench marks.
