photo credit LBL

I’m exited to to let you know about CrunchPress.com WordPress theme directory.  415 + quality themes are added and we are adding about 10 new quality themes everyday.

It is our aim to build largest WordPress theme directory online. Not only the largest but also the largest quality theme directory. An important aspect of CrunchPress.com WordPress theme directory is that it only publishes spam free themes. We are not publishing any themes with encrypted footer links and in future if we publish any theme with encrypted footer links, we are going to mention it as a warning.

So move ahead and check quality free WordPress themes for your blog.

If you are a theme designers you can submit your theme for free to CrunchPress Theme directory.

ISC aka Internet Storm Center has reported a new ‘distributed WordPress admin account cracker‘. This is a very smart and major attempt to crack admin passwords of WordPress blogs.

This script is written in PHP and performs brute force cracking attempts to WordPress admin accounts.

The wp_brute_attempt() function takes 3 parameters, $ch which is cURL’s structure (cURL is a command line tools that can be used to perform HTTP requests). The other two parameters define the site and the password that will be tried. If the script logged in successfully, the page that gets returned by the server will contain the phrase “Log Out”, and the function will return a true value.

In layman’s words that script allows distributed cracking. It uses a MySql database to save information and script distributed (installed) over a large number of machines actually connects to main database. This allows the attacker to run many simultaneous scripts, each of them can take 200 URLs.

The script then takes every password from a password script and tries it on each site. The script can even be stopped and when executed next time will continue where it stopped.

While this particular version is relatively simple, the power behind the script and the MySQL database allows the attacker to distribute the attacks not only by sites, but also by passwords tried as well.

What can you do to protect your blog?

Cool question! If you are using WordPress, your blog security is at risk. You can protect your blog by taking following steps.

1. Change you admin username, name it to something other then ‘admin’
2. Use a strong password – other then some simple word, use alpha-numeric password and also use some special characters like #$%^&*
3. You can use WordPress security plugins like ‘Login Lockdown‘ to protect your WordPress signup page.
4. Use ‘Bad Behavior‘ plugin for WordPress, ‘Bad Behavior’ is tested against this script and it can block its access attempts to your blog.

Have any questions? Feel free to ask through comments section.

This post is first post of a series we titled, ‘Best of WordPress’. In this series we will discusses best WordPress plugins, themes, hacks and tips.

Here is the list of 5 best WordPress SEO plugins for webmaster to get make their blogs SEO friendly and get top rankings.

1. All In One SEO Pack

My favorite SEO plugin of WordPress, a must have for every blog powered by WordPress. According to statistics it is the most popular plugin in the whole WordPress Extend repository. This plugin has a roboust feature set. In my opinion this is the best WordPress SEO plugin. This plugin allows you to optimize various things like home title, post title, page title, keywords and much more. It also generates meta keywords automatically based on the content. Another handy feature is to help remove duplicate content from your site by using no-index for category and archives.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin creates a well-defined sitemap of your entire site with one click and also notifies search engines of your sitemap. You can also use a priority system for your posts, tags and archives. I’m using this plugin at all of my blogs and it gives great results.

3. HeadSpace

A plugin with many great features and quite populer in WordPress community, HeadSpace. It has some similar features as that of ‘All In One SEO Pack’.  This plugin has the ability to generate post meta tags and its also capable of importing data from other plugins like SEO Pack.

4. SEO Smart Links

Internal links in your blog are very important for its SEO.  SEO Smart Links create automatic links in posts based on keywords to corresponding posts and pages. That helps in increasing page views and distribution of PR in site.

5. Robots Meta

Robots Meta help you add meta tags for search engines to hide certain sections of your site from search engine robots. It can add tags to prevents indexing of your all feeds including comments feeds, you can also prevent indexing of admin pages.

Are you using another plugin? Please use comments to share your opinion.

At start of this month I made a change to this blog. I changed its existing domain http://thewordpresspro.net to http://crunchpress.com by setting up a 301 redirect.

The Permalink structure previously was year/month/day/post-name
I do not like this structure so changed it to domain.com/post-name

Now here is an interesting situation, thewordpresspro.net/09/10/17/post-name redirects to crunchpress.com/09/10/17/post-name and this page further to crunchpress.com/post-name

It become a double 301 redirect. When I analyzed it I become afraid of situation that this may cause problem in indexing.

After some research I cam across this page, at Google group a Google employ Berghausen has responded to a similar question. According to him Google indexes and support “double 301 redirects” however Google is slow on indexing these redirects.

So if you are in a similar situation i.e, changing your WordPress hosted sites domain and then Permalink structure, don’t worry, go ahead!

As some of our readers may have noticed that we have changed URL structure at CrunchPress.com I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. However I discovered if a random visitor from a search engine knows that the post they are loading is old, they are more likely to close the page quickly. Even some bloggers have started taking off dates from their blog posts.

It was a bit scary for me to change URLs due to SEO problems (I’m already having a problem with Google at the time of writing this post, more on it later). However changing URL proved very easy for me.

Here is the process,

1. Go to settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.
Here in ‘Custom Structure’ field enter, /%postname%/

2. Now open up your favorite FTP program, longin to FTP account of your WordPress install, open .htaccess to edit and enter following code.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +MultiViews
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9\-/]+) http://crunchpress.com/$1

RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Change CrunchPress.com with your domain, save .htaccess and you are done!

I’ve assumed you are using domain/year/month/day/post-name structure, if your structure is different please tweak it accordingly.

NOTE:
1. If you are using Super-Cache or any other cache plugin for WordPress, please clear your cache before doing this procedure.
2. If you have a sitemap plugin installed, update/rebuild your sitemap manually.
3. 6) Add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure that the sitemap was accepted and keep an eye on crawl errors periodically.

What about updating your Twitter status as you create or edit a blog entry? And all this automatically? Yes! Off-course I know this is a great idea. You can do this by using a WordPress plugin, Tweetly updater.

Tweetly Updater is a WordPress plugin that updates Twitter when you create or edit a blog entry. It uses the bit.ly service for short urls. The plugin uses bit.ly with the history option, so you can track the clicks on the urls inside your twitter posts on your bit.ly homepage.

I’m using this plugin at 10 +/- of my blog, this plugin has put Twitter profiles for these blogs at auto-pilot. No more manual tweets, my tweets are created automatically.

Download Tweetly Updater from here.

If you have strange characters like, ?q=ek at end of WordPress URLs. You can remove them by using Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin. This plugin fixes all sorts of weird addons to your URL’s by automatically 301 redirecting to the permalink for that post, page, category or tag page.

This blog had same problem and I’m using this plugin here. You can download this excellent plugin from here.

I always thought WordPress Pro has an ugly domain, which is not brand-able so never worked at this site.
However now I’m going to do a relaunch of WordPressPro. On first step, domain is changed to more brand-able and memorable CrunchPress.com

In future site will have 3 sections, WordPress community news, theme & plugins reviews, a theme directory for theme designers to upload their designs and a WordPress job board.

So stay tuned for new changes.

When users add your gadget to their iGoogle homepage, they’ll see your content each time they visit Google. Your Google gadget will show your latest posts sorted by date and an avatar image (your Gravatar).

To do this install WP-iGoogle gadget plugin.

Referrer Detector is a WordPress Plugin that displays a greeting message to visitors that come from different urls (known as referrers).

For example, you may want to welcome Diggers with a message that reminds them to digg your story, or you may want to ask Del.icio.us users to bookmark your post, and so on.

The plugin is easy to use and install. It comes with out-of-the-box support for 14 sites which should cover a good portion of the traffic that you would receive.

This makes it a install and forget plugin unless you really want to bother about customizing it.

Referrer Detector has many useful features like pure AJAXed admin  interface,  the greet box position option, or you can put a tag (<?php if (function_exists('referrer_detector')) referrer_detector(); ?>) into the template to show the greet box anywhere of choice. Exclude URLs, a stat panel. Many installed-by-default entries (which can be restored anytime with one click). Upon installing, you will have these entries available:

• 9 rules
• Del.icio.us and Delicious.com
• Digg
• Gizmodo
• Google Search
• Lifehacker
• Live Search
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• TechCrunch
• Technograti
• TechRadar
• Twitter
• Yahoo Search

2nd Plugin is ‘WP Greet Box‘.

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer URL.

For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction.

Its prominent features are,

• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts upon activation. There is no need to modify theme files.
• Ability to auto-insert greeting message to the top or bottom of the post.
• Greeting messages can be user closeable or not.
• Ability to detect the visitor’s search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the frontend makes it compatible with caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ability to set rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages. Regular expressions is also supported (but not required!).
• Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prefix/append HTML around the greeting message box.
• Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!
  • blinklist.com
  • blogmarks.com
  • del.icio.us
  • delicious.com
  • digg.com
  • diigo.com
  • facebook.com
  • flickr.com
  • furl.com
  • google.*
  • ma.gnolia.com
  • mister-wong.com
  • myspace.com
  • netvibes.com
  • newsvine.com
  • reddit.com
  • search.live.com
  • search.msn.com
  • search.yahoo.com
  • simpy.com
  • stumbleupon.com
  • technorati.com
  • twitter.com
  • youtube.com

My personal review is that I prefer ‘WP Greet Box‘ and I’m using this plugin at one of my sites. The ability to display related posts make it better then Reffer Detector.

Are you using any of these plugins? Or anyother greeting plugin? Has it helped increase visitor loyalty, number of hits? Please tell us about your experience through comments.