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Tech Stuff

Web Graphic Design Tutorial

By Christian

What’s up friends? How are ya? One of the questions I get a lot is how to create the graphics I use on Dangerous Tactics. If you’ve had a website critique or worked with me as a consultant, you know that one of the big things I advocate is the creative use of graphics to engage visitors and help you get more leads from your website.

This video shows you how I create the graphics I use. Honestly…I’m not a graphic designer, and I barely know how to use Photoshop. These graphics are totally custom and really easy to make actually. Here’s how I do it…

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By the way, if you are reading this post somewhere other than my site, and you don’t see the video, you’ll need to click here to see the video. Peace out 🙂

Darth Vader-Proofing Your Blog with Login Lockdown (Blog Security Series)

By Christian

Yep. Your blog security sucks. This series of posts will fix it.

Step one: lock your WordPress blog down against 99% of the malicious attacks out there in one fell swoop. It’s simple. It’s free. And you can set this sucker up in just a few minutes.

The most common form of attack out there is the brute force attack. Little college kids with nothing better to do write programs that will pound your login page with login attempts until they find one that works. After they’re logged in…well, you know what happens then. So let’s take a couple steps to help ensure that doesn’t happen.

When attempting to hack an account, you of course need to nail down both user name AND password. So first of all, use a solid password for god’s sake. Guys, I work on your websites every day so I KNOW what kind of passwords you’re using, and it’s pretty rare for me to see a good one 🙂

Password rules:

  1. Alphanumeric – have your password contain both letters and numbers.
  2. Combine upper and lower case – use at least one upper case letter in your password.
  3. Use symbols – if you really want to screw with anyone trying to crack your password, throw in a symbol or two. You know… *$%()#. That kind of stuff.
  4. Change it periodically, and OMG…don’t use the exact same password for all your accounts.
  5. If you’re installing a new version of WordPress, choose an admin name other than “admin”. Nearly all WordPress logins have the user name “admin”, so selecting a different user name from the beginning is definitely a smart choice.
Now that you have a solid password and aren’t begging to get hacked, let’s lock your login form down. Any brute force attack that comes along will get shut down before it even begins. And remember from the last post, it’s not a question whether or not your site will get hit with one of these attacks. It’s just a matter of when.
Installing Login Lockdown is a smart move. If I’ve built a site for you, you already have it. If a malicious attack hits the login page of your blog, they get three attempts to crack your password. Otherwise, they get locked out and it’s flat out impossible to login. Or you can change this setting to whatever number you like. Installing it is a piece of cake. Observe…
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Questions? Hit me up!

How to Stop Darth Vader from Taking Over Your Blog

By Christian

Yes this is the actual picture the hacker used. Fun!

I remember my first blog. I poured my heart into that thing. Never really made much money but I met cool people from all over the world, and it was a lot of fun.

I logged on the check comments one fine morning, and I was confused by what I found. There were no comments. None. There were also no articles. In fact, there was no website at all.

There was however a big ass picture of Darth Vader.

I sat there staring at Darth for a bit. I was in disbelief. My website was gone. Where the heck was it? I remember looking over my shoulder and around the room in confusion, as if that was going to shed some light on the matter.

The reality was clear. I had been hacked. Big time.

Let’s be real. This is a pretty extreme case. Most hacks are far less extreme. I had a friend check her site one day to find various obscene words placed randomly throughout her site. At least she still had her website 🙂

Here’s the thing: security is usually the last thing we want to think about when it comes to running a website or blog. Especially when you’re a busy business owner.

But it’s absolutely crucial. And the truth is that protecting your blog is actually pretty simple.

Over the next few articles here, I’m going to lay out a few very simple and effective ways you can prevent 99.9% of the attacks you’re bound to experience.

This is an important series of posts! Make sure you’re subscribed, so you don’t miss any of these. You need to know that if you’re running a website these days, it will be attacked. It’s not a matter of if…it’s only a matter of when.

Don’t let Darth Vader take over your website! I will show you the way. May the force be with you.

Here are the articles in the series:

A Really Simple Way to Make WordPress Run Faster

By Christian

I’ve had a few conversations with you all about plugins lately. And getting better, faster performance out of WordPress is always a good thing…so I wanted to share a couple pretty rockin plugins with you.

Install and run these two plugins (very simple, very free), and they can do a lot to speed up your database, make your site run faster, etc. Good stuff! I figured the simplest thing to do was show them to you in action, so here’s a quick video for you.

If you have any questions, let me know!

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As always, if you’re reading in email or a feedreader, you may need to visit the site to watch the video. Thanks 🙂

How to Delete Thousands of Spam Comments from Your Blog Very Quickly

By Christian

We all like the idea of getting a lot more traffic and comments on our blog, correct? One negative thing that comes along with more traffic is more spam. If you’ve ever tried to go in and delete large numbers of spam comments, you know it can take all day…a complete waste of time.

As always, a little knowledge can go a long way. This post is a short tutorial which shows you how I just deleted over 90,000 spam comments from a clients blog in just about one minute. A massive time saver to say the least 🙂

If you happen to be reading this post in a feed reader and cannot see the video, click here.

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This is the query I used in the video:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘0’

Feel free to copy and paste it if you like 🙂 If you have any questions, let me know. It’s my pleasure to help however I can!