MacBros’ Place |

Earlier today somebody hacked my site and made a few changes. Congrats to them, but thankfully my web host went to work quickly and restored the site to it’s former self by restoring a backup that was from 24 hours earlier. A couple of comments were lost in the event.

It was mainly my fault because I didn’t have permissions set properly. Homer slap to the head, “Dough!”

Looks like I’ll be editing my files manually instead of using the wordpress editor from now on. Since you need to have them set to writable and if I have to go into FTP to change them all teh time, I may as well edit them in FTP also.

Well anyway. Sites back up and running.

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This is just a quick announcement to my fellow loyal readers, and yes, even the ones who never comment.

If you look up at the header, you’ll notice that a couple of links have disappeared and have been moved on to the left sidebar. They were just some disclosures and TOS’s links, nothing big or anything, but I just want my main links up top.

The latest link is the Gaming Page. This page will feature a few new games every other day for you all to play for real. They will be classics, and time killers. Just be sure you have your flash updated and also your Shockwave too for director type games.

I’m hoping this will be a fun and popular addition to the site. I know I’ll be spending a lot of time playing these things too. I just need to be sure I’m adding more than what I’m playing and wasting my time with .

Thanks have to go out to Rich, AKA: The English Guy for helping out with a couple of dilemmas I was having. One was figuring out the new custom page template settings in WordPress 2.6.1 and how to not display certain pages amongst the group of pages on the site.

For those who want to know, what he helped me figure out. To keep certain pages from being linked with the rest of the pages you just need to add to the already WP tag wp_list_pages(); to look something like this, wp_list_pages('exclude=1,2,3'); 1,2,3 being the actual page ID.

For the template problem; Just add the following code to the first line of your template page and then the rest will come to you.

<?php

/*

Template name: yourname

*/ ?>

yourname being the name of the template, which will show in the template section of the admin Write Page section.

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OK the previous plug-in that I tried didn’t seem to work. It wasn’t placing the links in the feed nor was it placing the links in the content scrapers scrapped version on my content. So basically it was pointless to keep it.

Thanks to Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today, he had suggested that I give ©Feed (Copy Feed) a try.

After I installed it and went to the settings panel, I was overwhelmed with the multitude of features and setting you can have with it. It basically does the same thing as the previous one was supposed to do, Plus more! You can Ban IP’s and URL’s, customise the banning message, customize your copyright statement and so on. The plug-in will even display any suspected content on your dashboard.

I really didn’t want to spend the time making a screen shot of the entire control panel as splicing all teh images would have taken more time than I really have at the moment. So this will have to do.

Copy Feed Control Panel

WARNING!!!!: If you do not use the latest version of Firefox, then do NOT try to view these pages. They try to install computer diarrhea on you.

The first site example: computer[dot]ezineaerticles[dot]com/08-08-08
The second Example: software[dot]ezineaerticles[dot]com/08-08-08

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I might not be able to stop you from scraping my RSS feed (yet) but at least I can make it so you’re readers, if in fact you actually have any real ones that is, know that you are a scraper and show them where you stole the real content from by linking to my front page and to the scraped content you stole.

To those reading my feed in your readers, you will see the paragraph like;

This post originates from and is authored by : MacBros’ Place. Read all full and original postings at MacBros Place.

The title of the post should also link to the original post also.

So since I can’t easily detonate the scrapers scraping site into oblivion, at least I can benefit from having my links back in all their scraped content.  This is especially good when my RSS feed is set to only display only a partial excerpt of the full post, so their readers (if any) will be forced to click on my links instead of their AdSense ads.

The plug in I will be using for this is called RSS Footer. It gives you the option of setting it to display your own personal linkage in either the header or footer of the RSS Feed. I have chosen the Header as the footer wouldn’t be visible because I don’t display the full Feed from my posts.

RSS Footer Admin Screen Shot.

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Yup, there’s already an update. What else would you expect from an open source CMS application that is so popular these days?

At least the developers are always on top of things when it comes to security. And that is one reason all WP users might want this update:

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration.

There are over 70 other bug fixes that you might be interested in too. To name off just a couple;

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Make sure you update, and to make updating easier, you might want to grab Wordpress Automatic Upgrade.

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I’ve just installed Wordpress 2.5 and only two plug-ins barfed up.

Unfortunately, I can’t really get into it at the moment because I have to get my ass off to hell work.

I would just like to say that I like what I am seeing so far.

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I’ve been really busy the past few days and have been keeping myself scarce to the internet world.

I have been working on a project that has been keeping me away from the chat applications and other distractions. This is a project that is very important and will finally get some nice cash into my pocket. Thanks to John Raul II, we both have made some serious progress in getting this project on the go.

I’m not going to reveal anything until it is completed, so you can stick in there and hopefully I’ll have something to share soon.

I also wanted to mention the post in the Wordpress Dashboard.  The Wordpress 2.5 Sneak Peek post really has me geared up for the latest Wordpress Release. If you haven’t already read this post then you should if you’re a Wordpress user.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Ooo! I can’t wait for the full release! I don’t do Beta, so I’ll impatiently wait for the final release of the latest Wordpress version. The screen shots they show indicate that Wordpress is getting a complete face lift. The features are going to be awesome too.

I can’t wait!

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