BetterPrivacy

A FireFox plugin for protecting your privacy.
Learn more at this link.
Ever wondered why you are still tracked though you tried everything to prevent it?
BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO's on Google, YouTube, Ebay...
Better Privacy serves to protect against not deletable longterm cookies, a new generation of 'Super-Cookie', which silently conquered the internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. Concerning privacy Flash- and DOM Storage objects are most critical.
This addon was made to make users aware of those hidden, never expiring objects and to offer an easy way to get rid of them - since browsers are unable to do that for you.

Wordpress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint - How to identify a splog that is copying from your blog

One of the biggest problems facing Bloggers is the proliferation of copycat blogs. You post some rich content, the work of lots of effort, research, and something you really like, and suddenly it is being copied and posted onto other blogs without a credit (and for a normal reader, it would seem that the other blog is the creator of that content). And since you made your content available on the web, it is very very hard to prevent somebody from copying your content. You can try using some solutions that will put off some automated tools, and other solutions will thwart people who are less able, but it is impossible to prevent your blog from getting copied (even though you own the copyright to your content, the legal process for shutting down another blog can take time).
What you need to do is to find out quickly who all are copying your blogs so that you can take action geared towards warning these sites, and preventing them from copying your content. There are many tools / plugins that can do this, and one of these solutions is a Wordpress Plugin called 'Digital Fingerprint' (available at this site):
From the site:

This plugin helps blog owners stay vigilant against unauthorized content use by the overwhelming majority of blogs that are splogs. To combat splogs use of your content, this plugin will place a digital fingerprint, customized and tailored by each individual user of this plugin, into blog posts. The fingerprint is only visible in the RSS feed, not on the website itself. For example, already I have included my fingerprint in this post and unless you are reading this in an RSS reader, you haven’t seen it.
Once embedded in your post, the plugin allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint using Google Blogsearch, BlogPulse, and Sphere (see the admin screenshot, above). It also allows the quick and easy search for your digital fingerprint of the web itself using Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

You should refer to the site above, read the steps, and use the plugin; it can be real helpful in your effort to prevent people from copying your blog and going scot-free.

Make money from blogs - AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin: How to protect your RSS feed from getting copied automatically

For bloggers, a RSS feed is something critically important. With a RSS feed, you can build a set of dedicated readers who get pinged everytime you generate new content, as well as be able to control how much of your post you want them to see. If users are impressed with what they read, they will come to your blog more often to read other content on the blog, and spread the word around. So, having a RSS feed is critical. At the same time, a RSS feed is also a very useful tool in the hands of somebody who wants to make a simple automated system of copying your feed. Such a person will have a website build of content from many similar blogs, and automatically generate content from these different feeds. And since Google does not index RSS feeds, this other site will use a mechanism to take this feed and create a post on the other site. Of course, you hate this, but what can you do, short of stopping your RSS feed. Or you can take the effort to try and identify this person from your RSS feed and block, but it is no easy matter.
Another option is to use a Wordpress Plugin to try and give a different content to such an automated system (called a splog, a blog build from feed spammers who automatically take content from feeds and convert them into content on another blog, hence stealing your content). One way to reduce or prevent such stealing is through using a Wordpress Plugin called AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin (site). What does this Plugin do ?
From the site:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Read more about this plugin from other blogs at Google Search (link)

Make Money from Blogs - Wordpress plugin: Display your Page Rank on any page

For people with an understanding of what Google's Page Rank is, having a high Page Rank is a badge of honor; if the Page Rank is not high, people make all sorts of effort to get a higher Page Rank. They will link to sites with a higher Page Rank, post to article directories (to try to get some of the high rank of these sites). In fact, whenever Google does a review of Page Rank and either bumps up a person, or pushes up the Page Rank, there is a huge amount of emotion involved. For an individual site to have a high Page Rank, it is probable that they will get a corresponding larger amount of traffic (from search engines, as well as from people who would want to link to a site with a high Page Rank).
Hence, if you have a high Page Rank (in fact, a Page Rank of > 3 is good enough to display), you might want to display the Page Rank. Somebody with a lower Page Rank might look at the high Page Rank, and want to link to your site. Or you might be justifiably proud of the high Page Rank, and display the Page Rank on your site (link to article):

If your wordpress blog has a better page rank, here is a better chance to reveal it to your blog readers. That is Wordpress Page Rank Plugin Show-My-PageRank. You can also change the size, caption text, text color, font size etc from option window.
If you want to show your page rank to a custom area , say footer.php or header.php , just add the below line to corresponding section in theme editor window.

Go ahead and try it out; if you have a High Page Rank, why not display it as a badge of honor.

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Wordpress Plugin: Take control of your database access

Wordpress depends on the Database for almost everything. All the values your enter, all your content, everything that goes to make your blog is actually stored in a Database, mostly MySql. It is very much possible to use a Database connectivity frontend, typically provided by your hosting service, but it requires somebody with technical talent to make that happen. Instead, why not try and use a tool from within your Wordpress to make this happen.
Well, there is a Wordpress Plugin that can make this happen, and it is called WP-DBManager 2.50 (available at this link)

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Go, ahead, and take control of the DB. Remember, for a Wordpress site, the Database communication can make or break a site in terms of performance, so you should understand more about how your Database connectivity works.

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Wordpress Plugins: Use a plugin to update your plugins

If you have a blog on Wordpress (or multiple such blogs), there are a lot of extensions you can make for your blog. You get a cool theme, and then start looking for plugins that give your blog additional features, whether these be administration, or allowing users to tag or search, or the plugin shows other related posts and comments. Okay, so your plugin is now in place, and your blog is ready. What happens a couple of months down the line, when the plugins you use may have some updates, such as having some bug fixes, or some new features, or the plugin has been updated to work with a newer version of Wordpress. How long will you keep on trying to track down updates, and manually updating these plugins ? This can be pretty painful, and take a lot of effort.
So, there should be some way to automate the process, or at least make it simpler, and there is an answer - Single Click Plugin Updater WordPress Plugin (site).

This plugin extends the plugin update notification feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 by adding an “update automatically” link to update notifications. When you click the link, the new version of the corresponding plugin is downloaded and installed automatically. It also lets you know which plugins have update notifications enabled.

There are a lot of comments in the page, so if you have a problem, it should be easy to find the solution.

In addition, you can read more at this page on wordpress.org (link)

Single-click plugin upgrades in WP 2.3 and up. The techniques that this plugin uses are slightly different from the built-in plugin upgrade feature in WP 2.5, so it's possible that on some blogs the plugin updater works and the built-in updater doesn't (or vice versa).
Quickly determine if there are any pending updates and how many plugins are active. This plugin displays that information right below the "Plugin Management" headline.

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Make money from Blogs - Relating your Flickr photos to your Wordpress blog

There are many different ways you have to express yourself, such as doing so through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, through photo sharing sites such as Picasaweb, Flickr, Photos on Facebook, personal blogs, and so on; similarly you can share on blogging sites such as Wordpress, Blogger, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these sites are not linked, and you would be finding yourself duplicating some of your work. Consider the example of a great photo that you want to put on Flickr, and also share on your blogs at Wordpress or Blogger. So, what do you do ? Well, the hardest way is to upload these to all the services individually, while manually tracking the status of which photo has been updated to which site. The smarter way is to figure out how to upload at one place, and use elsewhere in a smart way with minimum effort. Google already does that at Picasaweb since it owns both Blogger and Picasaweb; so a photo updated to Blogger actually is stored at an album in Picasaweb.
If you are a great user of Flickr and Wordpress, then there is a solution available to you as well. This is in the form of leveraging the Flickr API to make this connection, and here is a Wordpress Plugin that allows you to do that (link to plugin page - called Flickr Photo Album for WordPress). Read more on the site:

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site. And if you want, you could also hook it up with Lightbox or any other number of display libraries.
On the backend, this plugin will also add a new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.

Installation instructions along with a detailed feature set are available on the page.

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Wordpress Hack Block: Login Lockdown

What does somebody do when they try to figure out your password for Wordpress account ? They try multiple attempts at your password, and Wordpress allows an atacker to make multiple attempts. Would it not help you if you could get a report whenever somebody makes multiple attempts to access your login account. Here is one Wordpress Plugin that helps you in this effort. The plugin is proactive in these security measures, since it directly blocks access from an IP range if there are a number of invalid login attempts from that range.
Page to read more and download (link here)

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

Wordpress Hack Block: Limit Login Attempts Plugin

Wordpress allows any number of attempts at login, so if somebody is trying to do a brute force dictionary attack onto the admin section of your site, at some point, they may suceed. But the basic issue is, why are you making it easy for hackers to do so; you should set a limit on the number of times a wrong login can be attempted on your site. Here is a plugin called 'Limit Login Attempts' that allows you to do this. Get it from this page (link)

Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.
Features:
Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (for each IP). Fully customizable
(WordPress 2.7+) Limit the number of attempts to log in using auth cookies in same way
Informs user about remaining retries or lock out time on login page
Optional logging, optional email notification
Handles server behind reverse proxy

Wordpress Optimization Tool: SQL Monitor

One of the ways in which you can optimize the performance of your Wordpress site is by reviewing the processing of database calls in terms of frequency of such queries, the number of such calls being made, the performance of these calls, how optimized are they, and so on. It is not easy to determine all these numbers, and you will need a tool to help you determine these numbers. So, here is SQL Mintor (link to page)

WordPress can provide only the list of the queries and the developer has to manually run every query and analyze it. Very boring, isn't it? SQLMon tries to help the developers and analyzes the query itself, reporting everything that needs attention.
The plugin is perfect for WordPress developers, plugin and theme developers and site administrators who are trying to find out why the blog is too slow

Optimizing your Wordpress account - 1

In 2 previous posts where I described problems with my Wordpress account, the preliminary solutions prescribed were:
- Keep your Wordpress account updated to the latest release
- Keep spam to a minimum, including emptying the Akismet spam folder on a regular basis

These are just temporary solutions, given that Wordpress is supposed to be not yet including optimization code in it and as a result, takes more CPU than required (see a description of Wordpress optimization deficiences on this page).

What are some of the other things you can do:
1. Review the list of plugins that are in use. A number of users download a number of plugins and keep them active. Each plugin is a performance hit of some sort, and you should review your plugins to see which of these plugins are really necessary vs. plugins that do not add much value and are a performance hit.
2. Use some sort of caching in order to prevent each page hit querying the database and slowing down the server. You can use WP-Cache (link) or you can use Word Super Cache (link)
3. Using graphics. If you have a number of graphics, those are additional graphics that need to be served to your users. As an example, refer this calculation from Wordpress Codex:

For example, let's say the front page of your blog calls upon 8 graphics to create the "look" of your blog's design. Add to this number the various WordPress template files it takes to build your page. You've got the header, sidebar, footer, and post content area at a minimum. That's four more "calls" to files on your site. For 100 visitors, those files get loaded 1200 times. For 1000 visitors, those files are accessed and loaded 12000 times. This increases your bandwidth and server activity.

4. Use spam filters such as Akismet to prevent comment spam
5. Try and get others to host your content. You have some great graphics or some analytics that need calculation which are done at run time. These also take server processing load, and is preferable to get content from elsewhere. For example, analyics information is also availabe at sites such as Google Analytics and all the calculation is done on those servers.