January 2008

The following posts were written in January 2008.

Sunday, January 27, 2008, 6:34pm

Secure Your WordPress Installation

Matt Cutts has a nice article and discussion about how to secure your WordPress installation. Security is a huge concern for businesses and organizations, especially when pitching an open source platform like WordPress. Therefore, any measures you can take as a freelancer to protect your client’s data is worthwhile. Matt mentions three tips, which I’ve summarized below:

1. Lock down your /wp-admin/ directory via an .htaccess file
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog

All three tips will take you less than 10 minutes total to implement, so why not?

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Saturday, January 26, 2008, 5:39pm

oDesk is Probably Not Worth Your Time (As a Freelancer)

I’ve received a few emails asking whether or not I use freelancing websites like oDesk to find additional work when things are slow. I replied “no” for a few reasons, but the main one being that online websites like oDesk are not really geared towards the typical freelance designer or developer.

oDeskFor example, do a search of available jobs with the keyword “wordpress”; as of this morning, there were 103 active projects. A few were PSD-to-theme services, but many were full redesigns of existing layouts or completely new WordPress-powered websites. (more…)

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Saturday, January 26, 2008, 11:21am

Google Presentations Adds PDF Export

I started using Google Documents because of a hard drive failure that left me without MS Office for about a month. Within a week, I realized I didn’t even need Office because of services like Google Documents and Zamzar.

Being an avid user of pretty much every Google app, I now use Google Documents to store many important Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. One of my main issues with using Google Presentations for PowerPoint files, however, was the inability to save my presentations back to a format I could work with off the web. After the latest round of feature updates, which includes PDF export, vector shapes, and better printing options, Google Presentations just got a little more practical for me.

Do freelancers even need MS Office for compatibility reasons? Are many people using the advanced features of Office document formats that would make upload to Google Documents or conversion to PDF difficult?

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Friday, January 25, 2008, 9:53pm

Can Pretty Sites Do Well with Google AdSense?

I just revisited the “suggested placement” for optimal AdSense performance for a client website, and again I find myself wondering if a nice looking website can make decent money from those somewhat ugly ad blocks.

I’ve found many clients know just enough about AdSense and online advertising to want to try something on their websites. Usually I’m unable to talk a client out of AdSense, but after they see the ad block on their brand new website, many ask for me to remove it, even after I’ve integrated the color scheme and placement within the rest of the design.

Is AdSense as popular a request as it was a year or two ago?

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Friday, January 25, 2008, 8:48pm

Rail Against the Conventional Wisdom

This was listed as a way to spark interest in your website or blog by someone at WickedFire (a popular affiliate marketing forum). For the most part I agree with this idea, especially if you feel very passionately about a particular topic. However, I can’t stand the posts that deliberately take an opposite stance without doing the research needed to make their argument.

It’s one of those things - if you pull it off, you look great. If you don’t, you end up looking pretty bad. And a bit lazy.

I’m not quite sure what got me started on this because, believe it or not, I don’t have a particular post in mind right now. Every so often though, I see one and think. Ouch.

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