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After reading about a few Wordpress Blogs getting hacked, I am finding that I have started reading more about the Online Security aspects, and probably a few of my last posts reflect that as well. Recently I have come across a really nice Wordpress Plugin, which is a great tool to restrict unauthorized access to your WordPress Blog.

Welcome to Login LockDown Wordpress Plugin.

It records the IP address and timestamp of every attempt which results in failure to login to your Wordpress Account. If it is seen that the a particular IP is repeatedly attempting and failing to login to your account then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This foils the attempt to break your password simple by trial and error methods.

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.

They have recently released the version 1.2 of the plugin, which is compatible with WordPress 2.5.1 also.

Download: Login LockDown v1.2

There are many ways to answer a question like How to Write a Blog Post. There are many web tools available. Some bloggers use blog writing tools like Windows Live Writer, while others use the built in WYSIWIG text editors. Some of the Blog Writing Tools are mentioned below.

1. ScribeFire: ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.
2. Windows Live Writer: One of the most popular web tools for writing blog posts from the stable of Microsoft.
3. MarsEdit: Powerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac, which allows you to write, preview, and publish a blog post without a web browser. However it is not FREE.
4. BlogJet: BlogJet is a blog client for Windows that allows you to manage your blogs without opening a browser.
5. Qumana: Qumana features include easy text formatting and image insertion, simple Technorati tagging, and advertising insertion with Q Ads.
6. Elicit: Elicit is a desktop blog client that integrates Web and RSS services from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bloglines etc. in one desktop application for the purpose of creating content for blogs. But it is also not free.
7. Ecto: Ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for Mac OSX, supporting a wide range of weblog systems.
8. RocketPost: It is touted to be designed for serious bloggers and business users.It claims to be the only blog editor with WYSIWYG editing, full local editing and full blog import. You have to buy to use it.
9. Thingamablog: Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi / php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server.

Besides all these software and tools to write a blog post, I have recently learned that Word 2007 is also a powerful Blog Writing Tool. I have been using Windows Live Writer to mostly write Blog Posts till now, but I find Word 2007 to be even better in some cases. Word 2007 seems to give you a richer interface. For instance, with one click, you can insert any of the following into your blog post.
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• Pictures
• Shapes
• SmartArt Graphics
• WordArt
• Symbols

Formatting your blog post is much more easier in Word 2007, than in Windows Live Writer. I also found that the speed of Live writer to be slower than Word 2007, both to start and work.

However, the availability of many useful plugins make Live Writer a useful piece of software to write blog post, which is missing in Word 2007. Yet another thing is that Live Writer supports Technorati Tagging while it does not seem to be possible for Word 2007.

You have to first open a new document in Word 2007, and select the option of a Blog Post. When opening for the first time, it asks you to add new blog account, where you enter the URL address of your blog and the username / password of your blog. Thereafter you will know for yourself, how to write a blog post with Word 2007.

A few screenshots…

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After the recent crackdown of Google on Paid Text Link Ads on Blogs and websites, this highly disputed way of making money with blogs had been ignored by most of the bloggers.

But now, I have been recently contacted by TNX.net for a review, which is yet another system of trading, selling and exchanging text links on your blogs. Since, I have been seeing lots of bloggers using it, I thought why not give it a test drive. So here is it.

What is TNX.net

It is marketplace for selling text links on your website. You earn credits for it, which you can exchange for buying text links for your website or simply you can sell them for getting few dollars. For displaying links, you have to add a code on the web pages on your website, and you are given the freedom to choose which pages on your website you want to advertise. TNX.net automatically searches for the content on your webpage and displays contextual text links of the advertisers already registered with them.

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The “price”, which you get for each sale is calculated automatically and is mostly dependent upon

1. Google PageRank (PR) of each page,
2. website category,
3. link popularity,
4. and number of outbound links.

Advantages to Webmasters

• You can sell links on any and every page of your website, meaning more profits.
• Easy code installation, no more individual link building.
• The price for each link is calculated automatically, and it is fair for all.
• The system is Secure and Confidential: No public list of users. All sales are automated.
• You can choose your advertisers yourself. Learn more about it here on Digital Point forum thread.

Advantages to Advertisers

• It improves your site ranking in search engines as the links are in HTML and can be read by Search Engines.
• You can place millions of non-reciprocal links to your site automatically.
• Links are contextual and are placed on relevant pages
• Geo-targeting is possible.
• Since it is a new service, still in its BETA, the prices are among the lowest on the market. For as low as $11 a month you may get up to 10,000 static links to your website.
• Convenient interface.

They also have an affiiate program, where they reward you to bring new members to their system. They are also running a unique schemes for new members, where they will give 2000 credits for you as a new member. You can use these credit points to earn text links to your websites or exchange them with other members. If you want to sale or purchase these links, then you can also do that but such transactions are “taxed” as high as 25% (12.5% from both sides), which I think is quite high.

It is fact that today many bloggers are flocking to be a part of their network. Today I checked their site, and found following data, which is quite impressive for such a new service.

Users: 51,301, (daily growth: +0.31%)
Sale speed: 4,866 Links/Hour
Pages in TNX database: 32,914,292
Text link ads sold: 22,872,631

But despite all these advantages, I am refraining myself, at least for present, from adding their code to this blog, because it is also a fact that participating in such a massive link trading network can easily be tracked by the Big ‘G’, and I don’t want to burn my fingers yet again, specially after last year’s Google Slap on some of my blogs.

This is my personal opinion. If you want to be part of that network, go ahead and click the banner below. It will directly take you to the sign-up page of TNX.net.

Wordpress is simply great.

Besides providing the best SEO features, the type of flexibility it provides through its plugins, is simply unmatched by any other blogging platform.

The latest plugin found be my, is WP-Print, which allows your readers to get a print ready version of any of your post, with a simple click of a mouse. This plugin is specially useful for blogs, which regularly post articles about How-Tos and Tuotrials.

It will create a printable version of your posts by using its own CSS file, and it will automatically launch the printable page when the user clicks on the “Print this” link that you will insert on your blog. If you want to see a live example of WP-Print wordpress plugin, you can visit the Pick The Brain blog.

A nice useful plugin.

Backlinks are the lifeline of blogs and websites. They give you traffic, they give you exposure and more importantly, they give you the much needed Google Juice, which is so important to rank up in SERP.

Given the importance of Backlinks, they are probably hardest thing to gain. People follow all sorts of practices to get Backlinks including link exchange, buying links etc.
I have recently written a guest post for CourtneyTurtle.com, which was well received. In this post I have aired my way of link exchanges.

Yet another popular method of getting backlinks to your blog is by commenting on blogs, which have rel=”nofollow” attribute removed from their comments section. There are lots and lots of them, and this method is an easy one to get some crucial backlinks to your blog.

But, how to find good dofollow blogs

There are many ways, read on. But the best one is probably the last one.

1. Use DoFollow lists: Web Tools and tips is also a dofollow blog and it also shows some link love to the fellow dofollow blogs by maintaining a list of dofollow blogs. You can use that list, or similar lists on other blogs.

2. Use CommentKahuna: This is a small downloadable program, which I found from John Cow’s blog. After download, you have to enter a keyword into it, and it claims to search for the blog posts for that keyword from the dofollow blogs. Then you can choose, where to comment and thus earn a backlink. The benefit is that, the backlink you earned is from a blog which is in the related niche as you, and so it is more important.

But, when I used it, I found that the many of the blogs, which were found by CommentKahuna for me, were actually carrying a rel=”external nofollow” attribute, which is as good as nofollow. So it was useless for me, although many of the John Cow visitors have praised it highly.

3. Use DoFollo.com: This is a website, which is acting just perfect for me. It finds quality dofollow blogs, for the keyword of your choice and you can easily comment on them. Certainly a website worth considering, if you don’t think it to be an unethical method of earning backlinks for your blog.

What is your take, let us know.

Blogging today has become a very powerful medium of fast communication of information on the web. There are millions of blogs today on the web, thousands of blogs are being created every hour, and most of them are on on the free platforms, Blogspot being one of them. The popularity of blogspot originates from the fact that blogspot allows bloggers to modify the template and thus the blogger is in a position to serve Adsense and other ads on their blogs. And this is where the problem starts for the genuine bloggers.

Earning money online by serving ads on blogs seem to an easy solution, and so it lures many of them, who just copy the content created by others on these blogs, also sometimes synonymous with the term splogs, and try to make money. These splogs are sometimes able to make serious money, out of the content created by others.

This has two pronged effects on the genuine blog. First, it is depriving the original blogger from the benefits due to him, and more importantly, the process is also creating a web page, which has a duplicate content on the web. Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Although Google is smart enough to judge, which is duplicate and which is original, by the indexing dates and other methods, but still there are chances that the original content is downgraded by Google just because a rogue has copied and pasted it elsewhere.

So what do you do in such a case.

If the splog is a Blogspot blog, which is the case in most of the Splogs, Blogger provides a easy solution for that. Simply Flag the splog, on the navigation bar, which blogspot provides on the top of their blogs.

However, if the splog has hid the navigation bar, which requires a simple hack of the blogspot template, then you can report the splog to Blogger by following following link.

Blogger/Blogspot abuse reporter tool

It has been reported that although it takes some time to Blogger to take action, but action has been taken.

Lorelle, has written two excellent articles on applaud those who warn you your blog’s content theft and What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content. Check them out.

Ping sites, what are they?

Pinging is basically the process of sending a small piece of code by the concerned blog to the pinging service. What does that code contains. Pingoat, the premium pinging services says…

A blog ping is just a piece of text, in simple words. It’ll contain your blog name and the url. It is usually prepared in the XML format. The servers that accept ping have special programs for accepting and processing these ‘XML pings’.

Why should I use pinging

Today’s blogging world is really competitive. It is vaguely said out of the 100 posts being published on blogs, only 1 contains the content which has actually been created. Out of the rest, 9 add some value to the already available content. Out of the rest 90, only 40, transform that information into their own words, and the rest 50 simply post the same content to their blogs….rather splogs.

So you can imagine, how challenging it is to survive and grow, in this world of market driven economy, where blog promotion is the key to success.

So, how to promote your blog fast

In this era of cut-throat competition, there is a rush to break the news at the earliest. Sometimes, blogosphere reminds me of the TV news channels, which compete with each other to break the news before others. Similar is the case with blogs.

Every blogger wants that his post is available to readers and search engines and blog search services before others. And Pinging is the service, which plays a major role in it. So, if you want to quickly circulate your blog posts to the maximum number of readers, it is recommended that you include following top pinging sites, and configure your wordpress blog to automatically ping these 65 great pinging services.

1. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
2. http://1470.net/api/ping
3. http://api.feedster.com/ping
4. http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
5. http://api.moreover.com/ping
6. http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
7. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
8. http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
9. http://bblog.com/ping.php
10. http://bitacoras.net/ping
11. http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
12. http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
13. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
14. http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
15. http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
16. http://coreblog.org/ping/
17. http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
18. https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
19. http://ping.amagle.com/
20. http://ping.bitacoras.com
21. http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
22. http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
23. http://ping.blo.gs/
24. http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
25. http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
26. http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
27. http://ping.feedburner.com
28. http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
29. http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
30. http://ping.weblogs.se/
31. http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
32. http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
33. http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
34. http://rpc.britblog.com/
35. http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
36. http://rpc.newsgator.com/
37. http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
38. http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
39. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
40. http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
41. http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
42. http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
43. http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
44. http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
45. http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
46. http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
47. http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
48. http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
49. http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
50. http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
51. http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
52. http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
53. http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
54. http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
55. http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
56. http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
57. http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
58. http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
59. http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
60. http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
61. http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
62. http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
63. http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
64. http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
65. http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

[Source: Wordpress official website]

Update: Yet another list of 75 pinging services are available at Binh Dot Com. You may check for your self, because some of the entries may be common in both the lists.

We assume, that you already know how to configure your wordpress blog to automatically ping these services each time you publish a new blog post.

In case you do not know, just go to Options > Writing and copy/ paste this list in the box of list of update services.

P.S.: Including so many of pinging services to your Wordpress might slow your posting. In order to ping these services in the background, and not affect your speed, your can install the nice Wordpress plugin called No Ping Wait.