Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason.  Some days they are even successful.  In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues.  It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 – The iFrame – The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load.  It seemed abnormally long.  I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet.  Huge red flag there.  It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there.  Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
2. Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.

It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.

So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.

Upgrading to a newer version of Wordpress isn’t to complicated, however some precautions should be taken. The list below is a bit more detailed that Wordpress provides, but I’m just trying to line item out everything.

Prerequisites:

• FTP access.
• Blog admin access.
• 10-30 minutes for most blogs. This is also dependent on how big the blog is and how many plugins the blog has. Webhosting and internet connection speed can also play a big part.

Notes:

• No other authors should be in the blog during the upgrade. If they are, it probably won’t hurt anything, but they’ll be confused as it won’t work correctly.
• Not all plugins are always compatible with newer versions of Wordpress; especially when it’s a larger update. It would be a good idea to visit each plugin’s homepage to ensure it’s compatible. Wordpress also tries to keep a list, such as the Wordpress 2.5 plugin compatibility list. If a plugin is not compatible, either wait to upgrade until after the plugin is updated, or find an alternative.

Upgrading:

1. Backup your blog’s database. Grab the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and use that to run backups via the Wordpress admin. It’s simple to install and easy to use.

Every blog comes with comments and pretty much every blogger is basing their success on comments. Sure, they may say they don’t, but when you have no comments you feel like you’re just talking to yourself. So how do you get comments?

1 – Write posts that are conversational and something that people can relate to. If you write posts in a way that there feels like there is no room for discussion, then comments will be harder to get.

My wife is great at making posts people can relate to. She put out a post two years ago when she broke her leg and is closing in on 1000 comments from others that have broken theirs. She’s not a marketer, or a PR person, just an average blogger who happened to write in a way that people felt compelled to comment.

2 – Invite comments. If you put out a top ten post, or go off on a rant, ask uses what they think. Literally put at the end of the post “Do you agree?”, “Do you have any tips to add?” or other questions that are inviting comments.

Blog are just like any computer in the fact that they are only as good, and secure, as the software on them. Keeping your blog software up to date is important, but so is keeping your plugins and third party code updated.

Updating your blog’s plugins can give your blog a few advantages:

• Additional features if the plugin is a major update.
• Security fixes.
• Optimized plugin code that runs faster and more efficient.
• Better compatibility with the blog software or other plugins.
• Better compatibility with third party sites if it’s part of another service.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t update your plugins as it’s quite hard to keep them up to date; especially if you have a lot of them. Some plugins have update notifiers in them, others now tie back into Wordprss.org to look for updates. But that’s just the update notification, they all require some time and effort to download and update.

De-activing plugins is a lot easier, unless you actually have to modify the code, and doing so has its benefits.

• It can speed up the blog as it has fewer scripts to run or plugins to load.

Most blogs are setup to allow anyone to make a comment on a post without having to have an account. However, some blogs are trying to create communities and require visitors to register for a free account in order to leave a comment. Sometimes this registration has other additional benefits, like forum participation, other times it doesn’t.

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A reader asked me a question that I found quite intriguing, “How do I get people to find my blog posts?”

There are a number of ways that people can come across you and your blog posts. Here are just a few.

1. Search Engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are constantly looking for new content to crawl and rank. Ensure your site is search friendly and submit an XML sitemap for faster indexing. Before you know it, the search engines will start bringing traffic.
2. Tagging Engines – Sites like Technorati have blog searches that focus on serving up content based on what categories and/or tags you’ve used with your post. Ensure you’re using good categories and tags for additional exposure in tagging sites.
3. Blog Sites – Technorati, Google Blog Search and community sites like Topix all index blog sites specifically and use those posts to feed their content. No websites allowed, only blogs.
4. Feed Reader Suggestions – Rojo and Bloglines have the ability to share or suggest feeds based on what the user is already subscribed to.
5. Social Networks - If you have a Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog or one of the many social bookmarking sites, included your feed in those sites to gain a bit more exposure.

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Being in SEO, there are lots of things to consider with a blog to make it more search engine friendly. One of those is the title tags and meta description. I’ve going through a few plugins in the past, but until Clive told me to check out All in One SEO Pack, I didn’t have one that did it all.

At first, I was a little nervous of All in One SEO Pack. The title of the plugin sounded a little egotistical. However, I tried it out and have been very happy with it.

All in One SEO Pack has a few great features. The first is re-arranging the title tags so that the post title comes before the blog name. You can also put in custom title tag templates for the homepage, posts, categories, archives, tag archives, pages and search pages. Or, you can write your own title tags per post.

In the past I used Optimal Title, which was nice, but you couldn’t have custom title tags and you had to modify the template to make the plugin work. It simply just put the post name before the site name. Then I switched to SEO Title tag.

Blogging is about more than just the site owner, it’s about the users too. Where as comments are a great way to get feedback, so are polls. You can easily ask preferences, opinions or collect user data from your subscribers.

An easy way to add polls to any Wordpress blog is via the WP-Polls plugin. WP-Polls is an Ajax plugin that allows a site owner to create as many polls as they want and easily integrate them into their posts.

Some features of WP-Polls include

• Unlimited Polls
• Allows user to select more than one answer.
• Tracks IPs so no one can vote more than they are allowed.
• Poll start and end dates & times. Optional ‘No end date’ also available.
• Styling of poll bar to match with your site.
• Sorting options for poll answers and results.
• Customizable Templates
• Stats & More.

How do you use WP-Polls?

First, ensure that the WP-Polls plugin is installed and running on your Wordpress blog. You can tell for sure if you see the Polls menu option in the main menu after Options.