Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

Protect your WordPress website

The WordPress brute-force login attacks show little sign of abating and we recommend all users ensure their sites are secured against this attack.

The Attack

Since spring 2013, hackers have been calling the WordPress login url with “standard” usernames (like ‘admin’) and thousands of passwords.  In our experience nearly all users have ‘admin’ as a user account so this makes them especially vulnerable.

The Solution

Well – not a solution exactly but it should protect your site being hacked.

The solution we propose is to change your username to something only you know about. If you are creating a new WordPress site, don’t use the default ‘admin’. Choose a new username.

If you have an existing site, you can’t simply delete the user ‘admin’ – therefore there are lot’s of free plugins around to change it instead. The one we’ve been using is called ‘Username Changer’. Install it, activate it, change your username and then remove it.  It’s a one off job.

2020Media can help

Additionally 2020Media would like to  see these WordPress attacks stop – realistically this is not going to happen – it’s a distributed attack from botnets, and things will change only when it’s not worth the hackers while any more.

2020Media are happy to change your login username for you plus we can add additional server-side security which will mitigate the denial-of-service aspects of the attack.

Managed WordPress

The Managed WordPress service from 2020Media is something anyone not logging in to their WordPress site on a weekly basis should seriously consider. Even if you do, get peace of mind as updates to WordPress, Themes and plugins are done for you. Read more

Tips and Tricks

Wordress Tips – reindex media

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Ever copied a WordPress site to another server and lost your images? But when you look, the images are still in the wp-content/uploads/ folders.

WordPress keeps a index or database of the images you upload and without this, WordPress doesn’t see the files.

We’ve yet to find a plugin that simply reindexes what you’ve already got, but this plugin is a workaround:

Plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/add-from-server/

It allows you to import media and files into the WordPress uploads manager from any location on your server, and in bulk.

Plugin screenshot
Plugin screenshot – add from server
Tips and Tricks

Free images for your WordPress site

PhotoDropper has over 62 million free images that WordPress owners can access and insert right from their WordPress dashboard.

photodropper
photodropper

They also have a premium tier that offers more professional photos on a pay-by-the-photo basis.

Many people can locate images from stock photo websites or their own libraries, but this involves extra steps of downloading the image, resizing perhaps, then uploading to the WordPress site. Checking for copyright also takes more time. This plugin does it all from within WordPress, using Creative Commons licences.

The PhotoDropper plugin is free!

You can download the plugin here, or just search for “PhotoDropper” from inside your plugins dashboard.

With PhotoDropper you have access to the entire Flickr Creative Commons database offering you over 243.8 million Creative Commons images all totally free and totally legal for you to use on your website… As long as you follow the simple licensing, which PhotoDropper makes easy.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons lets people share any work (photo, graphics, writing, etc.) with the world so that anyone can use and remix their creations under the licensing terms the authors provide. It is usually denoted with “Some Rights Reserved” instead of  “All Rights Reserved.”

Flickr (part of Yahoo) has one of the world’s largest collections of such photos that people have shared with just such a license.

The PhotoDropper Plugin makes the process of finding and adding these photos to your posts  simple and takes care of necessary attribution automatically.

Learn more about the Creative Commons license along with its rules and restrictions here.