I found a few good themes this morning thanks to Smashing Magazine’s 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes. I actually found two that I really liked, I put the visually fun one here on this site and a clean easy to read one on Linux Neophyte.

That story couldn’t have come at a better time, I was hating the WP themes I’d been using on both sites and had almost no luck at all finding anything decent on http://themes.wordpress.net/. Oh and navigating that site SUCKS! It really needs an overhaul.

Anyway, if you use WP and want something new, check out the story above

Back when I started managing my own WordPress (WP) install, I was (and by was, I mean will always be) paranoid about letting just anyone with a ‘puter at my /wp-admin dir.

• /wp-admin is where you go in WP to control the blog. It’s where you write to and post from, as well as perform administrative tasks.

I felt it prudent, so I took a few steps to protect the place. Firstly, I renamed the default admin account to something else. A task made fairly easy using your web host’s tools (phpmyadmin). Doing this will make it more difficult for fools to to make their way into the blog’s control panel. I also set up one helluvagood pass phrase for myself. Once that was done I took steps to limit just how many computers can hit that directory. This was done with a .htaccess file. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htaccess for info on what else you can do with htaccess and some tutorials.

My file looks something like this:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “MattSnell”
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.1.100
allow from 192.168.1.101
</LIMIT>

What it does is deny access to ALL IP addresses (order deny,allow and deny from all) and then selectively allows ONLY those in the allow from list.

Since I have two public IP addresses that almost never change, I just specify them in the allow list and upload the file to my /wp-admin directory using scp or ftp. If my IP address ever changes, I won’t be able to edit or otherwise admin the blog until I go in and update the file. No biggie, only takes a moment.

So there you have it, change the default admin username, set a good pass and limit how many IP addresses can access the control panel. Feeling better already

So, looks like I’ve really been keeping up with this blogging thing. Last time was August 3rd…. Well, to be honest, that was the last time I posted. I see a draft here about a new laptop and Vista that is waiting for completion.. I’m gonna count that as a 75% complete blog session (my blog, my rules).

I just spent all of 10 minutes installing yet another WordPress blog, this time for my dad. I can’t get over just how easy it is to create one. All you need is the ability to create a MySQL user and database (cPanel on any Linux hosting provider gives you that), FTP or (preferably) shell access to the server and the ability to edit a text file.

WordPress has a famous 5 minute install that you can follow to do the job, the extra 5 minutes (in my case) is used up going back into cPanel and then phpMyAdmin to rename the default “admin” account to something else and to tweak the permalinks as I just can’t stand the default. Poof! You got yourself a new blog and you’re ready to share your opinions and inane blabber with the rest of the world!

Check out my Dad’s blog, he’ll be posting topics he covers on his weekly WATD radio show.