Pakzilla » Wordpress

5 reasons I like Bluehost

Tahir Akram — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:08:16 +0000

I was in terrible tension with my previous hosting provider. They down my site often and was having very less responsiveness in support. My account also was having very low bandwidth. So a friend suggested me to evaluate some hosting providers and I selected Bluehost.

Reasons I like Bluehost

Bluehost provide hosting unlimited domains with unlimited space and bandwidth. So it’s worry free thing. You can bring all your website here. And there is no need to pay for every single.
Support. They are awesome in it. I used their live chat support and they were very helpful.
No confusion in selecting a plan for you, because they offer only one plan. And making good in it.
They have good history in web hosting. If you whois some favorite domains, you will notice Bluehost name servers.
I used auto-installer and it works like a charm. Installed WordPress on an addon domain in seconds. (there are other install scripts)

Things you should do when changing your WordPress host

Tahir Akram — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:34:39 +0000

Just couple of hours back I changed the hosting service provider of my this WordPress blog. The former service provider was giving me very low bandwidth and that was consumer in the first twenty days of this month. I have not came across any big hassle in shifting to new servers. But I do experienced some things that I wanted to share.

Always have backup

That’s your all investment. And never underestimate their importance. Always take backups of your contents and your database. At any point of time there could be things when you need them badly and you can not access your FTP/DB server. From now onwards I am also going to make this a habit. It always pays well in future.

Taking backup by phpMyAdmin

When I was taking the backup of my database, I noticed phpMyAdmin does not include the script of create database if not exist in the SQL file. You should create a database with the same name that is mentioned in your wp-config.php file. And need to create the same user too. Associating that user with newly created database is the next part and giving that user the privileges (all). After these steps, you are good to import your this SQL backup file to your new server’s phpMyAdmin

The .htaccess file

Some time for permalink settings we do editting in .htaccess files that usually present in the root directory of your server. (if you are not running mydomain.com/blog strtucture, in this case this file will be in blog directory). Take care of this file too when takeing backup. Some FTP browsers does not show this file. So must ensure to copy this file if your have created or it exists. If you never created this, dont bother.

Prevent hot linking of images

You can save your bandwidth by preventing the hotlinking of your image files outside of your blog. People usually do this, when they link your image file on their webpages to save their storage. And they start eating your bandwidth. So with some WordPress plugin you can prevent it. I am looking that plugin. I will update this post when I will find some suitable plugin.

Happy blogging.

Easy way to create your WordPress mobile website

Tahir Akram — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:12:17 +0000

I was thinking if there is any way to optimize wordpress website for mobile browsers. To make Pakzilla mobile website I used WordPress Mobile Pack plugin that automatically detect the user agent and optimized your website according to mobile.

You must try this plugin, for best optimization for mobile web browsers.

Download plugin

You can download WordPress Mobile Pack from here.

WordPress app for Nokia is now available

Tahir Akram — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:10:44 +0000

Now you can use WordPress on your Nokia phone. WordPress.org has release an open source S60 app for this. Quite handy application. As I have to use Opera to access my blog. But I hope the experience of using it through app will be great.

You can now post new posts and pages, edit existing content on your blog, manage comments, check stats and more on the go.

You can download app on Nokia Ovi store here.

How to use Facebook Like count button on WordPress

Tahir Akram — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 08:57:33 +0000

Place the following code where ever you want to show the Facebook Like count button on your WordPress blog.

ID)); ?>&layout=box_count&show_faces=false&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&font=arial" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:63px;">

Preview

Now a days, I am a WordPress advocate :)

Tahir Akram — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:30:45 +0000

Now a days a lot of my friends catching me about setting up their websites or personal blog. Its really a dotCom fashion. Sounds its become the need of everyone. People are loving to contribute towards Internet. And what I am suggesting is to just start with WordPress.

With my love with in WordPress I am pretty biased with it. Though I am not a big WordPress hacker. But to start a personal or corporate portfolio WordPress is the best option to go. Its agile. What you need to do is to find some suitable theme for you. Get designed your logo and color scheme. Customize your theme. So that it gives the unique look. And your site is ready.

Fixing wordpress automatic update problem

Tahir Akram — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:14:43 +0000

I tried many times to update my WordPress version from 2.9 to 3.0.1. But whenever I tried from dashboard, it just got stuck.

The wp-content directory was also in 777 mode. But still I cant get my WordPress updated. To get this done, I put my root directory to chmode 777. And I disabled all plugins. And it just works like a charm. If you are also in same situation, you can try this trick.

Download premium WordPress theme Thesis 1.7

Tahir Akram — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:24:48 +0000

Some days back I spend time in hunting some quality WordPress themes which can give me great options and configuration. Thesis theme could be your choice if you think the same. I have seen many sites built over this theme.

You can download Thesis 1.7 from here.

How to solve image upload problem in wordpress blog

Tahir Akram — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:42:45 +0000

If you have hosted WordPress blog. You might experience following error message while uploading images.

The uploaded file could not be moved to /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads

I was messing it to resolve this issue without causing any big damage to my hosted blog environment. There was a strange thing, if I put chmod to 777 and in Settings -> Miscellaneous Setting I have wp-content value in Store uploads in this folder text box. This scheme works but it cause a lot of rush in my wp-content directory with the big pile of images. But still I was not satisfied that I didn’t used uploads folder. I change permission mode of uploads folder to 777. And put wp-content/uploads in Miscellaneous Settings. But all goes in vein.

My issue resolved my just making another folder in wp-content. I name it upload. And put wp-content/upload in Miscellaneous Settings with chmod 777 where wp-content is 755.

Every thing goes smooth. I am able to upload images in a separate directory. Leave the uploads folder if it creating headache for you.

How to protect your website from gumblar.cn infection

Tahir Akram — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:14:12 +0000

Yesterday one of my websites got infected by a suspicious malware gumblar.cn. This website contains several exploits and trojans that can harm your system. How it starts its infection is to invoke Adobe Acrobat Reader on your machine. I found after browsing my infected site, Acrobat Reader process was running in Task Manager.

According to Google Safe Browsing Service

What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 2 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-05-05, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-05-05.
Malicious software includes 2341 scripting exploit(s), 6 trojan(s).

This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS42831 (UKSERVERS).

I found some of php files were altered by adding a iframe at the end of the page. My infected files were /wp-content/themes//index.php and /wp-admin/index.php and in same directory index-extra.php. I didnt found any other file which was infected by this.

I manually removed this embedded iframe and every things works fine.

If you have some type of information about this infection, people will highly appriciate who are messing arround the internet about the solution of this problem.

Update (5/11/09): I am able to remove this malware from my blog and WordPress admin site.

Removal

Removed image.php file from all images folder. image.php infection only found in ‘image’ folder. Make sure you didn’t remove the orignal image.php file. If your orignal file infected, only remove malicious code
Looked for iframe code added on the top or bottom of php page and remove it. I found this iframe which I removed.
Checked all PHP, HTML and JS files for added anonymous Java Script methods. I found all JS files infected in wp-include directory
Put httpdoc directory permission to 755
Scaned my computer with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, which identified several threats and removed
Updated my AVG Anti Virus
Changed my FTP password
I did all this manual code removal activity from my Pleask control panel

Please fell free to make comment and your suggestions to make more security measures to prevent such threats.