1. Don’t use “admin”. Don’t use it as your admin user name. Doing this reduces the amount of effort a hacker has to put in (even if it’s via an automated script) to break into your site.
2. Use strong passwords. Strong passwords do not have your dog’s name or your birthday or your name. Use a mix of upper and lowercase letters, as well as digits. The longer the better, but use at least eight characters altogether.
3. Change passwords. Change your admin and all user passwords regularly. If you have other bloggers on your site, make sure they change passwords too. Most people can’t decide when to do this, so tell them. Ask them to change their password at the beginning of each month – or on the last day. It’s easy to build a habit about this.
4. View your site regularly. This is to ensure that it’s running fine. A friend of mine recently found out the hard way that his hosting company changed the default setting on the web server of one of his sites. So instead of the WordPress index.php being served automatically, the old static home page, index.html, was showing. This cost him a month of advertising revenue from one network, because the network plugin couldn’t update the ads.
• If you have multiple sites, one way to manage them all quickly is to set up a list of their URLs. If the list is clickable, that’s even better. For example, Google Spreadsheet cells are clickable if a cell contains a valid URL.
• Another option is to use mind mapping software. Make each node represent one of your sites, then link each node to the corresponding URL. Go check out FreeMind and XMind, both of which are free, and one of the more powerful paid desktop versions, MindManager, has a 30-day free trial. (XMind also has a paid pro version.) Note that mind mapping is also a great way to brainstorm for writing content, or even just solving problems.
5. Use anti-spam options. Install comment anti-spam software and regularly moderate your comments. A few of the options you have are:
• Manual moderation. You’ll want to do this anyway, though it’s not enough. Get a plugin to help you.
• Automated moderation. For this you’ll need a WordPress plugin. (See section below.)

Some WP Anti-Spam Plugins

Kyle Eslick at WPHacks talks a bit about a few of the anti-spam options you have for a WP blog, including a new one called AntiSpam Bee. As well, here’s our take on your options.

1. Akismet. Akismet, which is one of the more popular anti-spam options in WP, is only free for personal use. According to the site, if you’re making more than $500/month from your blog, you have to pay for a commercial API key. Otherwise, the API key is free.
2. Spam Karma 2. The Spam Karma 2 plugin is free (but not GPLed). However, as of late 2008, it is apparently no longer being supported – at least according to the plugin’s options area in the WordPress admin panel. It still traps spam comments, but if you try to purge them, you might see database errors displayed. It still works, but the messages are annoying.
3. AntiSpam Bee. Apparently AntiSpam Bee replaces your blog posts’ comments field so that the post cannot be auto-spammed.
4. Trollguard. Trollguard claims that their free WP spam filter plugin can be trained by learning from which comments you delete.
5. Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a plugin “for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.” So you use it conjunction with comment anti-spam plugins.

Make sure that you select a good web host that supports your anti-spam efforts.

Kevin Rose, aka Mr. Digg.com (which has been valued at anywhere between $0 and several hundred milion dollars), offers, in a guest post at TechCrunch, 10 tips for increasing your Twitter followers. Besides the fact that I’ve never seen Rose write a guest post, and that he left off the most important tip: be Kevin Rose, it’s a good read. But since only he can be Kevin Rose, you’ll have to make do with his 10 tips and hope you’ll get even a fraction of his nearly 90K Twitter followers. Oh by the way, he’s apparently an investor in Twitter. Did this happen before or after he sold his Twitter competitor, Pownce, to Six Apart?

If you’re just starting out with Twitter, it’s also worth checking out David Pogue’s article in the NY Times. He makes several interesting observations about the positive and negative behaviors on Twitter. He has also found that when he speaks at tech and edu conferences, he’s finding maybe 1 in 500 people are on Twitter.

It must depend on what circles you run in because, despite David Pogue’s experience, there are certainly enough Twitter users that there are plans for Twestivals (Twitter festivals) to raise money for charity. We’re not talking a few cities, we’re talking Twitter users from over 100 cities participating for 24 hours on Feb 12, 2009 in various fundraising events. If you want to hold an event, visit the Twestival website for details. All funds raised will go to Charity: water projects].

As a web worker, your web browser is one of your most important tools. It’s performance affects your entire day. If you’re using the Firefox browser and it’s acting sluggish, check out these speed-doubling tweaking tips from Boy Genius Report.

Another item in your web worker/ blogmaster toolkit is probably an HTML editor (especially if you’re blogging, too). When you get used to one editor for your blogging, it’s easy to think it’s your only option. Six Revisions lists nine source code/ WYSIWYG editors in their recent list of 30 useful open source apps for web designers. Of course, many of the apps in the list are great for bloggers and blogmasters too.

Not everyone agrees, but some types of websites need to be visually attractive to be impactful (though others get along just fine looking less so). Blog themes might be fine for, well, blogs, but if you have a newsy site with lots of content, you need something different. Everson News [via Blog Perfume] is a free magazine-y WP theme that is well-suited to sites with a high volume of fresh conent. The emphasis is on headlines, but there’s also a feature article image area, a video, and even a prominent banner ad area. It’s easy for readers to see what’s new, without having to scroll or scan through a lot of text to decide.

Whether you’re running a news site or not, if you want to have multiple authors each with their own blog(s) on your site, you need WPMU (WordPress Multi-User). It gives you the publishing framework you need, allowing for multiple blogs per author. Each blog within a single WPMU installation can have its own subdomain. E.g., blog01.mywpmu.com. Note that some web hosts have a restriction on how many subdomains your hosting account allows. Fortunately, subdomains in WPMU can be managed virtually, to circumvent any such restriction.

Now if you’re still in the beginning stages of building your first blog, check out this list of 29 tips, tutorials and resources from Problogger.