this woman’s work

I spent some time yesterday making my wordpress site safer. Don’t be intimidated; it’s not too difficult:

Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks

8 Security Tips

Login Lockdown

If you’re not hosting your own wordpress install, you’re fine.

I didn’t realize that any old person could see what plugins I’d installed so that was the first (and easiest) thing to do — add an index.html to the folder.

I’ve found Wordpress 2.5.1 to be really buggy. I’ve installed it on a whole bunch of people’s sites and some of ‘em have problems I can’t seem to fix (like Julia still can’t upload pictures, I have to save my entries to click the comments/trackback permissions before I hit publish and Kristen’s flickr plugins are all wonky). But you really have to keep up with updates because they fix some of the security issues. Just remember to back up — I say this as someone who has lost blog entries in updates. Just export your entries and save your wp-content folder and wp-config file before you do your install. That way if something goes wrong you can try a fresh install and just import your entries, themes, etc.