I recently set up a blog for my band, Ellipsis. Just using a simple theme which I customised a little so it worked better as a band website. There’s also a load of fancy CSS3 goodness, naturally.

I ran into a problem, though. The blog was getting a ton and a half of comment spam. All of it was being blocked by Akismet, which is great, but that wasn’t stopping it getting there in the first place.

This is where we roll out the super-duper-ways-of-stopping-comment-spam.

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As you may have heard, on Friday evening I got what was to be the first of a couple of emails from some very helpful people telling me that there was a big message up from Google saying that WPShout contained viruses, spyware, the lot! I took a look for myself and sure enough, WPShout had been hacked somehow.

This isn’t good.

I’m fairly happy with my security; there are lots of little tips and tricks I use that make the site harder to hack than most, leaving me with the impression most hackers just wouldn’t bother and move on to the thousands more WordPress blogs without the extra layer of security.

I was wrong, evidently.

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In this month’s .net magazine (known as Practical Web Design in the US) there was an interesting article where an ethical hacker showed how he would break into your site — and what you can do to stop him. In this post we’ll look past “X Plugins To Save Your Blog” and see what effective steps you can take to stop a real life hacker.

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Search Google for WordPress security tips or the like and just about every article you come along will tell you that in order to have a secure blog, you need X amount of plugins. I disagree. I use none yet I’m satisfied I have a reasonable level of security. I use a number of techniques to keep the site safe, which I’ll discuss over the course of the post.

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The .htaccess file allows you to easily improve your blog, its security, reduce bandwith and increase usability. In this post we’re going to look at 26 .htaccess hacks, from A to Z.

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