Jawed’s Blog

As wordpress popularity is growing day by day and you see most of the new blogs using Wordpress. Its an obvious need to provide some sort of guidence to new commers about wordpress blogging. Like how to use wordpress in most effective way and make most out of this blog script.

I will discuss about the most common plugins, which I think you should be using from starting till end.

Wordpress Database Backup: If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.

Adsense Deluxe: A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog, you can put adsense in your post without editing any single line of php code.

Google Sitemaps: The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

Related Posts: Automatically creates a list of related posts, for the post you are viewing.

Math Comment Spam Protection: This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question for proving that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot, e.g. What is the sum of 2 and 9 ?. It does not require GD or any special PHP extensions. Similar to the Did You Pass Math? plugin, but can be used with any theme and JavaScript or cookies are not required.

Akismet: This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive. I have never used it because Math Comment Spam Protection works fine for me.

Autometa: This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Keywords and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

SimpleTags: is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. There are several plugins already available for this purpose, but they all require you to use custom fields within WordPress. The SimpleTags plugin eliminates this need, so you can now easily generate tags with your preferred method of posting, be it by email, a blogging tool like w.bloggar or from WordPress itself.

These are the plugins that will assist you to use wordpress effectively. There are hundreds of other plugins available but I think these plugins must be there when you install wordpress. You may want to view complete list of plugins from http://www.wp-plugins.net.

If you think that there are few more can be added to this list, just place it in a comment.

Recently, there has been alot of hype involving backdooring various web technologies. PDF documents are one of them. A British security researcher has figured out a way to manipulate legitimate features in Adobe PDF files to open back doors for computer attacks.

David Kierznowski, has posted a proof-of-concept code on his blog. and rigged PDF files to demonstrate how the Adobe Reader program could be used to launch attacks without any user action.

PDF documents seem obviously vulnerable. This is due to the fact that it supports JavaScript. However, there are quite a few twists and turns. It is by no means as straight forward as this.

Adobe supports its own JavaScript object model. For example, “alert(’xss’)” must be called from the app object, so this becomes “app.alert(’xss’)”. This means JavaScript attacks are limited to the functionality supported within Adobe. Secondly, Adobe Reader and Adobe Professional are very different with regards to which JavaScript objects are allowed.

Read all from PDF Back Doors

This article will give two practical examples of how Adobe Professional and Adobe Reader can be backdoored. There are 7 or more points where an attacker can launch malicious code. Both of the attacks discussed below are attached to the “Page Open” event.

These vulnerabilities are very critical and advanced attacks could be more devastating. A spokesperson from Adobe’s product security incident response team said the company is aware of Kierznowski’s discovery and is “actively investigating” the issue. Lets see when the patch comes up.

So many new technologies have appeared in the past half century that it’s impossible to list them all. But these 10 high-tech breakthroughs stand out over the last 50 years because they’ve revolutionized the way people live. We look back at their beginnings, as well as where they’ve taken us today.

10. Organ transplants:
In 1954, Dr Joseph Murray removed the kidney from one human patient and implanted it in another. The recipient accepted the kidney as its own rather than rejecting it as a foreign body. It was more than skillful surgery: Murray had chosen a pair of identical twins, Ronald Herrick and his terminally ill brother Richard, in hopes their similar genetic makeup would reduce the likelihood of Richard’s body rejecting Ronald’s liver. Soon afterward, though, other researchers developed drugs that could squelch a transplant recipient’s immune system long enough for the new organ to become incorporated into its new body. Today, some 25,000 Americans a year receive a new heart, kidney, liver, lung, pancreas or intestine — and a new lease on life.

9. Robots and artificial intelligence:
The term “robot” was coined by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek in 1920 — “robota” being a Czech word for tedious labor — but the first real industrial robot was built in 1954 by George Devol. Five years later, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a quest to mechanically mimic human minds as well as hands. Today, robots assemble products better, faster and often cheaper than manual laborers, while more than 8 million U.S. airline flights a year are scheduled, guided and flown with the superhuman assistance of advanced software. Still, some Americans eye such systems with the cynical view of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1952 story “Player Piano” warned that the machines might leave people without a purpose — or a job.

8. Electronic funds transfer:
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco set up a paperless transfer system with the Los Angeles branch in 1972. By the end of the decade, instantaneous transfers of millions of dollars in value between banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions had become common. The real appeal of EFT today is its trickle down to the individual: You get to grab cash from your bank account anywhere in the world, and use PayPal to buy and sell stuff on eBay without sending money or checks through the mail.

7. Nuclear power:
In 1956, when the Queen herself threw the switch on the world’s first atomic power plant at Calder Hall in northern England, nuclear reactors were seen as a source of cheap, pollution-free energy. But a partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania soured Americans on nukes as safe power. Nonetheless, the United States today has about 100 active plants that generate 20 percent of the country’s electricity — second only to coal as a source of power — and have been steadily increasing their capacity. Will the next 50 years bring a better alternative?

6. Mobile phones:
The idea for cellular phone service dates back at least to 1947, but the first call was made from the sidewalk outside the Manhattan Hilton in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher who rang up his rival at AT&T Bell Labs to test the new phone. Thirty years later, more than half of all Americans own one and cellular networks are beginning to serve Internet access at broadband speeds through thin air.

5. Space flight:
Astronauts from 50 years ago would be disappointed to learn we never went further than the Moon — no Mars colony, no 2001 odyssey to Jupiter, no speed-of-light spaceships. Even the Shuttle is in trouble. But the space race against the Russians that dominated the national psyche (and a good chunk of the budget) in the `60s and `70s pushed the development of hundreds of enabling technologies, including synthetic fibers and integrated computer circuits, necessary to fly men to the Moon and back. And the astronauts brought back a lesson from space: “We saw the earth the size of a quarter, and we realized then that there is only one earth. We are all brothers.”

4. Personal computers:
Before IBM recast the desktop computer from hobbyist’s gadget to office automation tool in 1983 — followed by Apple’s people-friendly Macintosh a year later — a “minicomputer” was the size of a washing machine and required a special air-conditioned room. But the trained technicians who operated the old mainframes already knew computers were cool: They could use them to play games, keep diaries, and trade messages with friends across the country, while still looking busy. Today, thanks to the PC, we all look busy.

3. Digital media:
“The camera doesn’t lie” went a saying not heard much since the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. Digitized audio, pictures, movies, and text let even an amateur edit reality — or conjure it from scratch — with a keyboard and a mouse. A singer’s bad notes, a model’s blemishes, or an overcast sky in a movie scene can be fixed as easily as a spelling error. Just as important, digital media can be copied over and over nearly for free, stored permanently without fading, and sent around the world in seconds. It rightly worries the movie and music industries, but how do you put the genie back in the bottle if there’s no bottle anymore?

2. Genetic engineering:
Everyone knows Watson and Crick, who unraveled the secret of DNA in 1953. But have you heard of Boyer and Cohen, who constructed the first organism with combined DNA from different species in 1973? They inserted toad genes into a bacterium that then replicated itself over and over, passing the toad’s genetic code down through generations of bacteria. Thirty years later, an estimated 70 percent of processed foods contain genetically modified ingredients, such as soybeans or corn engineered for higher crop yields. Of course, the much bigger potential — good and bad — is in engineering humans. It might prevent birth defects, and diseases later in life. But the side effects could be disastrous and unknown. Is there an ethical way to beta-test human beings?

1. The Internet:
This one seems like a no-brainer, but the Net’s unique strength is that no two people will agree on why it’s so important. The world’s largest and most unruly library, it’s also a global news channel, social club, research archive, shopping service, town hall, and multimedia kiosk. Add to that the most affordable mass medium ever, and a curse to anyone with a secret to keep. Three-fifths of Americans now use the Net, but it remains to be seen whether the connections to one another will transform us, or prove that we’ll never change.