The most recent of these to get added to my list is Donncha O’Caoimh’s http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

Of course when I installed it at the same time as installing the 3.2.1 release of wordpress the hash files weren’t available for 3.2.1. This lead me to lots of False positives. Yesterday then when I scanned I for some reason thought I was seeing the same thing. I mean upd.php and config.php seem like two perfectly normal files don’t they? Well hell no after asking a rather silly question over on Google Plus I realised the error of my ways and went about fixing things.

Exploit Scanner works on the basis that all your core files should have the same hash as a clean version. ( A hash is a value that gets created and mostly two different things can’t have the same hash )

Click to enlarge

The md5 Hashes for the two files are as follows

• exploit-scanner.php (1.0.5): ac8d7f3574a7470a245a2067e9c79072
• hashes-3.2.1.php: a660a35382f648c8735414a7d3531970

So if your websites version of these doesn’t match it’s fair to assume someone has edited the files on your site. You can always find these values on the exploit scanner plugin page. It’s well worth installing.

The Exploit scanner immediately told me about the errors. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a manual process as you still need to see what’s wrong and make sure the files aren’t valid. So backing up is a good idea first. I also ended up removing a few unused plugins and all the old themes I had on the site. It doesn’t have hash values for any plugins or themes you’re using so you may need to manually scan these and check if they have been altered. One way I did this was visually check the date of creation / modification of the files in my ftp client.

Anyways exploit scanner is about to become the first plugin that gets installed on all new wordpress installs ( and even a few older ones ) and I’m debating creating a rather simple script to show the last edited / created time for files as I’d find that one handy as well. The files were uploaded to my site on the 6th august for example. I know I wasn’t doing much there then so apart from an image or two and my cache things shouldn’t have been changed recently.

In general I resize images before I upload them to WordPress and as a result I disable the click the image link. However I noticed no nice lightbox (click image and it pops up rather than taking you to a page with just the image) effect as so sent up a call on twitter if anyone knew a quick plugin that’ll work with existing content and hey presto twitter.com/thelinden ( Barry Walsh ) gets back to me in seconds mentioning ShadowBox JS. God I really love twitter sometimes can save you ages looking up things and  making up a forum post and so on.

Cheers Barry and you can see the results on my previous post its automagic (Just needed to select JQuery in the plugin preference and it auto picks up linked images)

My name is James and I made the Greatest SEO Marketing Guru website ever I also made the theme for the site Social Media Expert

Like most people using “social media” I’m constantly amazed by the amount people seeking advice / how to’s and so on. I’m also heavily amazed by the amount of people offering their services to them. While I realise there is always a need to have some advice with new technology / ways of doing things the social media guru stud guy coaching type thing is a bit extreme no ?

So really what you’re wanting to ask is WTF is social media marketing ?

In a nutshell … its spamming the **** out of your friends initially in the hopes things will take off and you’ll get more people following you. This in turn will lead to every “tweet” / Post / Message you make getting read by an ever increasing number of people.

Wow you make it sound so great where do I sign up?
Well like most things I’d first advise you have a website to redriect your “fans” (people that follow / stalk you) to

This will help and who knows a few might even end up book marking your actual site instead of just seeing the off message from you. I’d also recommend you get and RSS feed onto your site. A what now ? .. ( an RSS feed is simply put … a list of the recent posts / activity on your site) People will see updates from you in an RSS reader of their choice if they use one. I actually being quite computer il… er … literate don’t use one. Why … again its down to time and how much time you have at the end of the day. There are so many posts to read things to check and so on it can be a bit overwhelming.

So you’ve got your site .. you’ve got something that you can drag people back onto your site with (RSS feed) .. what do I do next.

Well you pretty much start telling people about what you do. Its social media … can you be social ? .. can you be social online ( its potentially a lot easier to be social online than in real life) and away you go. Follow people you find interesting .. interact with people … let people know whats happening … open up your “company” to the world and interact. O…. K … you say … erm really thats what its all about.

1. Interact with people
2. People may follow you back if you’ve something interesting to say
3. You’ll follow them back
4. Connections will be made .. you’ll say hey to them they’ll say hey back
5. You’ll update info … people will see it .. some might like it and let their friends know
6. Interact Interact Interact ….

So … erm … that sounds simple enough doesn’t it? This is what social media is about … you’ll have people telling you its all about the number of followers you’ve got following you. NO … this is pure BS for example … I could have 10 people following me who are my customers and who might like to see I’m available for work … or I’m interested in doing XYZ … and there’ll be some interaction … or I could have 10000 people trying to sell their services to me .. following me … me following back … cluttering up my stream ( twitter stream … updates from people ) … which is more useful … well to be honest the 10 people you’ll interact with. Of course if you’re huge and can hire a marketing department and get loads of people involved in your twitter account then go for it. If its just you .. then … erm forget about it … follow people have them follow back or not … and let things happen naturally so to speak.

All this said there are a few things you can do to speed up the interest in you / your product or service …

Special offers … ooooh wow 20% off and save now today only .. <-- you like the look of that no ? well why not make a few discounts available for people. What will it cost you ... hopefully not that much .. you've probably got margins worked out on what you earn / profit and so on already ... so factor in what you've got in your marketing budget as well and go from there.

So all this been said it sounds pretty simple no ? Well hell it is .. its not rocket science ... its basic human interaction ... if you say hi, people will say hi back.

Things not to do:

1. Don’t spam … don’t spam your product .. don’t spam messages …
2. Don’t direct message people about your products
3. Don’t auto message people saying thanks for following
4. Forget about the .. you can earn $50,000 a day with my social media tool!!! click here to find out more … type offers. They are BS
5. Don’t read posts online and think they are the number one way of doing things … Trial and error should be heavily involved in your process ( We all make mistakes .. I’ve made them others have made them .. we try and move on )

Do realise that all the social media interaction is free BUT its damn expensive …
1 Tweet – 20 – 30 seconds of your time … (thats nothing you say)
.. reading the tweets of others … add on another bit of time …

We’ve 5 minutes gone just there like that … what have we done .. posted one message read a few others tweets.

Lets speed up things … how? … erm … social media is about building up a following .. interaction … respect (respect is import .. if people like you or your product they’ll help you promote it .. if they don’t .. you’ll have pointless twitter accounts RT’ing (Re Tweeting .. sending one your message to people who follow them) .. all your messages .. end result you’ll pick up useless followers

You will come across the odd thing which takes on the Viral nature … you say something clever .. you write something clever and suddenly lots of people are linking to you RT’ing your message ad so on … GREAT … WOO HOO and I’m happy for you .. but generally you can’t force this to happen it just does and if it does congrats and well done

So this ends part I of maybe a one part article .. maybe I’ll write a bit more ( For most people reading its hopefully DUH! material .. for others hopefully its something of an eye opener to the magic that is Social Media) Let me know what you think

James

(PS: Please note I’ve been really using twitter as my social media tool of example here … similar would apply to facebook and so on)

I installed the Hybrid Theme Framework the other day and must admit it took me a little while to realise what was going on with it. Once I did however I immediately threw the man the 25 quid subscription fee for access to the forums. Why Pay ? well he’s putting a lot of work into it so he might as well get something back. 25 dollars equates to 17 euro so I’m happy to help and getting support to questions in a timely manner is a major plus for me (he’s rather active on the forums on there as he should be)

So you’re here and you’re probably seeing blue .. a whole lot of blue. Don’t worry it was intentional The design is based on my work site though obviously different colours. (I’ve another site design / branding to do with the same style as this shortly for another personal project … consistency and code re-use should be good). I had wanted to do some retro style design that I was tinkering and playing around with in my head on here but in the end I said screw it. The logo is similar to an earlier version I had on the site with slightly updated colours.

Forbairt Site Design and Colours

So why not let me know what you think add a comment give some feedback. As with most of my personal projects its going to be a Work in Progress.