This is another ported template designed by our friends over at Hive Designs which was converted into a WordPress theme by me. Widget-ready sidebar as usual. Check out the demo here. Download it here. Screenshot is below.

Okay, someone just left a very strange comment (or at least tried to) on the first post I’ve ever made on this blog, dated several months ago. Not sure what exactly this script kiddie was trying to do, but here’s the comment information:

Author : Bill961356476','879919671billy@msn.com','','50.68.176.182','2008-03-20 00:04:45','2008-03-20 00:04:45','','0','lynx','comment','0','0'),('0', '', '', '', '', '2008-03-21 00:04:45', '2008-03-21 00:04:45', '', 'spam', '', 'comment', '0','0' ) /* (IP: 124.217.227.127 , svservers.com)
E-mail :
URL : http://None
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=124.217.227.127
Comment:
<strong>None...</strong>
None...


Looks like some lame SQL injection attempt (notice the emphasis on lame and attempt). Banned the IP they were using, even though it looks to be a proxy based in Malaysia. Let this serve as a reminder to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date and make sure there aren’t any vulnerabilities through active plugins (or even themes) you may have installed.

Today’s free WordPress theme doesn’t have the usual structure you’ll see on your every day theme. It’s not widget-ready, because there’s no space in the sidebar for listing categories, archives, blogroll, etc. This theme is for those looking for a simple (but good looking) theme without all the extra bells and whistles. Check out the live demo here. Download it here. Screenshot below.

This is a ported theme, originally designed by DemusDesign. Leave a comment if you have any port requests out of their other free templates, and I’ll see what I can do.

This isn’t a SEO blog, and I am by no means a SEO expert (whatever that means), but in this tutorial I’ll go over a few tips for optimizing your WordPress site for search engines. I’ll go over some well known SEO plugins for WordPress as well as basic page optimization. After reading this tutorial you’ll learn:

• What SEO (search engine optimization) is
• How to rewrite your URL’s for SEO-friendliness
• How to generate a sitemap and submit it to Google and other search engines
• How to use the All-in-one SEO Pack plugin to generate meta info
• How to get your site to the top of the SERPs for your targeted keywords GUARANTEED

If you want to learn how to do all of the above (especially the last one) read on.

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Now we have Sleek and Stylish. WP Sleek is yet another ported theme, this time from our friends at FreeCSS.info, originally called Sleek. This free WordPress theme features a widget-ready sidebar (as usual) and a little place at the top to write whatever text you want. View the live demo here. Download the theme here. Screenshot is below.

If anyone has any requests from FreeCSS.info’s free CSS templates, feel free to leave a comment.

If you’re still using mailto: links on your WordPress site, I urge you to read this tutorial. Having an e-mail exposed like that on any website is asking for mass amounts of spam. The sad truth is, bots or e-mail harvesters scour the internet for e-mail addresses like this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not to mention it’s really annoying to click on a mailto: link when you don’t have a default e-mail application set up.

The good news with WordPress is: there are a many easy to use plugins available to reduce spam with contact forms. These contact forms will effectively hide your e-mail address from robots and humans alike, thus greatly reducing your e-mail spam. The even better news is: you can do all of this without making it excessively difficult for a legitimate message to get through.

In this guide I’ll go over two plugins which I personally use myself on this very blog, cforms II and WP-ContactForm Akismet Edition.

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Today’s free WordPress theme is very classy and elegant. It is called simply Purple. The template was originally released by our friends over at Templatefusion.org which was coded into WordPress by me. It has a widget-ready sidebar and a few other interesting features. There is a theme options page to exclude selected pages from your top page navigation menu. There’s also a built in “recent comments” plugin which is displayed in the footer, along with the last 5 recent posts. Check out the live demo here. Download it here. Screenshot is below.

UPDATE: Download link was broken. It is fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.

Chances are you’ve heard the term Akismet before in the context of preventing WordPress blog spam. So what is Akismet exactly? Akismet is a powerful tool in the fight WAR against comment spam and trackback spam. This isn’t your ordinary anti-spam plugin that just adds a simple image code which supposedly verifies if the commentor is a “human” or not. The truth is, spam bots are getting more and more sophisticated by the day, and who knows? They may even be able to circumvent your CAPTCHA code and spam you like crazy. What Akismet does is different.

In this tutorial we’ll go over how to set up Akismet on your WordPress blog, step by step. This quick guide will show you how to activate the plugin and sign up for an API key to use it. Start experiencing the benefits of Akismet and read on.

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Someone alerted me to the fact that the comments for certain categories weren’t working. What happened was the comments that were being displayed on all of the posts in these categories were from a specific post that didn’t match with the post the comments were on. I know, it’s pretty hard to explain, so if you didn’t notice anything, the previous sentence probably made zero sense to you. If you tried to comment sometime within the past couple days, I apologize. I figured out the problem and it should be fixed now.

Today we have another CSS template turned WordPress theme, this time designed by Denise Mitchinson of Snapp Happy. This free WordPress theme is called Blue World. It features two widgetized sidebars. The left being ideal for text widgets and the right being ideal for list items. Check out the live demo here. Download it here. Screenshot is below.

If anyone has any requests from their selection of 84 CSS web template designs, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.