Dominate Your Local Market!

I attended WordCamp/PodCamp Columbus in Columbus, OH this past Saturday and as always, there was way more to learn than time to learn it. Trying to be selective when making decisions on which five of thirty-five sessions to attend was as difficult as it could be.

Every session covered subjects that would interest me and every session I attended was first-rate. I’d loved to have attended every session, but I guess that’s what keeps people coming back for more. I know now that I’ve had my first taste, I’ll be attending a lot more WordCamps and PodCamps in the future.

Not only do these “non-conferences” offer a wealth of information for attendees, they offer sponsors a great chance to get their name before a very appreciative audience.

Sponsors of this event included Ohio State Univ. Center for the Study of Teaching and Writing, Blip.tv, Blubrry.com, Spaceblue, Circle of Seven Productions, and Skyline Chili who fed a magnificent lunch to all who attended.

So my choice of sessions was:

1. Social Media – NOT a Revolution – Michael Loban
   This was a great one to start off the day. The first thing Michael did was say he wanted the session to be more of a discussion than a presentation and that’s exactly what he got. Input from various attendees livened the session and produced a great deal of new knowledge that I can use on behalf of OrangeCat clients.
2. Designing a Killer Theme in WordPress – Todd Santoro
   Todd did a great job talking about some of the procedures he uses to design a WordPress theme for his clients. Very similar to the process we use here at Orange Cat Productions, but he threw in a few gems that will make my theme designs more useful to clients – and that’s what its all about!
3. After lunch, I pencilled in a session called SEO Best Practices & How They Relate to WordPress. The scheduled presenter couldn’t make it, by an ad hoc session with four SEO-savvy participants proved to be a worthwhile session. While validating pretty much all of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that we use at OrangeCat.com, there’s always that one pithy gem that you might have never thought of – and this session was no exception.
4. Making Money With Your Podcast – Cliff Ravenscraft
   I had a very tough set of choices for sessions 4 & 5, but it took care of itself. I decided to attend this session as we are producing a daily Podcast of Industry News at Noon on MHMSM.com. I figured I could learn something. Cliff runs several podcasts from his Generally Speaking Production Network. After a brilliant presentation by Cliff, he offered to make use of the room which would be empty for Session5 by staying an extra hour and answering our questions. I took advantage of that and it was extraordinary. Thanks, Cliff for putting in the extra time to answer our questions.

Well, that’s a wrap-up of my day at Columbus WordCamp/PodCamp. It was my first and certainly won’t be my last. I believe in constantly learning all I can to serve my clients better. So I’m scanning the WordCamp and PodCamp sites for the next event. Right now, I’m looking at WordCamp Birmingham (9/18-9/19) and certainly WordCamp Louisville on December 4.

Orange Cat Productions LLC of Danville, KY announced today the launch of the new Tim Bidwell, Inc. website.

The website was built on the WordPress 2.9.2 platform. It features many labor- and money-saving features such as automated backup, automated Google Sitemap building and much more.

Tim Bidwell, Inc. provides accounting, bookkeeping and payroll and payroll tax services to businesses in the Central Kentucky BLuegrass Region.

The official Orange Cat Productions announcement is available at OrangeCat.com.

Please visit the new Tim Bidwell, Inc. website and give us your feedback.

WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten.

For more information and the official WordPress 3.0 video demonstrating some of the features of this major upgrade, please see WordPress 3.0 is available at OrangeCat.com.

We posted a video on how to upgrade WordPress a short while back.

Here is some new info – including a specific case – on why keeping WordPress up-to-date is so important.

Read more…

Two new WordPress videos have been posted to the videos page at OrangeCat.com.

Is Your WordPress Installation Up-to-Date? (3:22) takes a few minutes to show you how to determine if your WordPress blog is running the latest version. If not it shows you what to do about it.

Although WordPress has been fairly bullet-proof through it’s various versions, each new version introduces new features, fixes bugs and increases security over the previous version.

The same can be said for plugins. Older versions of plugins could have security issues that have been addressed in later versions. In order to run the latest versions of a plugin, you may have to be running the latest version of WordPress as well.

Having your WordPress website hacked could be more than just as inconvenience. If you have the Google Sitemaps plugin installed (and you should), it will report any changes made by a hacker as new content. You could then lose precious ranking if Google determines your site is now less relevant. It is much easier to keep ranking than to rebuild it.

If you are an OrangeCat client, you can subscribe to our updating service that keeps WordPress, themes and plugins current as part of a website maintenance program. That way you never have to worry about your WordPress being up-to-date.

WordPress Security: Delete Your Admin User (3:38) explains how having the default admin user on your blog may be a security risk and could increase your risk of being hacked.

Far too many WordPress blogs still use the admin user that was created during installation. If a hacker can be reasonably sure that the username for your blog’s admin area is “admin” they merely have to crack the password to gain access.

Since so many passwords are pretty weak, using terms such as “joe123″ or “marysblog” or the even worse “wordpress” or “password,” using software to repeatedly try different passwords (called a “brute force attack”) could uncover your password in short order.

All recent installations of WordPress on OrangeCat servers has included the Login Lockdown plugin that stops this kind attack by limiting he number of times a password can be tried before the login is disabled for a pre-determined amount of time.

Deleting the admin user and replacing it with a more secure username is one step you can take to thwart a brute force attack on your WordPress administration. This video walks you through the process.

If you would like us to change your WordPress admin user or install the Login Lockdown plugin, use the OrangeCat.net Services Page to submit a request. Pricing is available on our Services Page.