Taking into consideration that this coffee session is going to be more technical based and that we have to travel all the way to Tampines (west to east), Jasmond decided to attend alone and share with me later.

Plug-in
My frustration with plugs-in is indeed self-explanatory. In fact, Alvin Phang forsee that this is a bottleneck for most beginners and he is fast to package up all his self-tested plugs-in in his atomicblogging (launching soon product) and offer a more user-friendly option.

WYSIWYG vs HTML code
His further advice to rectify changing font, paragraphing, spacing and colour issue on wordpress is to use Adobe Dreamweaver software instead of the tedious HTML coding.

How to maximise outdated and extra CPU
Through causal conversation, Jasmond discovered that Alvin has 5 extra CPUs lying around and he used them to download additional information. Jasmond queried over the feasibility of converting them into server and Alvin commented that server consumes too much electricity since it has to be on 24hrs daily. Hmmm… worth considering since we do have extra CPU lying around too. Moreover, Jasmond has been using torrant.com very frequently of late and according to Alvin, sometimes torrant do have virus attached.

Pointer to upload Video
Fatia lamented on the number of times she kept trying to upload video but to no avail. But with just one click, Alvin was able to upload the video right at the spot. Thanks to Fatia’s experience, we finally get to realize that there must be a specific procedure to upload the video. Copy and paste html code of a video to the blog must always be done LAST. If one needs to do further editing to a blog, copy and paste html code of the video has to be re-inserted again.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol
Since the first day I met Alvin, I have been wondering why did he lament over Fabian Lim for not knowing what’s a FTP. In any case, I discovered from Jasmond that there is a shortcut to do FTP with filezilla. Definitely more user-friendly.

5 days have passed since I last migrat my-collectible-gift to be server based. And by 10/5, my site is being hacked by a self-proclaimed x2Fusion hacker!!

Fortunately, there isn’t much valuable information on my-collectible-gift yet. Unfortunately, all my information has been wiped out! Though the information that I upload are very minimum and not very confidential, it took me weeks to just manage to get them up and running! Weeks of work, and within a minute; all my data gone!!!

Liased with Tdothost.com, the webhost that I have registered for and quite a shock to learn from them that their billing system has been hacked too!

Contacted our mentor, Alvin Phang and he mentioned that the service of Tdothost is not as up-to-standard as before.

I have also requested from Tdothost for a detailed explanation of what’s the cause and how best to prevent hacker in the future.

Below an extract of Tdothost’s reply:

My site’s billing system was hacked too.
I requested a restore for your site.

There are many ways for hacker to gain control of a site.
For example, he may have hacked the cPanel OR FTP password for your domain, or better yet, the
hacker may go after a known vulnerability in a php script (i.e. wordpress or a wordpress plugin).

There is little anyone can do for a site or server that is already hacked, but I
can help offer some advise to prevent it in the future.
- Make sure you use the latest versions of any software or plugin you use.
- Make sure you always change your passwords ( cpaned, ftp, email, ….)
- Make sure no one knows your password

Tags: business

Since served based wordpress is highly recommended, we officially registered our webhost via tdothost.com on 5 May 2007. Get to learn some basic FTP functions as a result. For once, I have a feeling that I am a network administrator.

I still do not enjoy blogging on wordpress because it appears unfriendly to me. The features on WYSIWYG really need more enhancements and improvements. My experience of trying to do alignment, spacing, paragraphing, changing of font and colour is quite a turn-off.

I was so adviced that one of the main reasons why wordpress is widely used is because of plug-ins. Did read up some plugs-in but without much understanding. I gathered plug-ins are something that can only be appreciated when one is targetting and looking at specific feature to enhance one’s site. By reading the summarized explanation of what the specific plug-ins are for, none appeals to me.

However, when Jasmond showed me social bookmarking, I get interested. It then dawned on me that it is not that I am uninterested in plug-in but more to that I do not understand each and every function.

Shall leave the part of trial and error of all kinds of plug-in to Jasmond to explore and validate.

Till then, I rest my case with plug-ins.