Photo by Chris Kealy Photography 

If you use “admin” as the default administrative login for your WordPress site, it may be vulnerable to hacking.  News outlets are reporting and Matt Mullenwag is discussing the recent Brute-force botnet attacks on WordPress sites with the default “admin” account, and the take away is: change the username, use a strong password.

How Do I Change My Username?

If you click on the Users link from your dashboard, you’ll notice that usernames cannot be changed once they are created.  Instead, you’ll need to create a new user account and assign administrative rights to that account.  When the new account is created, you can then DELETE the existing admin account.  Full instructions including screenshots are available here.  Note you will also need to change the email address in General Settings if that address is the the one you used to set up your original admin account.

How do I change my password?

Unlike the username, you CAN change your password from the Users link on your dashboard.  Consider these tips when picking a password, or consider using a password generator.  You can also install a password generator plugin, if you want password generation to be integrated with new user creation.  And remember when you change your password, don’t share it with anyone.  

 What else can I do to keep my WordPress site safe?

What a lot of good discussion and hands-on work we had at the Finding Your Voice: A Social Media Content Development Workshop, hosted by HandsOn Tech, part of Pittsburgh Cares, and Google Pittsburgh.

I hope you found the presentation and the card sorting exercise helpful, and I hope you’re inspired to take what you learned back to your organization.  

As promised, below are links to the presentation slides and to resources you can reference to develop your content strategy.

Make sure to pick up a copy of Margot Bloomstein’s Content Strategy at Work – it’s a fun and helpful read, and it gives you the tools to lead your team to find your organizational voice and to build and execute your content strategy. Let us know how it goes!

(If you’d like the help of impartial facilitators to guide your team through the exercise, give us a call.)

Presentation Deck

References

• Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project, Margot Bloomstein, 2012
• Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition, Kristina Halvorson, 2012

Don’t forget about the upcoming social media events at HandsOn Tech.

If you want to know more about the online marketing services we offer at Big Big Design, you can read about them here, or please contact us. We’d love hear from you.

Are you a registered Pittsburgh nonprofit that wants to connect your mission with your audience through social media?  Do you want to engage on Twitter or Facebook, but you’re not quite sure what to say?

Join Big Big Design’s own Cynthia Closkey for a content development workshop hosted by HandsOn Tech Pittsburgh and Google Pittsburgh.  HandsOn Tech, part of PittsburghCares, was created to help Pittsburgh nonprofits use technology effectively and efficiently so they can focus and succeed in their missions.

Registered nonprofits can sign up for this April 17th event at Bakery Square.  Hope to see you there!

I use Networked Blogs for syndication.  Networked Blogs is a Facebook application that allows you to publish your blog feed right into your timeline.  A few weeks ago I accidentally screwed up the RSS feed for my blog when I changed the permalink formatting.  I fixed that problem quickly in WordPress, but the little hiccup caused Network Blogs to stop seeing my feed.  A quick click of a button pulled the feed and my latest post was immediately published to Facebook and Twitter.

Network Blogs will push your posts to Facebook in a format like this (there is an optional thumbnail display that I have disabled).

Their Twitter summaries are much more abbreviated to fit the 120 character limit.

You’ll notice the shortened URL in the Twitter post is a Networked Blogs URL.  That’s because Networked Blogs uses iFrame to deliver your blog content.  This means that visitors reading your blog through Networked Blogs will not be recorded in your site’s analytics.  Now I don’t monitor my traffic very closely on my personal blog, but if these metrics are important to you, Networked Blogs’ free service may not be the right service to use.

They do offer a Plus program (currently $19.99/mo or $39.89/yr) that lets you integrate Google Analytics to your Networked Blogs dashboard.  I’m not willing to fork over that cash, but I may consider trying one of these two other free syndication services, dlvr.it and RSS Graffiti (another Facebook app).  You know, just to scratch my geeky “how does it work” itch.  If I try them out I’ll let you know how it goes.

For the Big Big Design blog posts, we use a plugin called WP to Twitter, which requires a bit of set up, and — you guessed it — cross-posts to Twitter on publish.  We’ve not yet found a good WP plugin for posting to Twitter, but I’m looking at IFTTT for a solution.  I’ll write these up for you in a future post as well.

I recently tried a little experiment. I paid Facebook $7 to promote my column to my friends using the company’s sponsored advertising tool.

To my surprise, I saw a 1,000 percent increase in the interaction on a link I posted, which had 130 likes and 30 reshares in just a few hours. It seems as if Facebook is not only promoting my links on news feeds when I pay for them, but also possibly suppressing the ones I do not pay for.

“Disruptions: As User Interaction on Facebook Drops, Sharing Comes at a Cost,”  by Nick Bilton, New York Times.

Tonight I have the distinct pleasure of being a guest on the nerdy/techy/funny podcast Awesomecast. You can watch Awesomecast live starting at 7pm, and then watch or listen to replay after replay to your heart’s content on the Awesomecast website.

What’s Awesomecast like? Here’s a previous show during which I shared a story about Steve Jobs’s hands.

There’s nothing like waking up in the morning to Facebook notifying you that a friend has tagged you in a photo with your ex- from three relationships ago with the caption “True love 4evah!”  Or perhaps you’ve been tagged in the comments of a post that’s become uncomfortably political.  Or maybe your friend’s recent post to your timeline is an obvious advertisement for cosmetics.  Or deeply discounted airline tickets.  Or a free iPhone 5.  

Your immediate reaction may be to contact your friends and request that they untag you from their content.  If you’re unwillingly tagged in content, that is a breech of your online privacy and your friends should respect your privacy, right?

Well yes, your friends should respect your privacy, but you shouldn’t expect them to manage your online privacy.  Facebook is a social media site and your friends’ ideas of what is appropriate to share may completely different that yours.  Expecting your Facebook friends to change their settings to fit to your privacy policy is like asking them to pull down your house blinds or lock your car doors for you.  If you continue to demand untags as you add friends, you may start to sound like a certain ineffectual, jerky boss from a certain office-themed movie starring a red Swingline stapler. 

The reality is that you are in charge of your Facebook privacy.  It’s best to untag yourself from unwanted content, and while you can do this on individual photos and posts, it makes more sense to revamp your privacy settings and preemptively block unwanted tagging.

The beginning of the year is a good time to update those Facebook settings, but as Facebook is famous for sweeping privacy rule changes, it’s a good idea to keep current on all privacy changes and update your settings regularly.  Here are some quick instructions for untagging yourself from unwanted content.

 Untag yourself from photos

1. Once you are logged into Facebook, click on Photos under your Favorites.
2. Click on “Photos of You.”
3. Click on the offending photo and then click on the “Edit or Remove” icon.
4. Click “Hide from my timeline” if you don’t want this photo to appear in your timeline
5. Click “Report/Remove Tag” to see untag options.  You can either select “I want to untag myself” or “I want this photo removed from Facebook”.
6. If you choose “I want this photo removed from Facebook” your FB friend will be notified via a message.  (That’s when you find out how good a friend they are.  If they refuse to remove, you can get FB involved in removing the content.

To turn off tagging from your profile

1. From Facebook home, click the “Privacy Shortcuts” lock icon.
2. Click “See More Settings” to see all settings.  
3. In the left hand navigation choose the “Time Line and Tagging” option
4. Review the options here an turn on/off the features that are important to you.  Note that you can choose to review all posts your friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline. 
5. To permanently prevent unwanted photo tagging, choose “No One” under the “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded.” option.

I’m so pleased to introduce you to our new web designer here at Big Big Design: Danielle Nicol.

Danielle worked with us previously as a contractor, helping us build new sites. She came on board full-time this month, and in addition to working on new websites she’s helping support our existing clients.

Danielle has been blogging since 2002 — I first met her at a Pittsburgh Bloggers event years back — so if you have questions about keeping your blog lively, she’s a perfect person to ask.