More and more I am receiving emails from people I know that were obviously not sent from them.  They often just have links in them to some site that the hijacker is sending people to, and other times there are other scams like this one (traveling, lost my wallet, send money…), which I have received before as well.

So to make it easier to direct my friends and contacts to support for their situation, I put a list of links below for the most common email types that seem to get hijacked, at least that I know of – a0l, hotmail and gmail.

If your AOL email address has been hijacked, go here.

If your HOTMAIL email address has been hijacked, go here.

If your GMAIL email address has been hijacked, go here.

There are some other good tips in this article about a hijacked Gmail account, such as:

• adding a secondary email address ahead of time to make the recovery process faster;
• creating more secure passwords in the future; and
• checking that once you do get your account back, to check your settings to be sure that all emails are still not being forwarded to the hijacker without your knowing it.  And consider that the hijacker may have been or may be looking through all of your old emails for any information that they might use as well.
• I am not sure what all email account services have for their users, but those are a few tips.  You could search for more.

Anyways, good luck.

I have tried a few online backup solutions, (Jungle Disk which was buggy and incredibly complicated; Carbonite which drained my Mac’s resources constantly) and finally ended up with Backblaze.  I have been using Backblaze for over a year to backup my Mac computer and have been very satisfied.  Their tagline is that it is easy and it is.  And it does not drain my hard drive of resources, and I have never run into any issues.  It just does its job and I don’t think about it.

So I am sharing about it here, recommending it.

Why?  Here are some stats to get you thinking:

• All hard drives will crash during their lifetime
• More than 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen in their lifetime
• A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds
• Every year 46% of computer users lose their music, photos, and documents
• 50% of all hard drives will crash within 5 years
• 89.1% of PC users don’t perform regular backups
• A recent study from Gartner, Inc., found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years.
• 70 percent of companies go out of business after a major data loss

What do I do?  I work on my computer regularly as a web professional, a web designer and developer.  So it is important that I have backups. I work on Macs exclusively.

I have a local backup on an Iomega external hard drive that backs up automatically using Time Machine.  This is the most convenient form as I sometimes need to go back and get a file that I overwrote or deleted and I can just go back in time and restore it – which is super easy and convenient.  Also, if my computer goes down, it is easy to restore to a new computer from a time machine backup – not the case with an off site backup.

I also use Backblaze as an off site backup.  I have this in case there is some event that affects all systems in my work studio, (i.e. a theft, a power surge that blows through my surge protectors, and any other type of local problem).  This is a secondary backup and has built in a service to track and locate my computer if it does get stolen.  The cost is a measly $50/yr. for such an important service and it was super easy and fast to setup runs without any effort on my part.  A no brainer for me, once I found a service that worked that well, (this was my third attempt as outlined at the beginning of this article).

I also use Dropbox, and you can read my review of dropbox here, as a very convenient means of having certain files automatically available on my iPod and laptop, (or really from any computer from just logging in).  But with Dropbox, those files are automatically synced and available on those devices of mine for use just like any other file in my finder – without having to login to a remote service.  I use that for client files that I am currently working with.  And it is absolutely secure.  Dropbox gives you a few GBs free which is all I need for those files.  Not really a backup solution, but part of my approach to managing files and thought I would add it in here.

So if you are not backing up your files, you should.  It is easy, affordable, and you don’t want to find yourself wishing you had when it is too late.

That is my review of Backblaze.  Good luck!

Someone recently sent me an email asking me the following question, and I thought I would share the answer here.

The Question

“I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction about where to look to change my thumbnail picture that auto fills on one of your client’s WordPress blog when I post a response?”

The Answer

Those images are called avatars, and on a website powered by WordPress, you assign a photo to your email address by going to http://en.gravatar.com/.  There you can assign an image to your email address, or assign multiple images to different email addresses if you have several email address, like I do.  Since WordPress powers more websites than any other platform in the world right now, that is a lot of website blogs.

It is pretty quick to set-up and sometimes takes a little time for your gravatar to show up, but it should within 2 or 3 days from my experience.  I also recommend using a .png image file over a .jpg as I had issues with JPGs when I was last adding images, but that may have changed by now.  Not a big deal, just a preference.

If that helped, or you have something to add to my explanation, please share below, and see if your gravatar shows up.

Happy commenting.

Xmarks has a service that allows you to sync your bookmarks across browsers.  There are built-in options now to sync bookmarks within a browser, but not across browsers.  So Xmarks has been filling the gap for a while.

Unfortunately I have been having issues for a very long time (many many months) getting it to work on Safari.  Because I don’t use Safari that frequently, (I prefer Firefox primarily because of an indispensable web development addon called Firebug), I have not been super aggressive with getting the issue fixed.  I have gone back and forth about 10 times at least with Xmarks, now owned by LastPass, and never received any productive help.

Today, I changed something that seems to have made all of the difference.  I realized that I have to login with my email address and not my Username – even though the login box says “Username or email address” – that is not the case, at least not with me.  When I try to login with my username, it does not login, but when I login with my email address, it does.

More details:  I am on a Mac, now running Lion but two weeks ago was running Tiger and can only assume it was the same issue there.  To set preferences for logging into safari, you would open System Preferences and go to the Xmarks tab.  From there, on the General tab, there is a button to “Change login”.  Use that button to enter your EMAIL ADDRESS and password.  Try now.  For me, that worked.

What were the symptoms?  I had Xmarks working fine on Firefox, but not on Safari.  Everytime it tried to sync, it would just give the logging in… pop-up for a long time and eventually would say something like, “Sync Failed” – even though it was not really the sync, it was more accurately that it just could not login.

Hope this helps someone.  If it does, feel free to share below.

Below is a list of WordPress Video Tutorials created in Sept. 2011.

This is one part of a series of articles providing basic instructions for using WordPress. To start at the beginning, or view the full index of articles in this series, go to A Simple WordPress User Guide for Beginners.  And to view a playlist on YouTube with all of the below videos, you can go here: WordPress Video Tutorials

WordPress Tutorial | Introduction to WordPress Admin

WordPress Tutorial | How to Edit a Page

WordPress Tutorial | How to Add and Image

WordPress Tutorial | How to Add a New Page

WordPress Tutorial | Working with Menus

WordPress Tutorial | Working with Widgets

WordPress Tutorial | Adding and Editing Users

If you are interested in the WordPress User Guide, click on that link to start at the beginning.

How to make an email address on your website automatically open a users default email program on their computer and insert that email address in the To: field.  Instructions here are specifically tailored to use with WordPress, but can be applied in any case.

1. Add the email address to your website’s content as you would any content.
2. Then you are going to make it a link, jut as you would make some text link to another page, for example. So you would highlight your new email address (ie double click over it or click-drag your cursor of the email address); and then click on the “Link” button in your website editor to open the pop-up dialog box that allows you to add a website address.
3. INSTEAD of creating a link starting HTTP://….. – you will want to erase that part and insert the following: mailto:john@cnca.com
4. …where john@cnca.com is the email address being used. By putting mailto: before the email address, this causes the effect you want.
5. That is it. Save your changes. You do not have to specify a Target for that link in the pop-up.

For instructions on how to create a Forward in a Cpanel based hosting environment, click on How to Create an Email Forward in CPanel.

For example, if you generally use an email address myname@yahoo.com, and you want to add an email address to your website myname@mydomain.com, and have that newly created email address (which has your website’s domain name), then you will want to create a forward to forward myname@mydomain.com to myname@yahoo.com).  This will have the effect of automatically forwarding all email to your yahoo.com email address without having to share it on your website, (and also you can share a more professional email address on your website).  This is often desirable if you do not want to change how you manage your emails, as you would still be able to continue to just check your yahoo.com account as usual.

Instructions on how to create a Forward in a Cpanel based hosting environment

For example, if you generally use an email address myname@yahoo.com, and you want to add an email address to your website myname@mydomain.com, and have that newly created email address (which has your website’s domain name), then you will want to create a forward to forward myname@mydomain.com to myname@yahoo.com).  This will have the effect of automatically forwarding all email to your yahoo.com email address without having to share it on your website, (and also you can share a more professional email address on your website).  This is often desirable if you do not want to change how you manage your emails, as you would still be able to continue to just check your yahoo.com account as usual.

The one downside is that you will not be set up to send email from that new domain, only to receive.  In many cases, this is not an issue

1. First, login to your hosting account.  You can get that information from your hosting provider.
2. In the various sections of your hosting administrative panel that will present itself, there is a section titled “Mail”, and in there an option called “Forwards”. Click on Forwards.
3. Displayed will be a list of existing forwards (if any) and under that list is a button “Add Forward”. Click that button.
4. In the field under Address > Address to Forward, you will enter, for our example, just the name john.
5. On the right side of that field you may have options as to what domain name you want to have your new email address connected to. The options presented will be only those domains in your hosting account.
6. Then below that where it says Destination > Forward to email address, you will enter the email address you want your new email address to be forwarded to – for example, john45@yahoo.com
7. Then click on the button at the bottom of the page, “Add Forwarder”. That is it. Use the button at top right of your screen to “Logout”.

If you want to learn how to add an email link to your website, specifically within WordPress, click on How to make an email address link.

Are you thinking, “My browser only prints one page of a website, the first page”? Are you using Firefox?

There are several instances that trigger printing errors with Firefox.  The one I have run across results from declaring overflow: hidden, overflow: auto; or overflow: scroll, which I use sometimes for its self-clearing float effect.  The easiest solution to this is to create a print style sheet that  changes all of your tags that use this to overflow: visible.

You can read more about this and other related Firefox print bugs here:  at mozilla support, and at bugzilla.mozilla.

Good luck, and if this helps, or you have further comments, please share below.

How many times have I needed to identify a specific WordPress Category ID and scratched my head trying to remember.  And worse, when I searched on-line for an easy jogging of my memory, found un-necessary solutions leadering others to endlessly scratch their heads as well, wondering if there is an easier way.

And although I am assuming that if you found this post that you know why you are trying to find it, for those who don’t know, there are programming reasons to know – such as to specify in the code to exclude or include a certain category from being displayed on a page.

The Answer

The easiest way – no, not searching your database via your phpmyadmin; nor even changing your permalink structure to display it in your url – instead, simply click on the category option under Posts in your admin panel, move your cursor over the name of the category in question and it will be displayed in your browsers status bar.  That’s it.

This is one part of a series of articles providing basic instructions for using WordPress. To start at the beginning, or view the full index of articles in this series, go to  A Simple WordPress User Guide for Beginners.

How to Update your WordPress Installation.

When a new update to WordPress is released, you will be notified in your admin panel by a one sentence statement to that effect, displayed at the top of each page of your WordPress admin panel. There is a link in that notification to update. Updating your installation immediately is always a good idea.  Sometimes the updates have security patches that protect your website from hackers.

Click that link to go to the update page where you will have 2 options – to update automatically or manually.

The WordPress automatic updater works very well. Just click the button to update and wait 5 to 10 seconds until it tells you it is complete.

You will be told to backup your site first as a standard precaution. That is because you can never anticipate when something will go off, and as I said above, their updater works very well. At a minimum, it is a good idea and also very easy to backup your database, explained below.

Backing up Your WordPress Website

As an initial note, I think it is safe to say that any reputable hosting company will have backups of all of your files and databases.  But it can take days to a week to have them restored and at an additional cost (unless it was an error caused by the hosting company).  And your hosting company will likely not be backing up your site files, etc. every day but only every week or month – so their backup may not be right up to date if you should need that.  Backing up your files provides an additional insurance and control should a very rare ocurance happen.

Your WordPress site consists of the following:

1. WordPress Core Installation
2. WordPress Database
3. WordPress Plugins and Themes
4. Uploaded Images and Files
5. Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files
6. Additional Files and Static Web Page

To completely backup your website, you would need to backup your database, all of the site files that are located within your WordPress install folder, and any other files that you or your web developer installed elsewhere (if at all).

To backup those aspects of your website that are unique to your website, (ie not including all of the wordpress program files “core installlation”), you would want to backup the following ( with these, you could install a new wordpress install and put all of these pieces in place to put your site back the way it was):

The database: You can backup your database using the Export function within the Tools menu option. Your database contains all of the typed content of your website and its settings – (ie not your uploaded content (images, pdfs, etc).  Backing up your WordPress database is easy to do and is worth doing each time you update your WordPress instalation, unless you are using your website as a content management system and do not change content frequently.

WordPress Plugins and Themes:  Your “Theme” is the folder that contains the files that define the unique look and functioning of your website.  Plugins are sets of code that add functionality to your website.  You can find these folders on your server within the folder in which you installed WordPress here: /yourWordPressinstall/wp-content/themes and  /yourWordPressinstall/wp-content/plugins.  You can narrow down even further what you need to save within these folders by only downloading and saving  the “Theme” that you are using, and the only the plugins your site is using.  You can find your Theme in your admin panel within the Appearances/Themes area of your WordPress admin panel.  And you can determine which plugins you are using by going the the Plugins/Installed section of your admin and looking at those plugins that provide the option to “Deactivate” under their name (thus indicating that they are active).  You cannot backup these from within WordPress and would need to do this in another way, ie via FTP, a FileManager in your hosting account, or a backup utility in your hosting account.  Likely once your website is up and running, and you have one backup of these, you will not need to back them up again as they will not change, unless you install a new plugin.

Uploaded Images and Files:  Whenever an image or pdf document or other media is uploaded, it is stored in a folder on your server. In order to have your own backup of these, you would need to keep a backup of the contents of that folder.  By default, that folder is in this folder: /yourWordPressinstall/wp-content/uploads.  You can confirm where they are backed up by going to the Settings/Miscellaneous tab in your WordPress admin panel. You cannot backup these from within WordPress and would need to do this in another way, ie via FTP, a FileManager in your hosting account, or a backup utility in your hosting account.  How often you back this up depends on how often you upload new content.

Other Scripts or Files:  Any scripts, files or webpages outside of what is mentioned above would be unique to your website and theme and could not be anticipated here.  You would have to reference the documentation for a given theme you installed or ask your web developer.