Never forget to backup!

Maybe you’ve enabled the “flash slideshow” within the Slideshow options of NextGEN gallery. This will load the JW Image Rotator on every page. I’ve disable usage of the flash slideshow by unselecting the option:

[ ] Integrate the flash based slideshow for all flash supported devices

Without usage of the flash image rotator it is still possible to use slideshows. But the overall page load time increases. For me it looks like that loading the flash object causes the overall page display to be delayed. Google Chrome seems to handle loading of the flash object faster.

Anyway for me the fastest browser available seems to be Google Chrome. On my 13″ MacBook I recognize significant performance differences when using Safari, Firefox and Chrome. That’s the reason why I’m currently using Chrome (development version) as browser.

In my case it was caused by Googles mod_pagespeed plugin for Apache. I thought this is a nice plugin, but it seems it causes to much problems with WordPress (second time here for me). So I decided to no longer use this plugin.

Useful link:

• WordPress Trackback Tutorial
• WordPress Not Sending Pingbacks/Trackbacks

Add the following lines of code to the functions.php in theme directory:

function auto_login() {
  if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
  //determine WordPress user account to impersonate
  $user_login = 'guest';
 //get user's ID
  $user = get_userdatabylogin($user_login);
  $user_id = $user->ID;
  //login
  wp_set_current_user($user_id, $user_login);
  wp_set_auth_cookie($user_id);
  do_action('wp_login', $user_login);
  }
}
add_action('init', 'auto_login');

Source: lbsharp.com

Furtunatly there is an eays way to disable the admin bar. The only thing you have to do is to add one line of code into the functions.php of your theme:

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

And the admin bar disappears, very nice.

Source: German WordPress Blog

Delete all revision of every post. It can be achieved using a simple SQL statement:

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = 'revision'

I do this from time to time. Optionally it’s possible either to disable revison managment or restrict the number of saved revisions by adding one of the following statements into your wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

The information has been taken from weblogtoolscollection.com.

This is nice, but WordPress does still send a few HTTP requests to netdna.yoast.com. I think it makes no sense because we have disabled the Yoast widget:

To avoid this few unneeded request I’ve installed the Yoast Remove plugin. After installing and enabling the plugin the additional HTTP requests are gone and as a result we’ve improved the load time our admin dashboard a little bit:

Links

• Yoast Remove plugin

I guess you have three choices to come around this issue.

1. Modify the WordPress core source code

I found this solution from seorankings.com. This solution is quick and dirty. It may happen that you will have to apply the hack again when you update your WordPress version.

To modify open the file wp-includes/category-template.php and find the function wp_tag_cloud(). Change the number assignment from 45 to what ever you need.

function wp_tag_cloud( $args = '' ) {
 $defaults = array(
 'smallest' => 8, 'largest' => 22, 'unit' => 'pt', 'number' => 45,

2. Add the tag cloud function call to your template

Another option is to add the wp_tag_cloud() function call into your template. I’ve not tested it but it should work when you add the call into your sidepar.php:

wp_tag_cloud(‘smallest=8&largest=22&number=30′);

Now you can easily adjust the number of tags in your cloud. For this option it’s needed to remove the tag cloud from your widgets within the wp-admin I guess.

3. Use a Plugin

Optionally search for a configurable tag cloud plugin and use it.

Pretty nice. But it needs minor modifications in your template code after installation. In my case I had to replace the following lines of code in a few .php files in my template.

<div id="pagenavi">
<!--
 <div><?php posts_nav_link('','','&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
 <div><?php posts_nav_link('','Next Entries &raquo;','') ?></div>
-->
 <?php wp_pagenavi(); ?>
 </div>

Simply find all code places with the posts_nav_link(..) function call, remove them and add the wp_pagenavi() function call. That’s it.

Plugin Homepage: WP-PageNavi WordPress Plugin

He recommends to protect your wp-admin area using the Apache .htaccess file. Here in detail access is only allowed from IP addresses from where you are logging in. It’s definitely a good way to protect you blog, but often people don’t have a fixed IP address. The DSL provider assigns a different IP address on every dial in. Unfortunately there is no easy way to obtain the network addresses of your DSL provider which can be entered in your .htaccess file.

Another important recommendation: Always keep your server software and WordPress software up to date!

Also remove the following line from your header.php which will show hackers your WordPress version:

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> <!-– leave this for stats please -->

So let’s concentrate on the restricted access in the wp-admin area. It’s a little bit tricky to get the address list of your DSL provider. I’ll explain and show an example script below. First let’s have a look at the video from Matt Cutts.

As step one you have to find out your own IP address. Let’s assume your IP address assigned from your provider is 213.168.95.20 (this is just an example!). Next do a whois lookup:

server:~# whois 213.168.95.20
...
inetnum:        213.168.95.0 - 213.168.98.255
netname:        NC-DIAL-IN-POOL

Have a look at the netname NC-DIAL-IN-POOL. Usually provider assign  a common name for all DSL dynamic address. But we want to add all IP addresses or better all network ranges into our .htaccess file. Ok now we need to get all address ranges with this netname. This can be achieved using the Linux whois tool:

server:~# whois -h whois.ripe.net NC-DIAL-IN-POOL
...
inetnum:        194.8.209.0 - 194.8.209.255
...
inetnum:        194.8.205.0 - 194.8.205.255
...

Fine we get a list with all network ranges from our provider now, but still not the correct netmask format and a lot of other output which we don’t need. Basically it’s possible to manually generate the .htaccess file now. Not big fun… So I’ve created a small perl script which does the job. As small bonus it creates the needed format for .htaccess file which means you are able to directly add the output to your .htaccess file in the wp-admin folder.

Important: Before usage you have to add the netname of the dial-in pool of your provider. How to find it out is described above. Below is only an example. The output will look like:

server:~# ./gethtaccessranges.sh
allow from 194.8.209.0/24
allow from 194.8.205.0/24
allow from 195.14.226.0/24

Finally generate a .htaccess file in your wp-admin/ folder with the content:

order deny,allow
deny from all

and add the output of the script gethtaccessranges.sh below the two lines. That’s it! Now access to wp-admin is only allowed from dynamic IP address from your provider. Sure it’s not the perfect solution but I’ll prevent you from many other hack attempts from all over the world.

At the end of the script there is also an example in case providers use number in their netnames.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# gethtaccessranges.sh
# Harald Kraemer 08.08.2010
# www.technnitip.net
#
# NET::CIDR and NET::Whois is need to run this script.
# On debian you can install using apt-get:
# apt-get install libnet-cidr-perl libnet-whois-perl
#
# Important: Replace the netname "NC-DIAL-IN-POOL" at the end of the
# script with the dial-in netname of your provider! Use the command
# whois <my-ip-address> to find out the netname.
use Net::CIDR;
use Net::CIDR ':all';
use Net::Whois::Raw;
use strict;
sub getRanges
{
  my($netname) = @_;
  my $whois;
  my @whois_array;
  my @ranges;
  $whois = whois( $netname, 'whois.ripe.net' );
  @whois_array   = split( "\n", $whois );
  @ranges        = grep( /inetnum:/, @whois_array );
  foreach ( @ranges )
  {
    s/inetnum://g;
    s/ //g;
    s/ - /-/g;
    foreach my $item ( Net::CIDR::range2cidr( $_ ) )
    {
      print "allow from " . $item . "\n";
    }
  }
}
getRanges('NC-DIAL-IN-POOL');
#for( my $i=1; $i <= 30; $i++)
#{
#  getRanges('DTAG-DIAL' . $i);
#}

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