So I have been trying to correct the issue of over optimization and one of the many solutions I have seen floating around involves adding “nofollow” to category links. From what I have read links to categories on your site can be considered duplicate content. Please correct me if I am wrong.

So I went looking for a solution and all I was able to find was a bunch of plugins that will do this for you. As many of yo know I hate using plugins and instead opt for adding the functionality directly to the theme. After searching for almost an hour, I came across a little snippet of code from Whitney Krape that does the trick rather well.

Open up your functions.php file and add the following:

add_filter( 'the_category', 'add_nofollow_cat' );
function add_nofollow_cat( $text ) {
$text = str_replace('rel="category tag"', 'rel="nofollow"', $text); return $text;
}

That’s all you need really. Now any links to category’s on your site will have the “nofollow” tag. Do you think this is useful? Enjoy!

The best part about most of them is they are responsive! I think this is a great trend and I am happy to see a lot of designers making the extra effort to include this in their creations.

Kudos to the designers! know of any other minimalistic WordPress themes? Let us know…enjoy!

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So I decided I would write up a nice tutorial for my wordpress tips section and show you some simple steps to change the default gravatar.

Step 1: The first thing you need to do is open up your functions.php file and add the following:

add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'newgravatar' );

function newgravatar ($avatar_defaults) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/custom-gravatar.jpg';
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = "Custom Gravatar";
return $avatar_defaults;
}

The cool thing about this is you can change “custom-gravatar.jpg” to anything you want. Once you have done that, make sure you put the image that you want to use in the images folder of your theme.

Step 2:  Next thing is log in as admin then go to Settings, then to Discussion. You should see your custom gravatar as an option:

select your custom gravatar and click “Save Changes” and you should be good to go.

You can see it really is simple to change the default gravatar for WordPress. This option is available as part of the framework I use for conversions. As with anything concerning WordPress make sure you backup any files you are modifying in case something blows up. Do you know of great custom gravatars being used? Let me know. Enjoy!

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So what i am going to show you (for those of you who do not know about this) are a few WordPress tips that will show you how you can secure your WordPress install and keep this nasty little hackers from taking over your site.

Remove WordPress Version

The first thing I like to do is remove the version generator from the header. Leaving this information intact will allow someone to view what version of WordPress you are running and if there are any known exploits for that version they can use those to hack your site. Most people will use a plugin to remove this, but there is no need to add another plugin. All you have to do is add the following to your functions.php file:

function no_generator() { return ''; } add_filter( 'the_generator', 'no_generator' );

once you add this you should not see a version in the header section when viewing the page source.

Protect the .htaccess and wp-config.php Files

Another thing I like to do is add a few lines to the .htaccess file. Before you add anything i highly recommend that you back up the orginal .htaccess file in case something goes wrong. Open up your .htaccess files and add the following to it:

<files ".htaccess">
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

<files "wp-config.php">
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

What this does is keeps your .htaccess file and your wp-config.php file from being accessed by anyone. If they try to access it, they will get a 404 error. Works rather well.

Prevent Injection

One last bit of info I like to add to the .htaccess file is a little piece of code that prevents anyone from trying to inject anything like base64 code into the site. Since I have started using this I have never had any site hacked. This is not a guarantee, but from my experience it works great. Remember back up your .htaccess file before adding:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|\%3D) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode.*\(.*\) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

So there you have it! A few snippets of code that should keep your head from hurting and keep those pesky little school kids out. Do you know of any other ways to secure a WordPress site?

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First the bad news: this little tip is geared towards anyone who is hosted with the greates hosting company ever created: HostGator! Yeah, sorry about that folks. Now for the good news: If your hosting company uses cPanel, then this maybe an option you can ask them for. So give them a buzz or an email or send them smoke signals and ask and I sincerely hope it can be done.

The first thing your going to do is log into your HostGator account and once you are in scroll down until you see this section:

Now click on the section that says “Optimize Website” and once you do you will see a screen that looks like this:

Select “Compress all content” and then click Update settings. Now that you have that taken care of you need to check that this is in fact working, you can go to GIDZip Test and input your sites address and it will check if in fact the above was turned on correctly.

Ok so now you should have a good boost in speed but there is still one thing you need to do and that is edit your .htaccess file and add some values. I am going to share what I have in mine:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-fastphp
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-eruby
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/truetype font/opentype
</IfModule>

# BEGIN Compress text files
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>
# END Compress text files

# BEGIN Expire headers
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
</IfModule>
# END Expire headers

# BEGIN Cache-Control Headers
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
<FilesMatch "\\.(ico|jpe?g|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\\.(css)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\\.(js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\\.(x?html?|php)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=600, private, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>
# END Cache-Control Headers
# BEGIN Turn ETags Off
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
</IfModule>
FileETag None
# END Turn ETags Off
# BEGIN Remove Last-Modified Header
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset Last-Modified
</IfModule>
# END Remove Last-Modified Header

I do all of this for every WordPress site I develop or help with and it works wonders. Do you know of any other wordpress tips that concern speeding up wordpress? Let me know.

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add_filter('widget_text','execute_php',100);
 function execute_php($html){
 if(strpos($html," $html=ob_get_contents();
 ob_end_clean();
 }
 return $html;
 }

Thanks to Emanuele Feronato for this great snippet of code.

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