During my talk at WordCamp Ottawa I’ll be sharing info on how you can get started.

In the meantime, here are my slides for the presentation:

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This week, I discovered another great source of icon fonts distributed by Zurb. The social set is particularly interesting, since they have a few icons which are missing from genericons.

One of the best thing about teaching is learning from my students. I’m glad one of them introduced me to this great resource.

The post Foundations Icons appeared first on Bluelime Media.

Do not use “admin” as your username: Matt points out that since WordPress 3.0 allows you to pick a custom username on installation, to replace the default “admin”. Hackers and bots will attack your site using admin as the username, so if you are using this, please change it right away.

Use a strong password: Jon Jennings was curious about these botnets and so hacked his core file to record what passwords they were attempting to login with. The results are interesting.

• many of the passwords are dictionary words
• many include a digit or two at the end – but it’s usually “1″ or “12″
• many are apparently random strings of digits that make sense on a qwerty keyboard eg qwerty, 895623, qweasdzxc
• many are names or places eg nebraska, neal, Brittany, sonia
• some are geeky eg ncc1701d, r2d2c3po
• there’s clearly a distributed botnet at work here. I’ve noticed sequences of dictionary words in alphabetic sequence – but coming from wildly different IP addresses / locations eg I spotted visual, vivian, vivid, vivitron, vixen (actually a sequence of over 40 “vi” words that’s still continuing) with each attempt coming from a different IP address

So be smart and use a strong password.

Use security plugins: This latest instance of attack were reported to be coming from botnets which use different IP addresses, so using a plugin like Limit Login Attempts probably won’t do much, but will stop a hacker. You could password protect the entire wp-admin folder which is what the folks at Retrix.com did for all of their client in order to avoid disaster.

Add protection to your .htaccess file: Mika suggests that most security plugins might be too late in the game and thus not able to do much against this latest attack. Instead she suggests adding a script to your .htaccess file which also works against spam which is nice.

Of course, it goes without saying that your normal WordPress maintenance routine should be kept up to date. Update WordPress when a new version comes out and update your theme and plugins. Equally as important but perhaps not obvious, is to delete inactive themes and plugins. As recent post by WP Beginner points out that back doors are often found in these.

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I’ll give a talk in the developer track and discuss ways to become a better developer by contributing to WordPress and joining the community.

The title of my talk might be a bit misleading though. I probably shouldn’t have said developer.

Designers, teachers, writers and organizers are also needed and welcomed in the WordPress community. I hope that all types of WordPress enthusiasts will join me and get to know the many ways in which one can participate.

See you there.

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With more and more folks migrating to new Macs with retina display, I thought it would be a good idea to get in the habit of using vector icons.

In addition to the Bluelime site, I’ve also built a few responsive sites lately and my starter theme has proven very handy. However, I did find myself changing the same things over and over again. So earlier today, I made the following changes to the BLM responsive starter theme.

• The social media icons have been eliminated and replaced with genericons. I also had to replace delicious with tumblr. Delicious is no longer as popular as it once was.
• I’ve updated both desktop and mobile navigation. The small menu now display the menu title and upon click opens up the navigation.
• I’ve simplified the CSS and removed the gradients from the navigation.
• The header image, if used, now links to the home page.
• I’ve also updated silly errors here and there that Robert must have missed.
  ( ahem.. yeah, it must be his fault. I wouldn’t have done that.)

If you’ve used the BLM responsive starter theme, I would love to hear your thoughts. If you think it could be improved, enhanced or modified in any way, please let me know. For those interested in seeing the code changes, have a look through the commits.

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However, I recently discovered that all that work is not even necessary. Andrew Norcross has developed a plugin that manages FAQ really simply and is super easy to use.

Simply download the plugin, activate it, enter your questions and answers and then choose the shortcode you wish to display on your FAQ page. Andrew has thought of everything and given you lots of display options. The FAQ manager plugin is definitely on my list of favourites and has reduced my workload.

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While teaching at BCIT, I discovered that at the end of each term, students select projects from a list. So I inquired and thought that a re-design and conversion of WFPICCS into WordPress would be a great project. I was lucky enough to have my project selected by a team of 4. Kate, Chad, Gabe and Sesil did a wonderful job working together and built a great looking site for WFPICCS.

The site has a slider on the home page which is updatable by using a custom post type for each slide. Another custom post type was used for the board of directors and officers making it very easy for the folks at WFICCS to update and maintain.

A responsive design was also selected to allow visitors to access the site via platforms other than the desktop. Overall WFPICCS and I are very pleased with the site and looking forward to working with more BCIT students on future projects.

The post WFPICCS gets a new responsive website appeared first on Bluelime Media.

Check it out »

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As a theme developer this means that there’s no longer a need to use a theme options page. Otto wrote a series of great articles detailing how theme developers can implement different options and even created a theme demo for us to play with.

Since then, other developers have written great tutorials on how they’ve integrated the code in their themes. Here are few good ones:

Adding a logo uploader to your WordPress theme with the Theme Customizer, by Kirk Wight
Using the WordPress Theme Customizer to choose between excerpts or full content, also by Kirk Wight
The WordPress Theme Customizer: a Comprehensive Developer’s Guide, by Alex Mansfield

These tutorials helped me immensely in a few recent projects. My new theme Color Palette has a logo uploader and a color scheme selector. My BLM Responsive starter theme has been updated and the links to social media sites are now located in the customizer instead of a separate theme options page.

If you’ve played around with the Theme Customizer and have come across interesting themes or tutorials or if you happen to have downloaded one of mine and have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

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This new theme is fully responsive and comes with a choice of five different colour schemes. Once installed, just go to the theme customizer and browse through the colour options.

I hope that you like it and if you care to comment, don’t hesitate to do so.

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