Earlier this month I went away for a week. Two big things broke while I was gone:WordPress had a hole that could expose drafts of postsOur home had a power outage, which caused serious issues with my network attached storage (NAS) box.In each case, software or hardware that I maintain went badly off the rails. [...]

  Here are three easy but important ways to protect yourself if you run a WordPress blog:Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. What I’ve done is lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. I use an .htaccess file, which you can place directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what mine looks like:AuthUserFile [...]

  I’ve got some pent-up techie/gadget blogging in me, and I know that not everyone wants to read that. I’ve mentioned before how to get just my Google/SEO posts, but I’ll repeat in case you didn’t see it the first time.The short answer is to subscribe tohttp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed/instead of my main blog feed at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feed/This trick works [...]

  Recently my home Network Attached Storage (NAS) started acting flaky, so I wanted to back up my data. I picked up a 750 gigabyte Seagate Free Agent Pro drive. Here’s how I fixed a couple annoyances:1. The drive is formatted with ntfs.That’s great for Windows computers, but I preferred to format into a native Linux [...]

  Suppose you want to include a child iframe on your page. You’d like to resize the height of the child iframe so that it doesn’t show a scrollbar. That is, you want something that looks like this:Here’s one way you can do it. First, make the iframe that you want to include. I made a [...]

  Marshall over at ReadWriteWeb notes that in addition to Google, more sites are joining the Data Portability Working Group, which is cool. Data portability is a Good Thing in my book, and I’ve written about general data portability and Google before. So I left this comment:“Check this out, LinkedIn even posted about the Data Portability [...]

  Time to post my stats from 2007. I did a similar stats post last year. In 2006, I had 1.7M visits and about 2.9M pageviews. In 2007, I had about 2.3M visits and 4.8M pageviews:My top five posts in terms of traffic were:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/unboxing-the-everex-200-linux-computer/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hack-your-iphone-install-applications-with-installerapp-and-apptapp/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-googles-search/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/My RSS subscriber stats look like this:What else can I easily check as [...]

  Here’s something I missed while I was offline last week. It looks like Matt Marlon, who served as CEO of Traffic Power, has landed himself in jail. I have mixed feelings about this, but the mixed feelings are mostly satisfaction, curiosity, and just a smidge of glee. In my opinion, the stuff that TrafficPower [...]

  Ah, who am I kidding. You don’t want to hear me talk about the Davos question. I know that webmasters and search engine optimizers alike are all over at Wikia taking it for a test drive. I’m sure that SEOs are trying to figure out how this scoring:means that a site ranks highly for viagra. [...]

  I’m back online. My email isn’t quite as out of control as last year, but it will take me a few days to catch up on things. Going offline for a week was nice, and I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you have a wonderful companion to help you savor the time off.Here’s my [...]