Herself's Webtools

Domain hijacking doesn’t seem to be as large of a problem as it was five or ten years ago, but still a story here and there make the news. The moral of the story below? Pay your bills on time or early, especially when it comes to domains. As David Solomon can tell you praying won’t bring it back

Small business owner David Solomon was hijacked online.

Or rather, his company’s online address was claimed by someone else after he’d already moved in, leaving his business locked out of the Web home it had built for itself.

Solomon said his more than year-long experience was “horrific,” causing him to stay up nights praying for a resolution to the situation, wringing his hands and fretting over finances. . . .

It’s a long, complicated story as Solomon tells it. But in a nutshell, MotorWatch’s claim to one of the two URLs — nutzandboltz.com — was dropped, either by accident, miscommunication or both. As soon as it was released, a domain-name bandit grabbed it “and things just kept getting worse,” said Solomon. [ read more Mastering your own domain ]

I’m finding WP 2.3 to be not as stable as the prior version and regretting my upgrade. I upgraded the last of my blogs late last night. But if you are upgrading here are some tips:

1) Back up your database and do an export back up of your WP blog. You can never have too many backups.

2) Download and save wp-config.php. Open it, read it and be sure you know your user name, server, db name and password.

3) Save your favicon.ico, .htaccess, robots.txt files and then save your template.

4) Make you you have downloaded new versions of all your plugins.

5) Delete your old Wordpress installation, all of it. It will not work if you just upload the new version over the old version.

6) Upload the wp-config.php that you saved

7) Run http://yourwebsite.com/yourWordpressDirectory/upgrade.php

8 ) Upload your template, plugins and the files you saved if they got nuked during the install

9) Turn on your plugins

10) Re-select your template and you should be good to go

Have you ever gone to a website and gotten a file listing instead of webpage? That’s not something you want happening. First it confuses your visitors, second no one should be viewing your directories for security reasons.

To prevent directory viewing you can stick a index.html file in each directory. Perhaps just a list of links pointing your visitor to the main sections of your website.

Or you can edit your .htaccess file and add

Options -Indexes

This will return a 403 error to the visitor.

Or you can edit your .htaccess file and add

DirectoryIndex missing.html

Then when a user tries to view a directory your ‘missing.html’ file will be shown. You can chose any file you want it doesn’t have to be missing.html.

See also:
Perishable Press Stupid htaccess tricks