So.. Do you have your own customized 404 error page? Share with us! Enjoy!

Keep This in Mind

What we need to do is open the existing .htaccess file on your wordpress blog and paste the hack codes below OR create new .htaccess file if it does not exist. Upload to your site root and chmod it to 644 to protect it from malicious hacker types.

Be sure to keep the original working .htaccess as backup just in case you need to revert to original settings.

The Hacks

• Protect the .htaccess file itself

# protect the htaccess file
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

• Protect the wpconfig.php file

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

• Disable the Server Signature from showing

# disable the server signature
ServerSignature Off

• Limit the File upload size

# limit file uploads to 10mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000

• Blacklist undesired users and bots ip address
  

#who has access and who doesnt
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 123.456.789
deny from 93.121.788
deny from 223.956.789
deny from 128.456.780
</LIMIT>

• Allow only your IP adress on the wp-admin directory

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Example Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
</LIMIT>

Be sure to put your ip address on line xx.xx.xx.xx. You can allow more ip address by adding another ip address on next line.

• Redirect users to Custom Error page

#custom error docs
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.php
ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error.php

• Prevent directory browsing

# disable/prevent directory browsing
Options All –Indexes

• Redirect ‘Day & Name’ permalinks structure to new permalinks structure of /%postname%/ without losing any backlinks

The first thing to do is to login to your WordPress admin, go to Settings → Permalinks and select custom. Fill out the field with /%postname%/.

The permalinks will look like this one below:

http://www.yourblog.com/name-of-the-post

Now open .htaccess file or create new one if not exist. Paste this code inside it.

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$4

Now you should have all backlinks with the new permalinks structure.

• Remove /category/ from WordPress url

Now what we want to do is to change

http://www.domain.com/blog/category/postname

to

http://www.domain.com/blog/postname

Just paste the code below onto the .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourblog.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Redirect WordPress RSS feeds to feedburner with .htaccess

# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/catswhocode [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule>

Do not forget to change the feedburner url to your own feedburner url.

• Block referring domains

For this example is digg. But who don’t want referal from Digg? This is just for example. You can put any domain name.

#block referring domains
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

• Disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

• Setting canonical url manually using .htaccess

# set the canonical url
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Deny comment posting to no referrer requests/ Protect from Spam Comments

There is also a way that you can protect comment or post spamming using .htaccess.

This code will look for the referrer (the page from where the commentator came from) and will deny commenting if the commentator tried to access the wp-comments-post.php file without directly coming from your blog.

Just change the line 4 and specify your blog url there.

# protect from spam or post comments
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$

RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

• Redirect visitors to a maintenance page

Replace maintenance.html (line 2) by the page you’d like to redirect your visitor and the IP adress on line 3 by your own ip.

Note that a 302 redirection is used, to avoid search engines indexing the maintenance page instead of your real homepage

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123

RewriteRule $ /maintenance.html [R=302,L]

• Compress static data

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

• Forcing the use of browser cache

FileETag MTime Size
<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<filesmatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$">
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

• Protect WordPress Blog From Script Injections

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
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]

• Use .htaccess for php compression

You can try to use .htaccess to apply php compression, but use this code with caution at your own risk. It might not support your web settings etc.

# php compression – use with caution
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression 16386
</ifmodule>

• Limit the number of Simultaneous Connections

MaxClients < number-of-connections>

• Set the Time Zone of the Server

SetEnv TZ America/Indianapolis

What Else?

Refer to these sites for more informations:

• A to Z of WordPress htaccess Hacks
• The Ultimate Htaccess
• 10 Awesome .htaccess Hacks for WordPress

Further reference:

• Art of John Pugh
• Moillusions
• Dark Roasted Blend

Find your theme’s functions.php file, and paste the following code:

function hls_set_query() {
$query  = attribute_escape(get_search_query());
if(strlen($query) > 0){
echo '
<script type="text/javascript">
var hls_query  = "'.$query.'";
</script>
';
}
}
function hls_init_jquery() {
wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}
add_action('init', 'hls_init_jquery');
add_action('wp_print_scripts', 'hls_set_query');

After that manually you can open your theme’s header.php file and paste the following code before the </head> tag.

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
.hls { background: #D3E18A; } /* <- Change the CSS style of */
/*    highlighted texts here. */
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.fn.extend({
highlight: function(search, insensitive, hls_class){
var regex = new RegExp("(<[^>]*>)|(\\b"  search.replace(/([-.* ?^${}()|[\]\/\\])/g,"\\$1")  ")", insensitive ? "ig" : "g");
return this.html(this.html().replace(regex, function(a, b, c){
return (a.charAt(0) == "<") ? a : "<strong class=\""  hsl_class  "\">"   c   "</strong>";
}));
}
});
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
if(typeof(hls_query) != 'undefined'){
$("#post-area").highlight(hls_query, 1, "hls"); // <- Change 'post-area' to ID of HTML tag you
//    want to highlight search terms in.
}
});
</script>

Make sure to change the “post-area” in the code to the HTML tag ID (for eg: content or post) of the area you want your search terms highlighted. You can also change the way the highlighted text styles by changing the CSS properties of the “.hls” class.

Enjoy!

News Submission

We have integrated one plugin that enable visitors to submit any useful and suitable articles that will require moderation before being shared with our readers in a special community news page. Luckily, some links may be featured on our post, or shared in facebook, twitter or digg. Hopefully both sides gain profits from this sharing.

You can also submit news from below form:

To view submissions, go to Community News Page.

Follow WPTidBits Updates

On top of the sidebar, we have RSS Feedlink, Google Feedburner, Email Subscription, Facebook WPTidBits Fan Page and Twitter. We hope that our loyal visitor may follow our latest posts and great offers from time to time.

Join Our Social Pages

This is one of our request. We are quite green and still have long journey to catch great blogs like Mashable, WPRecipes, Web Designer Wall or any other experts out there. But we believe they also started small like us. So support us to built our names. Do join our twitter, Facebook Fan Page and Google Buzz Profile. We will try our best to serve our readers with memorable and useful contents.

Share Our Posts

We believed on one phrase “loving is sharing”. On each of our post, we have ready share button for readers which are generous enough and interested with our posts. We hope that visitors can spread the words and tell about us. You can find them on left side of post and most below of each post. Thanks!

Enjoy the site!

Why text inside search forms?

The text can actually help readers to identify the search area more easily, encouraging them to use it and even clarify the search process for non-experience users. Some examples of texts that you can include in the search box:

• search here
• search
• To search, type and hit enter
• search this blog

How to do it

Simply locate where is search form code. It can be in sidebar.php, header.php depending on where it is located. Just find this line of code:

<input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="20"/>

Then replace the whole code above with this bunch of code:

<input type="text" name="s" id="s" value="Text to be displayed here" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;"/>

With a simple code above will give you a clickable, and then dissapearing text inside the search box, and replaced by the texts you typed. When you click on other side than the search box without typing any text, it will reappear again the default search text.

More

Then you can customize the looks of the font and its color by modifying or adding the suitable css stylesheet.

To get a nice search result, you can go to our previous post:

How to Create SEO Friendly Search URL

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