Let’s Have a Word Drupal Blog & Vanilla Discussion Forums

On 04.27.11, In blogging, Blogsite, By Dan Calloway

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 27 April 2011

WEAVERVILLE, NC – I want to invite everyone who visits my The Chronicler’s Web blog to also visit my Drupal blogsite as well. This blogsite is called “Let’s Have a Word.”

I think you’ll enjoy my Drupal blog because it is more technically oriented than this blog and offers a great variety of information, including information relevant to the Stock Market.

Please consider visiting my alternative blogsite today and create an account so that you can comment on the articles that you find there. Remember, you must use a valid email address when creating an account because your account info is forwarded to the email address you supply when creating your account. Also, the valid email address is used by the site admin to contact registered users from time to time. Your account password is encrypted with military-strength 256-bit Rjindal encryption, so, it cannot be compromised.

Discuss what you read in my Drupal blog on the Vanilla Discussion Forums. Consider signing up and becoming a member. We would love to have you. Thank you.

I hope to see you soon!

Dan Calloway
Editor-in-Chief, TCW

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Spammers to Your Blog

On 11.06.10, In blogging, Blogsite, Security, By Dan Calloway

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 6 November 2010

WEAVERVILLE, NC – Do you have a blog? Most people nowadays have one for any number of reasons. Blogs are a good way of expressing one’s self to the world or simply a means of logging one’s thoughts or ideas on the Web. Besides, it’s called a Blog because the term means Web Log.

I like blogging. It gives me an opportunity to say what I want to say or to express my opinion about areas of interest to me and allows me to share that opinion or those ideas with the World. If someone has a concurring or dissenting opinion, they are welcome to comment on the posts I leave here. That’s perfectly fine. What isn’t fine, however, are those people who wish to attack my blog with HTML or script injection.

HTML or script injection is the intentional insertion of hypertext markup language or scripting language code into what appears to be a normal comment, but has the injected script or HTML hidden from view. The reason attackers perform the HTML or script injection is obvious. They want to advertise their business or their products on your blogsite.

The problem with this is two-fold. First, I haven’t given the HTML or script attacker to my blog the permission to advertise on my blog. Secondly, such attacks flood my blog’s server and slow down the site, making it difficult for those legitimate subscribers and anonymous guests to my blog to enjoy the site.

Well, I’ve decided to take a stand. I installed WP-Sentinel, a plugin for WordPress blogs that monitors and stop incoming HTML or script injection attacks against my blog. The plugin allows one to ban the attacker–identified by IP address–for 24 hours or for any number of hours if you manually ban someone. Well, I take it a step further. I don’t worry about temporary banning. If someone takes the time to launch an HTML or script attack against my blog, then I will ban them permanently–NO WARNING!

I take the IP address of the attacker that WP-Sentinel reveals in an email message that it sends to me and I update my .htaccess file in WordPress. This file is located in the root of your WordPress installation folder and controls access to your blog. The default access command in that file is: “allow from all.” However, you can insert a “Deny” statement on a separate line(s) below the “allow from all” statement, one for every IP address you intend to ban permanently from commenting on any of your blog posts. Thus if you were intending to ban IP addresses 78.113.23.54 and 98.223.14.33, for instance, the .htaccess statements would look like this:

allow from all

deny from 78.113.23.54

deny from 98.223.14.33

I keep a copy of my latest .htaccess file in a folder on my user folder in Linux. When I receive an attack notification, I log into my Dashboard in WordPress, navigate to my WP-Sentinel plugin, locate the IP address of the attacker, append the IP address deny statement to the last line of the file, and then upload and overwrite the existing file with the new one–banning the new user along with the others.

I take a hard line against those who wish to attack me. You should too.

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Joomla, WordPress, & Drupal Website Design Business

On 10.31.10, In Blogsite, Business, By Dan Calloway

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 31 October 2010

WEAVERVILLE – I have come to the conclusion over the last 15 or so months that at my age of 57 no one wants to hire me. Although I have tried to interview, and have applied for many positions–many of which I am overqualified for–I never seem to get an interview or the interview ends with, “I’m sorry, but you are certainly overqualified for the position you’re applying for.” Many times I’ve applied online for positions and never even get a response. That’s simply just unacceptable.

So, I’ve decided if no one will hire me, then, as a result of this obvious age discrimination on the part of employers these days, I have started my own small business and hired myself as the company’s President and 100% voting stockholder. The staff of Chronicler’s Web, LLC is in the business to design affordable and professional-looking websites for worldwide clients.

I have prepared and filed with the Department of the Secretary of State for the State of NC the Articles of Incorporation to form my own small business. The business name is Chroniclers Web, LLC. This limited liability corporation is a click-and-mortar business and is wholely-owned and operated by Dan Calloway.

Chroniclers Web, LLC is a website design business that specializes in Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal site construction. My staff and I are experts in all three of these open source website design platforms–recently bringing Drupal into the fold.

In addition, I have recently added a Chronicler’s Scholar blog site to my domain, which I have created in Drupal. If you’re interested in blog articles of a scholarly nature, then you will certainly enjoy the site. Please consider following it through the site syndication and sign up for a new account to get access to information to which anonymous visitors don’t have access.

Please help me promote my new business by letting all your friends, family, co-workers, and colleagues know about Chroniclers Web, LLC. If you would like to send written correspondence to the Chroniclers Web, LLC, our physical address is:

Chroniclers Web, LLC
PO Box 2228
Weaverville, NC 28787

Our hours of operation are M-F, 9am – 6pm Eastern. The business telephone number is located on the business website. Thank you for your loyal support of The Chronicler’s Web, Dan Calloway’s personal blog.

UPDATE! — The Chronicler’s Web, LLC was officially accepted and filed in the Office of the Secretary of the State of North Carolina on 3 November 2010.  I’m now a small business owner. Time to get to work.

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Build a Website and They Will Come…or Will They?

On 05.02.10, In blogging, Blogsite, Web browsers, By dancalloway

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 2 May 2010

WEAVERVILLE, NC – There was a time in the mid- to late-90′s when I could build a website using one of my favorite web-authoring tools at the time such as FrontPage or PageMaker, and after publishing the site, I could be guaranteed that site visitors would find it. Today, this is not the case at all.

Back in the early days of the Worldwide Web (W3) there were only a scant few hundred thousand or million web pages that had been published and available for site visitors to visit. Today, there are literally billions of web pages on the Internet. What this means is that if you build a website and expect people to find it, then you’re in for quite a surprise. It would be similar to erecting a coffee shop in the Mojave desert and expecting people to be lining up at the counter waiting to be served. It’s simply not going to happen.

So, what used to be true; that is, that I could build a website and they would come, is no longer the case. What I have to do today is be smarter about how I draw traffic to my website. And, I do this using the technology made available to me in WordPress.

Site visitors on the W3 find your website today by plugging in keywords and phrases in the major search engines like Google, Ask, AOL, Yahoo, etc., and what results are pages of links to the results of their search that come from previous searches conducted by the search engines and cached on their servers. These searches conducted by the major search engines are performed by what is referred to as Web bots. These bots go out and look for web pages that have been published to the W3 and they index their searches based on meta tags that have been (or should be) placed on those pages. The meta tags are invisible to humans but not to the bots. But where do these meta tags (or keywords) come from? They are incorporated on the web pages as they are designed by the web designers in XHTML or PHP.

WordPress allows the everyday person (not necessarily a professional web designer) to incorporate keywords into their websites in the appropriate places and in the appropriate quantities so that Search Engines can find them, but at the same time, not reject them when they do. This is accomplished with a plugin for WordPress called “All-in-One SEO Pack.”

The All-in-One SEO Pack plugin is available by searching for it in the Plugins | Add New Plugins section. Once installed and activated, all the user has to do is tell WordPress to use the meta tags generated by keywords the user assigns to his/her blog posts and the SEO plugin automatically updates the meta tags for those posts so that Web bots can find them during their daily website indexing missions.

If you install the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress into your WordPress blog, you’ll notice an increase in site visitors within the first two weeks after doing so. As time progresses, you’ll notice an even greater frequency of site visitors, and in larger numbers flocking to your website. I know I have. It works and, as a result, I can once again say: “If I build a Website, they will come.”

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Dan’s Personal Blog — Coming Soon!

On 03.28.10, In blogging, Blogsite, By dancalloway

by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 28 March 2010

WEAVERVILLE, NC – Many of my subscribers have voiced their desires to see a more personal slant to my blogging rather than personal articles that I have written and published in the past.

The readers have spoken and let me know that they want me to express my views, opinions, and insights into a daily blog to be published in its own feature within The Chronicler’s Web.

I am responding to those resounding requests by launching my Personal Blog segment here at The Chronicler’s Web in the next few days. Please look for this added feature on TCW and subscribe to the RSS Feed.

I hope that the introduction of my personal blog to this website will be what my readers have asked for and that this new feature will be both enjoyable and enlightening.

If you have any requests for information that you would like to see in my personal blog, please leave a comment here in this article or email me. Another alternative is to use the Contact Me form to submit your comments or inquiries. And, finally, I’m experimenting with a “Live Chat” interface located on the sidebar that will allow you to conduct a live chat session with me over the Internet. This is currently offline, but if you click on the Email Us button, you can use that interface to send me an email as well.

“Thank you” to my subscribers. I promise to keep listening if you promise to keep visiting and reading my articles on TCW.

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