Installation & Configuration

This plugin is as simple as install and activate. It has a fantastically simple configuration page, as shown below, allowing you to easily turn on (or off) link checking for different types of content. When a broken link is found it notifies you on the Dashboard and provides you with simple controls to remove the link, edit the link or check it again (in case the site was temporarily down).

Prevents Frustration

It may seem like a trivial plugin, but Broken Link Checker is actually one of our most powerful tools because it actively prevents visitor frustration. Remember the last time you were on a website and the content you really wanted was just a click away? And you clicked and got the lovely “Page not found 404″? I bet you tried a couple more times, then abandoned the site, never to return again.

That’s exactly how your visitors feel, and exactly what your visitors will do when they discover you’ve left some links unchecked. So head on over to your WordPress admin panel and get installing the Broken Link Checker plugin!

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When configuring your publishing location as FTP, fill in the host as ftp.yourdomain.com and use the FTP username and password as provided in the email we sent you when you first signed up with us. If you need to reset your FTP login details, here’s how!

You will also need to ensure the Directory/Path field is set to ‘httpdocs’

For those who prefer to skim, here are the same directions in written format:

1. Select the site you wish to publish in the sidebar. If you only have one, it’s likely called “Site”
2. Change the “Publish To” dropdown to “FTP Server”
3. Name your site whatever you like and enter your contact email address
4. Under the FTP Server Settings section, specify the server address as ftp.yourdomain.com (e.g.: ftp.websavers.ca)
5. Supply your FTP Username and Password where prompted
6. Enter ‘httpdocs’ in the Directory/Path field
7. The Protocol can be set to either FTP or SFTP for good results. If you have trouble with one, try the other!
8. Choose the Test Connection button to be sure everything will work. If you get an error, let us know in the comments below or open a support ticket.
9. Enter your website address

When you’re ready to publish simply press the “Publish Site” button to begin uploading. Now that you’ve saved the server settings, you will only need to press the Publish Site button every time you wish to upload changes!

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Things you will need

• Your database username and password for the application. To find this, you will need to login via FTP and open the wp-config.php file. Other applications have similar configuration files. For example, Joomla uses configuration.php and most other apps use config.php
• The version of your installed application
• The path the application is installed to. For example, if you have to enter yourdomain.com/wordpress in your browser to get to the admin panel, then your path is /wordpress

Great, let’s get importing!

1. Login to Plesk through the Client Centre
2. Choose Web Applications in the sidebar and if you see a list of already installed applications, choose the “Applications Browser” tab in the upper right corner
3. Select the application you will be importing. In this example, you will be choosing “WordPress” in the application directory.
4. Choose the “Import Existing Install” button
5. Select the domain/website name that your application is installed to in the list
6. Enter the path to the application. Tip: do not include httpdocs or httpsdocs.
7. If you have more files saved in the domain than just your web application, then change the directory contents dropdown to tell the application manager which files are part of your application. If you don’t know anything about this, leave it at its default.
8. Specify the version of the application you have installed
9. Provide the applications installer your database username and password
10. Choose the “Import” button and after a few seconds, you’ll be all set! You can start upgrading your application through the installer and making backups whenever you like.

Not sure about how to do some or all of this?

No problem, we can take care of importing your application into the web apps installer for you! If you have our support plus web hosting package, this is completely free of charge. If you have a do-it-yourself WordPress hosting package, like the Ultimate or Extreme plan, you can either upgrade to the Support Plus plan, or pay a one-time fee of $49.99 and we will import your application to the apps installer, back it up and update it for you! Simply open up a support ticket with your request.

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1. Login to the Client Centre and choose the Login to Plesk button
2. Choose Mail in the sidebar and, if provided the option of domains to choose, select the domain under which you are adjusting your mail account
3. Select your mail account in the list
4. Choose the Spam Filter button
5. Select the option to “Switch on Spamassassin spam filtering”
6. We suggest entering a score of 5 as we have found it to be optimal for most of our servers. More info on this to come.
7. Click OK and your spam filter will now be enabled.

How does it work?

When an incoming email is believed to be spam, the subject of the email will be prepended with “*****SPAM*****” or whatever text you specify under the second field of Spamassassin settings when enabling your spam filter. Unfortunately it does not automatically move your spam to a Junk or Spam folder, so you will need to create a rule in your email program (like Outlook) specifying that any email with *****SPAM***** in the subject line be moved to the correct junk folder.

The spam filter will check all your incoming emails and check them against a massive database of common attributes often found in spam emails. Each attribute is paired with a weight indicating roughly how often that attribute is found in spam emails. For example, if an email with the word ‘viagra’ is found to be spam 98% of the time, but an email with the phrase ‘weight loss’ is only confirmed to be spam 40% of the time, the word ‘viagra’ will carry a higher weight. This also works in reverse – if there are positive attributes to your email, that are rarely (or never) found in confirmed spam, then those attributes will be a negative weight.

All of these scores are added up at the end of the checks to give you your final score. The lower the score, the less likely the new email is spam. The score you entered in Plesk in step 6 (above) is the threshold that must be reached for Spamassassin to mark your email as spam. In other words, a variety of different (normally spammy) attributes must be found within the new email that make your email look like spam for it to be marked as spam.

The clever spammers can get around this: here’s how

This is all well and good, but there’s one major problem with it – since the spammy attributes are public knowledge, all a spammer must do is avoid those attributes when sending out emails. As an example, let’s say that most of your spam emails trying to sell you premium software like Microsoft Office for Businesses, but because the spammer is so clever about avoiding spammy attributes, they only score a 1.0 when your threshold is 5. Thus every time they send you an email, it’s never marked as spam and your premium software spam starts collecting in your inbox. How do we fix this?

Training to the rescue!

By training Spamassassin, you’re giving it information about what kinds of spam and what kinds of non-spam email you normally receive. This way it can start to detect patterns specific to your spam (and non-spam) rather than simply using attributes that are common in all the world’s spam. If you’re receiving tons of spam about software but you rarely discuss software in your emails, then Spamassassin can accurately assume that all incoming email discussing software is spam and mark it as such. So, let’s get on with it and start your training!

1. As above, head on over to the Spam Filter option for your email account in Plesk
2. Choose the “Training” tab

In the list you will see all emails found within your inbox. You must leave email in your inbox until you have trained them for this to work. Once you have completed training, you can delete them or move them to another mail folder as you normally would.

Simply check off all emails that are spam, then click the “It’s spam” option at the bottom. That’s it! Keep repeating this as often as possible until you have at least 100 spam emails and 100 non-spam emails trained. The more you train, the better it will be at correctly categorizing your email.

Happy training!

We’d love to hear your results. Use the comments below to let us know how effective this was for you, but please be sure you’ve training at least 100 of both spam and non-spam emails before commenting.

***Please note that each of your email accounts have their own login to Plesk, so you can send your email users to your server’s Plesk URL and have them login with their email address and email password so they can train their own spam.

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Zero Day Vulnerability in Many WordPress Themes

Luckily, and more importantly he managed to pinpoint the issue and identify a very new vulnerability in many WordPress installations. It is estimated that this issue could affect hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs.

Unfortunately, because this TimThumb library is included in themes and plugins and not in the core WordPress installation, it is not easily patched. We are unable to mass-patch this issue using our automated application installer because of this very problem.

Although premium theme creators will no doubt release updates to their themes that fix this issue, it may take some time for these updates to come out. It is also likely that free themes or outdated plugins may never get an update to this problem. As such, it is a very good idea to check your site and look for this vulnerability and fix it as soon as possible.

Note: if you currently have our Support+ web hosting package, this has already been patched if you had this issue.

So how do I know if I’m at risk?

Almost everyone using the TimThumb library that downloaded it before August 1, 2011 is likely at risk. If you are not sure if you are using TimThumb, the easiest way to check is to look through your theme folders for a file called timthumb.php or thumb.php. This can be done using an FTP program or the file browser in your Plesk Control Panel.

This file may also be called thumb.php. It could be in any theme folder, not just necessarily your active theme. Also, it’s possible it is in your plugins folders as well so be sure to look thoroughly.

Oh great, it’s there. Now what?

The quickest way to fix this issue is by editing your timthumb.php or thumb.php files and finding the following lines:

$allowedSites = array (
‘flickr.com’,
‘picasa.com’,
‘blogger.com’,
‘wordpress.com’,
‘img.youtube.com’,
‘upload.wikimedia.org’,
);

The issue with this vulnerability is due to the way the script handles these remote sites being allowed to inject images. The issue can be fixed by simply removing the websites displayed in the $allowedSites array. After you remove them it should look like this:

$allowedSites = array (
);

An empty array.

Update:

Fortunately, because of the quick find by Mark Maunder, the team at TimThumb already has a patch in place. All you need to do is download the following file and replace your existing file with it:

Download: http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php

If your local file is called thumb.php, simply rename the new file to thumb.php before uploading.

—

That’s all there is to it. If this process is beyond you, or you just want to make sure that you fixed the issue completely feel free to open a support ticket through our client admin area, or find us on twitter @websavers.

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In order to configure your email account you will also need to have already created your email account in Plesk. If you can login to webmail at webmail.yourdomain.com (eg: webmail.websavers.ca), then your account is created and you’re ready to proceed.

Let’s get started!

1. Open the Settings app on your homescreen
2. Choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then select Add Account
3. Choose Other to add a non-branded email account
4. Choose Add Mail Account
5. Enter your name and email address and password as it has been set up in your hosting control panel (typically Plesk).
6. Choose Next and leave it on the default selection (IMAP)
7. Under Incoming Mail Server AND Outgoing Mail Server enter the same details:

Host Name: mail.yourdomain.com (eg: mail.websavers.ca)
User Name: your full email address (eg: email@websavers.ca)
Password: The password you specified for the account in your hosting panel

These are identical for both incoming and outgoing servers.

8. Choose Next. It will Verify the account details. You will likely receive a notification about being unable to verify the server identity, this is OK, choose Continue.
9. Choose Save
10. Choose the account you just set up in the list of accounts, then tap the account name
11. Scroll to the bottom and choose Advanced
12. Under IMAP Path Prefix, enter “INBOX” without the quotes, and all in capital letters.
13. Go back by clicking “Account” in the upper left corner, then choose Done twice.

If you are unable to send or receive email after completing these steps, then try restarting your iPad or iPhone. If you are still unable to send or receive email after completing these steps, or if you are unable to complete these steps successfully, please try on a different wireless connection. You may unknowingly have a firewall blocking the setup from succeeding.

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Sparrow is available on the Mac App store for $9.99 [App Store Link] or for free with ads [App Store Link]. It boasts a minimal interface, with gorgeous animations and excellent OS integration. For more details on Sparrow, check out their website for a full feature listing and a handy little video describing how it works.

Now to the meat and potatoes; how to set up your Web Savers account in Sparrow. Thankfully the Sparrow folks have made this as simple as it gets. Three steps and you’re off to the races! Start by launching the Sparrow app from your dock. If this is your first time launching Sparrow, it should prompt you to set up your account automatically, if not, go to the Sparrow menu (upper left corner) and choose Preferences. Go to the Accounts tab and choose the + in the lower right hand corner.

The first step is to provide your account details. Enter your name, your full email address and your password, as you configured it in Plesk.

Next, enter your incoming server info. This will be in the format mail.yourdomain.com. As an example, the screenshot shows mail.websavers.ca since the email address we’re setting up is an @websavers.ca address. If your address were john@johnsmith.com, then you would enter mail.johnsmith.com. Provide your full email address as the Login and enter your Password. Everything else can remain at the default.

Finally, provide your outgoing server info. This is identical to the previous step. The SMTP server is mail.yourdomain.com and your Login is your full email address.

Choose the Next button and Sparrow will add the account and begin downloading any existing emails. You’re all set! Try out sending and receiving emails and be sure to open a support ticket if you run into any problems.

Use another mail app? Ask us if we’ll consider a guide for your mail app of choice in the comments below.

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Things you will need

1. Your domain name
2. Your FTP username and password. These differ from your client centre username and password.
3. A general understanding of where things are located on your computer, such as where your user account folder is located

If you are working on the domain that we created automatically for you when you signed up with us, the FTP username and password can be found in the Web Hosting Welcome email sent when you first signed up with us. It can also be seen in your client centre by selecting “My Services” in the menu, then clicking the manage button beside your hosting account. You may need to hover your cursor over the password to see the full credentials.

If you added the domain to Plesk yourself, then you would have been asked to enter in the username and password for the domain – these are the FTP credentials you will need.

If you forget your FTP username and password and cannot find them, please see our KB article on how to reset your FTP login details.

Intro to FTP and SFTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is what you use to upload your site content to your web server. If you made use of our application installer, then you will still need to know how to use FTP to make changes to your configuration, upload plugins or modules, and adjust other parts of your site manually. Thus it is important to understand the basics of FTP for all aspects of creating and maintaining your website.

SFTP simply adds “Secured” or “SSH” (Secure SHell) to the front of File Transfer Protocol. Using SFTP is highly recommended in all cases where you wish to transfer files due to the added security. In order to use SFTP with our servers, you must have “Shell Access” enabled on your account. We enable basic chrooted shell access on all our accounts to ensure you have secure access to your server. To verify that Shell Access is enabled for the domain you will be working on, do the following:

1. Login to the client centre, choose My Services, click manage beside the hosting account you will be working on, then choose “Login to Plesk”
2. Choose “Web Hosting Settings”
3. If you have more than one domain, select the domain you will be working on in the list. If you have just one domain, ignore this step
4. Under the “Account Preferences” section, look for “Shell access to server with FTP user’s credentials” and ensure it is set to anything that is not “Forbidden”

If you are unable to change this option, please open a support ticket referencing this guide and explaining what you are trying to do so we can correct your permissions.

Where to Find FileZilla Client

FileZilla is a great free FTP and SFTP capable application for Mac, Windows and Linux. It is available here for download. Ensure you download the Client application, not the Server. For Mac OS X there are better applications in terms of user interface design, although they are not free. More on this later.

Download and install FileZilla now to get started with it.

Configuring FileZilla to be Less Confusing

There are a few user interface elements that are bound to do nothing but confuse you. To avoid possible confusion, choose the View menu, then uncheck “Local Directory Tree” as well as “Remote Directory Tree”. Also uncheck “Message Log” (also under the View menu). You may need this for troubleshooting, so remember where it is.

Connecting with FileZilla

At the very top of the window, you will see fields for Host, Username, Password, and Port. These are useful for one-time connections, but if you want FileZilla to remember your settings, then it would be better to save them as a bookmark so you don’t have to enter the details each time you open the application. The first button on the left in the toolbar is the Site Manager – this is how you save bookmarks to FileZilla. You can also find this under the File menu (File > Site Manager).

Open the Site Manager and click the New Site button. It will immediately request a site name – you can make this whatever you wish. On the right, enter your domain name as the hostname with ftp prefixed:

ftp.yourdomain.com

Enter 22 for the Port (for SFTP) or 21 for normal FTP. SFTP is highly recommended. If using SFTP, change the Server Type to SFTP SSH File Transfer Protocol. Under Logon Type, choose Normal and enter your FTP/SFTP username and password.

If you are using regular FTP and not SFTP, make sure you visit the Transfer Settings tab and choose “Passive” for the Transfer Mode setting.

Click Connect.

Understanding the FileZilla User Interface

FileZilla is really easy once you get the hang of it. Here’s the general idea:

Left Side: Local Computer

On the left is your local computer’s directory structure. By default it’s probably showing c:\ on Windows and / (also called root) on OS X or Linux. You will want to navigate to wherever your site’s files are located on your computer. If you used our application installer and don’t yet have your site saved on your local computer, then you probably want to navigate to your Documents or Sites folder and create a new directory where you will store your website.

On Windows Vista and 7, Linux, or Mac OS X, I suggest navigating to the Users folder, then your username, then the folder called Sites (if Sites doesn’t exist yet, why not create it?). Within the Sites folder, create a new folder by the name of your website. You can use this folder to store all your website content.

Right Side: Remote Server

Now that you have connected successfully to your server, on the right side you should see a list of directories like:

anon_ftp
cgi-bin
conf
error_docs
httpdocs
httpsdocs
pd
private
statistics
subdomains
web_users

Although they each have their purpose, most of these can be ignored. The folder where all of your web content is stored is under the httpdocs folder. Don’t mistake this for the httpsdocs folder – this folder is for storing the web site content that is accessible when visiting https://yourdomain.com. In other words it’s for secure content only and only when Plesk is not set to use the same folder for secure and non-secure content.

Transferring Content

To upload your site content, simply drag and drop the items you wish to upload from the left pane to the right. The opposite is true to download – drag the items you wish to download from the right to the left. While the files are downloading or uploading, they will appear in the transfers pane at the bottom of the window. You will also be notified of any failures here.

Troubleshooting

If you cannot connect or cannot upload or download files, the reason why will be displayed in the message log. If you followed the direction to hide this above, then you will need to show it again to view the log. Go to the View menu and choose “Message Log” if it us unchecked. This puts the message log just below the quick connection details at the top of the window. You can see any error messages here – normally at the bottom of the pane.

If you cannot resolve the problem described by the error, please copy and paste the error you see in the message log into a support ticket so we can look into it. Please also include your connection details, including the hostname, username and password so we can reproduce the problem.

Alternative Applications

Although different applications have different user interfaces, all the core functionality described here remains the same. For Mac OS X there are three great alternative applications, one free and two paid. The alternate free application is called Cyberduck and is available here. Cyberduck is also available for Windows now.

Yet another alternative, Flow – $25 USD, makes your FTP/SFTP connections look like Finder windows for simpler drag and drop uploads and downloads.

The third alternative, and my SFTP and FTP application of choice is called Transmit – $34 USD and is made by the folks over at Panic software. Transmit has been around for many many years for the Mac and its latest incarnation, Transmit 4, is a fantastic application. If you intend to be working with file transfers regularly and you’re using a Mac, I highly suggest purchasing this software. The user interface is second to none and the featureset is extremely powerful. For example, Transmit has the ability to easily and simply mount one of your SFTP connections directly in to Finder so that uploads and downloads really are as simple as drag and drop in an already familiar manner. This is all managed through a cute menubar icon in the image of Transmit’s truck icon.

Transmit also has the ability to synchronize folders, making mirroring changes uploaded by others to the server and changes you made locally a breeze.

If you have a suggestions for a great FTP / SFTP application, please let us know! Use the comments below to leave your message.

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Quick Intro to DNS

Whenever you access a domain name like websavers.ca or google.com, your computer accesses your DNS server (usually supplied by your internet provider) in order to obtain the actual numerical IP address of the server the site lives on. Before you register your domain name, or at least before the name servers are updated, your computer will ask your DNS servers to get the IP address for yourdomain.com, but the DNS server will return “Sorry, I don’t know”. This is why you must tell your computer, “I know where that name should point to: here’s the address.” All operating systems provide a special file for overriding name-to-number resolution: the hosts file.

Overriding DNS with the hosts file

Windows, Linux and Mac OS X all use a special file known as the HOSTS file to manually convert names to numbers. Whenever you visit a name like websavers.ca or google.ca, your computer looks at this file before querying your DNS servers to find out what their real IP addresses are. Thus, when you want to tell your computer what server your website resides upon, this is the file you do it in.

First up: where is the HOSTS File?

Here is the location of the file on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

• Windows: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Linux: /etc/hosts
• Mac OS X: /etc/hosts

How do I correctly use this file?

The file may have some information in it at the top – normally information about how to use the file. The key to entering info accurately in the hosts file is by using the following format:
[Server IP Address] [Domain Name]
So, for example, websavers.ca might look like this:
64.131.80.122 websavers.ca
64.131.80.122 www.websavers.ca

How to Edit The HOSTS File

Here’s where things get a bit easier! Rather than navigating to the directory shown above and opening the file in your favourite text editor (on Windows) or opening up Terminal and figuring out the correct commands on the Mac, we’ve found a couple FREE utilities that will take care of this for you!

Mac

If you’re using a Mac, head on over to the Gas Mask Google Code project page and get installing!

This app opens up your hosts file automatically and allows you to save it by writing over the current file. You also have the option of saving multiple hosts files and easily switching between them. This way you can save a default as well as a different one to easily activate and deactive each site you’re working on. Simply create a new one and throw in the IP and site name using the format above. Select the host file you want active on the left, then click the checkbox in the toolbar to activate it. All set!

Windows

On Windows you can download a similar app called Windows Hosts File Editor. Rather than navigating to the hosts file and editing it, just open up Windows Hosts File Editor, and you’re all set to go.

Have any trouble making these apps work? Have an even better app to edit the HOSTS file? Something wrong with the directions? Use the comments below to tell us!

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Here is an overview of the main plugins that we typically use on every WordPress hosting install. They are in no particular order:

All in one SEO pack

This is definitely my favourite SEO plugin. I have tried a number, including SEO Titles and Platinum SEO Pack and neither of which have the same capabilities that the All in one SEO pack has. Although Platinum comes close in functionality, I’ve had issues with it not updating or displaying properly, your mileage may vary.

All in one SEO allows you to easily change your post and page-specific title and meta tags. It also lets you control internal nofollow links, which I find quite useful when structuring my sites.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress is a must have if you want to track website visitor behaviour and integrate your website with the free Google Analytics software. This plugin gives you an easy way to add your Analytics code to your web hosting while giving you a few advanced options such as tracking outbound clicks and not tracking logged in administrator users.

Contact Form 7

This is the most powerful free WordPress plugin I have found when it comes to easily generating contact and submission forms. Contact form 7 lets you generate contact forms with any field name, type, and style you’d like, while providing a short code to insert the form inside any of your WordPress pages.

If your theme does not have a contact form built in, this is a great starting point to integrating a contact form in a few clicks.

Widget Logic

Widget logic is a great little plugin we stumbled upon a couple years ago. It gives you the ability to display certain widgets only on certain pages, posts, categories, etc. You can add a widget and make it display just on your home page, or just on your contact page, for example.

It is a little more advanced, as you will need to use the WordPress Conditional Tags, but they are not too difficult to figure out. We control almost all of our widgets with this plugin on this site.

WordPress Database Backup

If you are not backing up your WordPress database you should definitely pick up this tool. It lets you easily create backups of your WordPress installation and either store them on the local server, download them, or send them via email. You can even set up a backup schedule so you don’t have to worry about your content.

All of our servers have nightly backups in case of an emergency, but it is always a good idea to do your own local backups as well.

Broken Link Checker

The broken link checker is equally as useful to a business site as it is for a personal blogger. This plugin tracks all your internal and external links to check for any problems with them, whether a 404 not found, or 500 internal server error, etc. It has an easy to use dashboard that lets you view any issues and remove the links with a click of a button.

This is great if you are linking out to articles that are no longer available, or if you have recently changed the structure of your website and forgot to redirect some of the old links.

Exec-PHP

A simple plugin that allows you to use PHP within your WordPress posts and pages. The plugin has not been updated in a while, but it is working as of WordPress 3.1 when this post was written. Just install and insert your php code.

Code Markup

Code markup is a great plugin for people looking to display code on their pages or in their post. An example of its use is on our post about integrating flickr on your website where we displayed the required code using this plugin.

WP Recaptcha

This plugin gives you the ability to easily integrate Google’s reCAPTCHA into forms on your website. This helps reduce automated sign-ups and spam.

—

These are the themes that we typically install on every WordPress site we manage. There are other plugins that we may need to use on a case by case basis, but the above list is a great foundation.

If you have any favourite plugins that were not listed above, please let us know!

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