Gmail 502 Server Error

Today when I try to check my gmail from FireFox, I encounter 502 Server Error. But when I try different browser like Internet Explorer 8, I was able to check it smoothly. So, there is problem in Firefox and gmail.

Further after that I realized that if you clear your Firefox browser cache and cookies than you will be able to check your email even from FF.

Step 1: It is highly recommended to backup your database before your work on any database command.

Step 2: Login to your database using phpMyAdmin (or whatever), Click on your database and click on the SQL tab and enter the following SQL query:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='default' WHERE option_name='template' OR option_name='stylesheet' LIMIT 2;
This query will change the wordpress theme to default.

Step 1: It is highly recommended to backup your database before your work on any database command.

Step 2: Login to your database using phpMyAdmin (or whatever), Click on your database and click on the SQL tab and enter the following SQL query:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ' ' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';
This query will disable all the active plugins.

Feedburner Email Subscription

Step 1.: Go To Feedburner.com and create an account. Verify it’s you, etc.

Step 2: Enter Your blog RSS feed information: (Hint, you can find this in your word press blog by clicking the posts rss feed link)

Step 3: Once you have filled out the necessary information including your blog title, etc., you can click your blog feed title and open the ‘utility’ screen.

Step 4: Click the publicize tab up top

Step 5: Click the email subscriptions link on the left side of the screen:  once clicked you will see some code that will need to be pasted into your blog.

Step 6: Customize: you can customize your blog feed emails by clicking the Email Branding link on the left: drop in your logo, change your font, etc. Cool stuff!

Step 7: Once you have installed your ’subscribe code’ you can sign up to see how it works.

Now your subscriber’s will receive a  email with your latest blog post. Enjoy!!!

Here goes the link http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/ which helps you to create icons and marquees for your web pages with FavIcon from Pics.

Enjoy

- Sakin

Browser Details for Tech Support

Today, I would like to show you the innovative site developed by Imulus. It is very useful for mainly for the Support Team who work in Web. It is very difficult to get the technical question answered through your client who is not technical. Then this site help you find the the answer related to Web Browser.

Website Title: The Site Title is Support Details | Tech Support Management
Website URL: http://www.supportdetails.com/

As the operator of a website or online service, you know the problem: a gruff complaint to customer support because nothing works. And the customer, in his frustration, unfortunately forgets to provide further details.

Where does an admin or programmer begin when all they have to go on is “does not work” or “is broken”? You need details: about the customer’s browser and its configuration. A reasonable approach to the problem would be to start with some queries, which the non-specialist would be able to only partially answer: “Which browser? Well, uh… this Mozzarella.” “Cookies? I haven’t baked in years.”

When in doubt, send your customers to the website Support Details ( http://www.supportdetails.com/ ). Their data will be automatically read out of the browser (including Flash version, operating system, cookies, JavaScript status, screen resolution, browser size and more) and can be copied, sent directly to you via email or saved. The free service uses Flash but can also complete its task without it.

User interfaces—the way we interact with our technologies—have evolved a lot over the years.

From the original punch cards and printouts to monitors, mouses, and keyboards, all the way to the track pad, voice recognition, and interfaces designed to make it easier for the disabled to use computers, interfaces have progressed rapidly within the last few decades.

But there’s still a long way to go and there are many possible directions that future interface designs could take. We’re already seeing some start to crop up and its exciting to think about how they’ll change our lives.

In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we’ll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future).

• Brain-Computer Interface
  • Army Mind-Control Projects
  • The Matrixesque Brain Interface: MEMS-Based Robotic Probe
  • OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator
• Biometric and Cybernetic Interfaces
  • Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring
  • Fingerprint Scanners
  • Digital Paper and Digital Glass
    • Transparent OLED Display
    • LG 19″ Flexible Display
    • E-Ink
• Telepresence
  • Telepresence Surgery
  • Universal Control System
  • Space Exploration and Development
• Augmented Reality
  • Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens
  • Wearable Retinal Display
  • Heads-Up Display
  • Privacy Concerns with Augmented Reality
• Voice Control
  • BMW Voice Control System
  • Google Voice Search
• Gesture Recognition
  • Acceleglove: Gloves that Recognize Sign Language
  • Gesture-Based Control for TVs
  • Nintendo Wii
  • Xbox Project Natal
• Head and Eye Tracking
  • Gran Turismo 5
  • Pseudo-3D with a Generic Webcam
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Cyber Security Knowledge Transfer Network
  • AI for Adaptive Gaming
  • AI for Mission Control
  • Virtual Assistants
• Multi-Touch
  • Microsoft Surface
  • Apple Products
  • Mobile Phones

[View with PicLens]

Read more about The Future of User Interfaces

iPad

Today January 27, the first month of the year 2010 been a big day for Apple Companies. They are one of the most innovative IT company which has been revealing great products in the past such as iPod, iTouch, iPhone and so on. Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed another great produced names iPad Tablet which will cost from $499 to $829. Apple.com reported that it is their most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at unbelievable price.

Steve Jobs Reveals iPad

Features:
The device has a 9.7 inch LED-backlit display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick.
Powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage.
It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone.
The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen.
Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours.
In addition to WiFi, it will have a 3G option from AT&T.
It supports the new iPhone SDK so you can use the iPhone apps in iPad too.
iPad lacking an SD card slot and USB port for which you have to buy extra adapter.

Highlighted Featured:
Apple highlighted the iPad’s use as a digital reader. The iPad comes with a new app called iBooks and an iBooks store. Apple partnered with five publishers to make books available for sale through the iBooks store. “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this technology,”says Jobs referring to the Kindle. “We’re gonna stand on their shoulders and go farther.” The iBooks support the ePub format, allows readers to flip through pages and supports pictures, video, and other graphics. The first book available will cost $14.99. It is also said to be next version of digital journalism.

Costs:
The Wifi-only version, with 16GB of memory, will cost $499.
A 32GB version will be $599, 64 GB will be $699
3G from AT&T it will cost $829 (for the 64GB version)
AT&T will offer two data plans: $14.99a month for 250 MB of data or $29.99 for unlimited. All the 3G iPads, however, will be unlocked, meaning they can be used on other carriers as well.

Video:

Photo Gallery:

[View with PicLens]

Google Analytics Exit Link Screenshot

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

I use Google Analytics for my own site and other sites I work on.  I mostly use this tool to track the visitor and my popular post, keywords and also the click on Site Overlay. I had never tracked exit/outbound link with Google Analytics. One day, my client asked to me research about it and track the exit link.  Then my search for the exit link tracker begins. I fund lot of codes but non of them work properly. Finally, I was lucky enough to get read an article written by Jordi Romkema. But now I see that his site is not available. So, I am writing here again with reference to his code. If you are finding difficult to track the exit/outbound link then just follow the instruction below:

1) Create a Javascript file. For example let’s save it as exittracker.js and write the following code and save it.
var ExitTracker = Class.create({
initialize: function()
{
this.domain = document.location.toString().toLowerCase().split("/")[2];
$$("a").each(function(item)
{
if (item.href && (item.href != (document.location + "#")))
{
$(item).observe("click", this.track.bindAsEventListener(this));
}
}.bind(this));
},
track: function(e)
{
var el = e.element();
var exit_domain = el.href.split("/")[2].toLowerCase();
if (this.domain.toLowerCase().indexOf(exit_domain) == -1)
{
if (typeof pageTracker != "undefined")
{
pageTracker._trackPageview("/exit/" + el.href);
}
}
}
});


2) Now insert the following code to link the scripts. You should place the code right after your Google Analytics code:
<!-- Google Analytics code here -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="exittracker.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
new ExitTracker();
</script>

Note: Click here to download the prototype.js

If you find difficult to write the code then Click here to download the set of prototype.js and exittracker.js . Then you can just add the code to link these two file after your Google analytics code.

If there is any problem then just write a comment and then I will reply you back.

Wordpress Security Tips

Posted on: September 5, 2009
Updates on: December 15, 2009

As the WordPress is getting popular and used by many people, now the hackers are also being active and involved in hacking wordpress site. I have recently received lot of request to fix the WordPress hacks. I would like to list some WordPress Security Tips to help you protect from hacks.

1. Keep up to date with the latest WordPress Version: Always keep your WordPress site updated with the latest version of WordPress. The WordPress developers do not maintain security patched for older WordPress versions. In August 12, 2009, WordPress released version 2.8.4 as the security release. Older version of WordPress is more open to hacks.My Tips: Regularly update your WordPress site. You can use the plugin “WordPress Automatic upgrade” or Instant Upgrade Plugin Further, you need to keep your plugin and theme to be up to date as well.
2. Populate wp-config.php Properly: Go through each line in wp-config.php, not only the first block for database configuration.My Tips: Use WordPress secret key generation tool to generate random salts for WordPress cookies. These keys are used to insure better encryption of information stored in WordPress user’s cookies. To make it more secure modify the the WordPress table prefix to something other than wp_. Adding random characters and numbers to the end of wp, such as wp52sk1_ obfuscates it enough but still allows you to recognize the tables as those belong to WordPress.
3. Correct File Permissions: You should give the correct file permission and if you give full permission to files and folders then the hackers can hack it easily.My Tips: Set the permission as follows:

   All folder permissions should be set to 755

   All files permissions should be set to 644

   Files that you want to edit in the WordPress Theme editors permissions should be set to 666

   Never ever use 777 for WordPress permissions

4. Don’t Use the Default admin Username: WordPress is open source application and now most of people know that it has the administrator username as admin. This make it easy for hackers to to hack the password when they already know the administrator username.My Tips: Change the default administrator username admin to something else. Now i am going to show how to change the default admin username.You may use phpMyAdmin and paste the SQL command (the update line) to execute it.

   update wp52sk1_users set user_login=’myadmin’ where user_login=’admin’;

   wp52sk1_ is the database prefex that I change. The default prefex is wp_

   Alternatively, you may edit the value manually using phpMyAdmin web interface.

   Now your admin user is myadmin instead of admin

5. Pick Secure Password for Admin: Changing your admin username to something else is not a guarantee that people will not be able to guess it. For instance, if you use your username as the displayed meta data in every post, or you enable author specific page in multi-author blog, you will reveal your user name to the world.My Tips With this assumption, you should pick secure password for your WordPress login. Combine upper and lowercase characters and numbers.
6. Hide WordPress Version in the Header Tag: Although you have deleted the WordPress version meta data from your theme, you may still get WordPress version line in the page returned by the blog software. The culprit is, since version 2.5 WordPress has added the feature to generate this code. This will allow the hacker to know about the wordpress version you are using which will help them to hack it.My Tips: Add the following line to the functions.php file in your theme directory: (Create a blank PHP file with this name if your theme doesn’t already have one)

   <?php remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’); ?>

7. Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server: If you allow then the hacker will find the way to hack easily.My Tips; Do not use the following search code in the search.php in your theme folder:

   <?php echo $_SERVER [‘PHP_SELF’}; ?>

   Use the following instead:

   <?php cloginfo (‘home’); ?>

   Also block WP-folder from being indexed by search engines, the best way to block them is in your robots.txt file. Add the following line to your list:

   Disallow: /wp-*

8. Prevent directory listing: The problem in many cases, the default WordPress installation allows hackers to use their web browser as a file browser to look through the contents of the folder on your server. Normally it is harmless but some web hosts don’t even bother to turn off directory listing by default. This means that there are several things hackers can do. There might be loop hole in the theme and plugin you used for your site. The author of the plugin and theme might have made mistakes in their code that allow unexpected access, hackers can use your directory listing to find out if you have got those vulnerable files and then attack your site. Also people can browse the non-WordPress contents of your web server to discover folders and files that you might not be ready to announce that you thought were not accessible to the general public. Many directory listing feature a line in the footer telling visitors your server version. Hacker can cross-reference these version numbers with list of known vulnerabilities and bring your site down or gain illegal access.My Tips: Edit the .htaccess file and add the following line at the bottom.

   Options All –Indexes

9. Protect WordPress Administration Files: WordPress administration files are in wp-admin directory of your WordPress installation, except wp-config.php.My Tips: Use .htaccess to restrict access and allow only specific IP address to this directory and file. If you have static IP address and you always blog from your computer, this can be an option. If you don’t know you IP address then you can find your IP my visiting the site: http://whatismyip.com/You need to put a .htaccess file in wp-admin and add the code. See the Example:

   Order Deny,Allow

   Allow from 202.79.40.130

   deny from all

   For more refer to Apache’s documentation on mod_access to see the example: Protecting The WordPress wp-admin Folder

   Alternate Solution through user and password combination: There is another way to protect wp-admin directory with user and password combination. It also adds another level of security. Apache has complete information on authentication, authorization and access control. Example:

   AuthType Basic

   AuthName “WordPress Dashboard”

   AuthUserFile /home/user/.htpasswds/blog/wp-admin/.htpasswd

   Require user adminuser

   and then generate the encrypted password using the htpasswd command.

   $ htpasswd –cm .htpassed adminuser

   If you have cPanel then it is very easy as it has a feature called Web Protect which allows you to accomplish the same thing.

   Note: if you find it hard to use it in code then just use this plugin AskApache Password Protect

   Further, I recommend the plugin Login Lockdown plugin which record the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

   Note: the Htaccess and Htpasswd generator helps to create the necessary files with desired values.

10. Restrict File Access to wp-content Directory: The wp-content directory contains your theme, plugin files and uploaded. WordPress doesn’t access the PHP files in the plugins and themes directory via HTTP. the only request from web browser are for image files, javascripts, and css. For this reason you may restrict wp-content so that it only allows those file extensions but not PHP or any other file extensions. This prevents people from accessing any files directly.My Tips: Include the following lines in .htaccess within wp-content:

    Oder Allow, Deny

    Deny From all

    <files ?\.(jpg|gif|png|js|css)$? ~>

    Allow from all

    </files>

11. Take regular backups of your site and Database: No matter how hard you protect your site there might be some loop for hackers. There is never 100% security when it’s online.
    My Tips: Take regular backups of your file directories as well as the database. So, if there is any problem then you can just upload the backup copy. Use WordPress Database Backup plugin or WP-DB Manager to backup your Database and User WordPress Backup Plugin to backup your upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plugins directory.
12. Stop worrying about your wp-config.php file: During the server problem, i have seen in one of my friend blog that his wp-config.php file can be viewed in the browser and his database username and password are there and it can be hacked anytime.My Tips: You can secure your wp-config.php by adding the following to the .htaccess file at the top level of your WordPress install:

    <FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>deny from all</FilesMatch>

    This will make it harder for your database username and password to fall into the wrong hands in the event of a server problem.

13. Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password: Easy password with alphabetic and number can be hacked using the software easily.My Tips: Creating a strong password that is also memorable is one of the easiest defenses against being hacked. Use strong password my combining the alphabetic, numbers and symbols. There are a lot of online password strength checker that you could check.Also you might check lorelle’s article on blogherald called Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password , offering tips and tricks to help create a strong password that is also memorable, and how to deal with all the myriad passwords we seem to accumulate online.
14. The following plugins will be very helpful:
    • WordPress Exploit Scanner: It searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.
    • AntiVirus Plugin: It is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections.
    • WP Security Scan Plugin: It scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
    • Admin SSL Plugin: Recommended only for the advance users. It secures login page, admin area, posts, pages – whatever you want – using Private or Shared SSL. Once you have activated the plugin please go to the Admin SSL config page to enable SSL, and read the installation instructions.

Further reading:

Hardening WordPress

FAQ My site was hacked

10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress