Amy Winehouse, why do I have such an obsession with her car crash life? I’m not even that much of a fan of her music, but her life is riviting to me but it also makes me so sad that one person’s life could be so fucked up and what she needs is away from the cameras and to finally get clean - I pity her, feel for her and love her all at the same time. It’s a horrendous state of affairs really, the poor girl obviously needs to get checked into drug rehab again for her own safety.

Only yesterday she was given into trouble from court officials for passing on love messages to husband Blake Fielder-Civil during his hearing for his upcoming court case for perverting the course of justice, according to The Mirror. She also managed to be 4 hours late for the hearing!

Asked “How’s Blake looking?”, she replied: “He’s as gorgeous as f***. Haven’t you seen him before?” Minders then bundled her into a car.

Love, if you think he’s fit as fuck you really do need to clean up your act!

With everything that’s has been happening regarding work I’ve not had a chance to jump online in a wee while. But, for once in my life I actually have things to blog about.

Last Friday the boy and I went out to play some pool in his local pub, usually where we can be found on a Friday night. There were two guys playing pool on the table next to us and we started talking to them, I knew one of them as he’s a local driving instructor and knows the boy’s mum. Anyway, they were laughing at the fact I’m useless at playing pool and decided to teach me properly. Well, I’ve never had such a laugh. They ended up moving every ball over the pockets so that no matter what the shot, I potted a ball - it was excellent!

I absent mindedly asked ‘are you this good at getting people through their driving tests?’ and ended up getting myself a driving instructer. Who, has it happens is pretty damn good!

I had my first, double, lesson with him the other day and it’s amazing, I can actually drive. We did the usual cockpit drill, starting off etc and then I got let free on dual carriageways where I was told to ‘put your foot down til you hit 70 to see what it’s like’, which was scary as hell but so good as I was really scared of going fast, and I’ve mastered hill starts and crawling up/down hills at 5mph, as well as feeling a lot better at going around roundabouts.

I’ve got an other lesson on Thursday evening and I’m really looking forward to it, should be good. Now that I’ve got a good teacher I should be through my test in no time, my confidence is soaring when I get behind the wheel these days!

I’m having the nightmare of all nightmares. It all began yesterday…

My area manager came into the shop and wanted to talk to me. I thought he was going to pull me up for being 10 minutes later the other day, but he was in fact telling me that in 5 weeks time I’m moving to an other store as a supervisor (ie my current job within the company). The way it goes is that I’m leaving the shop that I’m in (and love), and I don’t have a choice in the matter. Apparantly the manager, other supervisor and I have ‘too close a working relationship’ and are too clique-y. Uh, what? Surely getting on with your work mates is a good thing, and we are a bloody good team! Also there’s the small fact that an other supervisor HAS to be moved from the store that he’s in and the only one he can come to is mine, and that means one of us goes - ME!

The shop that they’re proposing that I move to is hard for me to get to because I don’t drive - it’s 8 miles away and the bus stop is one mile away from the store, and I’d need to walk through an industrial estate at 10pm to get to said bus stop. I’m not putting my life in danger to get to work in a shop I don’t want to go to, even though that’s exactly what seems to be happening. I admit that this new shop is a lovely, lovely shop if it was tidy and that I need experience in as many different shops as possible before I get offered a manager’s position but the fact that I’m being pushed into it isn’t sitting well with me at all.

I can say no, as I have a joker up my sleeve - my contract which states that I do not have to move to another shop unless it is within a certain distance of the current shop that I’m working in. I’m still waiting to hear back from the second time that I said no to the area manager earlier this morning. But, he’s also said that ‘to think about what I’m saying no to’ which confuses me a bit.

Needless to say, I’m not a happy bunny at the moment - I’m stressed and worried and downright pissed off that I’m leaving the shop that I love and my friends. But, saying that…everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?

I’ll keep you updated!!

This video freaks the life out of me for two reasons. Madonna, who is 49, looks younger than I am. She’s 27 years older than me for goodness sakes! The second is the weird kissing scene, seriously why would you want to show people kissing with no skin?

Plus I hate the song, really hate it. But I listen to it all the time because it’s bloody catchy. I blame this on Timbaland. I’ve become obsessed with him recently.

Last night I found out the hard way why WordPress security is so important. My site got hacked/hijacked and the result was that every single internal link autoforwarded to a pornsite that tried to install toolbars, trojans..the lot.

I know that this has happened to at least one other blog that I visit, and probably lots more. The reasoning is probably down to unsecure file permissions within the wordpress files on my server. (Possibly something to do with the fact that WordPress have released version 2.5.1 with ultra important security fixes?)

So after deleting everything from the server and installing WordPress afresh (which of course came with it’s own problems of trying to remember all the plugins that I had installed etc) and importing a backup I took control of my blog again.

But it got me thinking. I’ve been online for half my life. I’ve had a website of some description for a decade. I should know about and implement security features. I shouldn’t have had to find out the hard way how important it is to keep my files safe from attack.

I’ve compiled a list of all the steps that you should take to protect your WordPress installation from malicious hijacking, after all I’ve been researching it for the past couple of hours to make sure that it never happens again.

File Permissions

Probably the biggest one on the list, and the one that can cause the most problems if you’re used to editing themes and plugins through the WordPress dashboard.

None of your files should be set to 777 (all users read, write and execute). By using the WP Security Scan plugin you can automatically see which folder do not have the correct permissions and fix them with a click. The plugin also points out any other security issues on your site. It’s an essential plugin for your site, and if you ask me it should be included with WordPress rather than Hello Dolly.

User - Admin

Your default user in WordPress is more than likely ‘Admin’. The same goes for the thousands of other WordPress blogs out there. So it’s not that difficult to guess, is it? So the obvious answer is to delete the user ‘Admin’. But WordPress won’t let you delete the default user, so what can you do about it?

This is where phpMyAdmin comes in to play. Don’t worry too much if you’ve never used it before, it’s quite simple as long as you follow these steps.

1. Log into your phpMyAdmin through your cPanel.
2. On the left hand side of the window you’ll see a list of tables like wp_options, wp_users. (the wp_prefix may be different if you’ve set this up as a different value when you installed WordPress).
3. Click on wp_users.
4. A table will load in the right hand frame, select the checkbox shown next to user_login.
5. Select ‘Browse’ from the tabs at the top of the page.
6. This then shows the table with all of your registered users details. You want to select the little pencil next to the name Admin to change this to a name of your choice.
7. Once you’ve changed the name to something else, press Go at the bottom of the screen.
8. That’s it - you’re done. The user ‘Admin’ no longer exists.

robots.txt

The robots.txt file on your server gives instructions to search engine robots (like GoogleBot). Remember that however not all search engine robots are good ones that play by the book, some will completly ignore your robots.txt file. But you can still add the following code to yours to stop all of your wp- folders being indexed by search engines.
Disallow: /wp-*

Passwords

Ok, this one’s a giver. We all know that passwords should be long and contain numbers, letters and symbols. But that’s hard to remember. But the amount of people who use the word ‘password’ as their password is incredible, and again it’s not that hard to guess, is it? Remember the MySpace password exploit? It threw up some interesting data on how people pick passwords, including the word ‘password’.

The easiest thing to remember is that you should keep your FTP and WordPress login password completely different and try and choose a password which is really hard to work out, but means something to you - like an acronym of you and your partners names plus your anniversary date. You could use a random password generator online to create a password, although you’ll probably have to get your browser to remember it for you!

WordPress version

Ok, so the geeks among us get excited when a new version of WordPress is in the pipeline and upgrade straight away, but some people wait a few weeks to ensure that any problems are ironed out amongst other reasons. It may be personal choice, but upgrading to the newest version of WordPress straight
away also protects your blog as there’s always security updates included in the upgrade. Try installing the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin to make upgrading your installation easy as pie.

Similarly, publishing what version of WordPress you are running is a danger in itself. You won’t realise that you’re letting the whole world know which version of WordPress you are running until you yourself check your page source. If there’s a Meta tag showing which version of WordPress you’re running from, remove it from your header.

Login Lockout

Login LockDown records 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. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.
Login Lockdown plugin

That says it all really, doesn’t it?

Directory Listings

By default anybody can access your plugins by going to www.yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins/ and viewing every plugin that you currently have installed. By either including a blank html file in your /plugins/ directory or switching off directory listings via your cPanel users will not be able to view these folders and files, and possibly any security risks that they have.

Don’t use FTP

Use SSH/Shell Access instead. It’s possibly not the easiest thing to do in the world but it’s one of the best moves you can make. If you can, disable FTP completely.

If you’ve got anything else to add, please feel free to leave a comment.

Earlier on I couldn’t get my wireless internet to connect for love nor money on my laptop, even although I could connect via my iPod Touch. Weird, but I managed to fix it only to find out that Virgin Media is having major outages across Glasgow concerning television accounts and internet accounts. So I keep randomly disconnecting. Not amused, but it hardly happens so I suppose I have nothing to moan about.

Since I was lacking on the internet access I thought that I’d do some work on my MTP stuff. We’re on a section just now that we’ve had a month to complete so far, and we’ve still got a month to go on this one section. It’s a huge, huge section covering loads of important stuff, more so than the last modules and sections that we’ve completed. Anyway, I opened up Word to begin writing away and decided to stick some music on and update my iPod at the same time. Uh, bad idea. I’ve sat for around the last hour renaming tracks and adding ratings / genres to hundreds upon hundreds of files - and I’m only on the letter A!

I think that I’m going to take a letter a night and ensure that each file is tagged correctly, is within the correct genre, has the correct album artwork (albumart.org is a life saver) and where possible the correct track numbers assigned. I’m not too fussy that I need to include the year - but I’ll probably go back and do that again at some point in the not-to-distant future.

And the MTP? I think I wrote about 800 words and stopped to concentrate on the music. That’s only 2 questions answered out of about 30 that I’ve still got to go…wish me luck!

I’m currently sitting in bed, still in my PJs, waiting for the in-laws to leave on holiday so that I can jump downstairs and make breakfast and coffee without having to make smalltalk with my hair everywhere (seriously, having short hair is murder when you wake up) and yesterday’s eyeliner still on. I could, obviously, brush my hair and take the eyeliner off but I can’t be bothered. I’d rather stay a mess until I have to get ready for work. Hey, it’s Sunday I’m allowed!

Tomorrow is my 22nd birthday. I don’t want to be 22. I think I stopped wanting to get older when I was about to turn 20 and could no longer be a teenager. Being 22 means that the next milestone in my life is 30 and that’s a scary, scary thought. And the fact that I’m 22 and still cannot drive (legally), don’t have any savings and am in debt to my mother for nearly £3000 is rubbish. I still don’t have a concept of money, it just burns a hole in my pocket. The best example being that my mum gave me £50 yesterday as part of my birthday so that I could at least go out this weekend and have money to do so. I spent £20 of it getting to and from work (taxi each way because I was feeling lazy - how stupid am I?), about £6 on lunch yesterday, £5 on cigarettes, £2 on lottery tickets, £8 on random rubbish in the shop - Lucozade for the boy because he was hungover, cakes, smoked sausages for our dinner, a kids Lucky Bag because it’s the tackiest thing that I’ve ever seen, chocolate bars. So that leaves me with £10. And I’ve nothing major to show for it. Grrrrr. I should have put the whole lot of it in my ISA that I opened up yesterday. It’s the only way that I’ll save money - direct debit straight out my account into a taxfree account that I can save up to £3600 a year in. I’m planning on sticking just £50 a month into it. But I also have a direct debit going to my mum each month for £450 to cover my phone, Council Tax, dig money and the money that I owe her. Still, it leaves me with just over £300 a month to spend as I like, or save…

I’m using an app on my iPod Touch called PocketMoney to help me understand where I’m wasting money, even though I know that all my money goes on cigarettes, taxis and lunch in the shop. I’ve cut down the amount that I smoke but it’s not making much of a difference. And every so often I take lunch with me, but I’ve usually bought the stuff that I’m taking with me so it doesn’t make much difference.

Wonder how long it will be until I’m posting that I’ve ran out of money?

I’ve had three driving lessons with a driving instructor and I seem to think that I am The Stig.

My first lesson was on Tuesday with Red Driving School. I’m intentionally not linking to their website because I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone, there was an obvious reason that there lessons were so cheap - incompetent springs to mind. The instructor didn’t even ask to see my driving license at any point during the lesson, never mind ask things like “read the license plate on X car” to check my eyesight.

Within 10 minutes of being in the car (a new Corsa, didn’t like it much) I was driving down the main road next to my house at 30 miles an hour and going around roundabouts scared for my life. Baring in mind that it was snowing heavily the night before the roads were in a horrendous state. I was petrified, making stupid mistakes like stalling at roundabouts with roadworks on them in between two double decker buses. Not good.

Needless to say, I’m not going back with Red. My mum paid for two lessons with a local driving instructor who is a lovely man, and explained everything to me properly. I’ve also been out with my mum a good few times in the local industrial estate, but for the life of me I can’t find the biting point of the clutch in her car very well, thus the reason we’ve not been out on ‘real’ roads.

Never mind, I love driving more than I ever thought I did. I just need to remember and think sooner and I’ll be fine. I keep forgetting to change down gears when getting to junctions and roundabouts and try to take corners like The Stig.

I know that a lot of bloggers who use PayPerPost get slated. I’ve seen it referred to as ‘just like adverts on TV that I flick past’. The person was explaining why they do not read blogs which have sponsored posts; which is fair enough - each to their own. I for one actually quite enjoy reading sponsored posts as they show how great (usually) the blog writer’s imagination is. It’s a skill being able to write a review of a product / service and incorporate it into your blog, personal experience, writing style and making it keyword heavy all at the one time. It’s a challenge sometimes, but that’s why you’re getting paid for it!

As avid readers of my blog (go on, you know you all love me) you’ll probably have worked out that I use PayPerPost from time to time. I made a pact with myself when I signed up for the site way back in July 2007 that I would only take opportunities that were actually relevant to me personally or my blog. I have no interest in garage storage
cupboards or homeowner insurance, so why on earth would I want to blog about them and bore you all senseless with my opinion on something I’ve never used or had an experience with? Unfortunately not all Posties¹ do this, and all you get is page after page of sponsored posts about online gambling, poker websites and weight loss miracles². To date I’ve been paid for just 12 posts, and made a grand total of 80GBP. Nothing life changing but that money has been put towards paying my credit card debt which is getting smaller and smaller by the month. Thus helping reinstating my credit rating, making me a happy girl again. Today I’m amused to see myself on the day’s top earner list. 3rd as well. And only from posting one post, sweet.

Anyway, I digress. And I’m starting to think that this post sounds like a sponsored post. I can assure you that it isn’t, I’m not getting a single penny for biggin’ up PPP, as I’ve already done that and been paid for it.

What I am worried about is that these random, not-so-frequent paid posts are discouraging readership. Don’t get me wrong, my life doesn’t revolve around how many comments I receive or my Alexa rating but I don’t like the thought of pouring so much time and effort into my site, as I have done since 1998, only to be shooting myself in the foot and loosing out on readers (and more to the point, new friends and blogs to read etc) just because I make a few bucks writing about things that people don’t want to read about.

So my question is to you, dear reader, is this. What do you honestly think of PayPerPost blogs. Not just mine, although do feel free to make your feelings known, but any blog that sides on the money making side. Do you have a tolerance level? Do you just skip the posts you don’t want to read or do you delete the blog from your RSS reader the moment a “This posts was sponsored by…” tagline pops up? Or do you not really care and read every post anyway?

I’m actually really interested in knowing what you think, good or bad. Everybody has their opinions so please share yours.

EDIT:This post has had over 200 views and only one comment, so I’ve added a poll for quick opinion posting. I like opinions, please pick one!

[poll=3]

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¹ Posties are the affectionate name for bloggers who use PayPerPost.
²Weight loss miracles do not exist. All you need is portion control and some exercise and commitment!