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Technology Bloggers community awards 2012

4th January 2013 14 Replies Christopher Roberts

Slightly later than last year (I was on holiday in Italy over New Year this year), I am now going to announce the winners of Technology Bloggers community awards!

This is the second year of community awards, and this year, the awards were democratic. I gave you (the community), the opportunity to suggest awards and nominations, and then you voted on who you wanted to win each of the six awards.

This year each award had 4 nominees, meaning that there were 24 nominations; which were filled by 13 different people.

You have voted, and the results are now in. Here are this years winners.

Top Commenter

Nominees:

Lillie Ammann
Peter Lee
David Jamieson
Neil Duncan

Runner Up

The runner up for this years top commenter community award is Lillie Ammann! Congratulations for Lillie for her nomination, she doesn’t comment very often but when she does, it is always kind words and useful feedback 🙂 You can find out more about Lillie by visiting her blog.

Winner

With 57% of the vote, the clear winner of this years top commenter award is Peter Lee! My thanks go out to Peter for his fantastic contribution to the blog. Peter commented on the blog around 60 times in 2012, which is quite a lot! Never were his comments bland or meaningless though, they always added value to the article, which is a credit to Peter and the community. Peter has a website which you can visit called Computer How To Guide.

Top Writer (Contributor)

Nominees:

Alan Tay
Hayley Anderson
Nick Sotos
Chadrack Irobogo

Runner Up

Hayley Anderson took 29% of the community vote, putting her in second place. Hayley likes to write about nanotechnology, a very interesting industry which is advancing all the time. Hayley maintains a website herself, which is about Microscopes.

Winner

The winner of the top contributor category of the community awards 2012 is Alan Tay! So far Alan has contributed 7 articles to the blog, and displays many of the characteristics of a good writer. Alan often replies to people who comment on his articles, and generally writes thoughtful and useful material. Alan is a specialist in IT Security, which he blogs about on his own site too.

Top Writer (Author+)

Nominees:

Christopher Roberts
Jonny Hankins
Steve August
Ron Fletcher

Runner Up

In a very respectable second place is Jonny Hankins. Author and innovation and responsibility researcher for the Bassetti Foundation, who currently resides in Boston (USA), Jonny has been a great author this year. His posts have inspired, amazed and amused, making him a true credit to the blog. Check out more of his work by visiting the Bassetti Foundation website.

Winner

It is with the utmost pride that I announce that the winner of the top author award 2012 is me – Christopher Roberts! It was a close fought contest between me and Jonny and myself, with 37.5% and 62.5% of the vote respectively – I am honoured to have won. Personally I feel that Jonny’s posts are often better than mine, but I shall acknowledge to the public vote and declare myself the winner. Thank you everyone 🙂

Rising Star

Nominees:

Steve August
Jonny Hankins
David Jamieson
Chadrack Irobogo

Runner Up

With 25% of the vote Steve August is the runner up for this award. Steve is relatively new to the community, and yet in the 5 months of 2012 that he was part of the community, he posted 7 app reviews – his preferred area of writing. Steve also contributes to Alpha Digits where you can read more of his work.

Winner

63% of the vote saw Jonny Hankins take the 2012 community award for rising star! My heartfelt congratulations go to Jonny for his fantastic contribution to the blog. With 59 posts and a series under his belt already, who knows where 2013 will take his ever progressing blogging career!

Most Friendly Member of the Community

Nominees:

Tammi Kibler
Peter Lee
Lillie Ammann
Chadrack Irobogo

Runner Up

Lillie Ammann was also nominated for this category, and took 25% of the vote, making her the runner up for this award 2012. Again, well done Lillie for the nomination and votes, you are a truly valued member of the community.

Winner
Peter Lee took his second award this year by winning the most friendly member of the community award. Huge congratulations to Peter, as willing two awards is quite something! I look forward to your participation in 2013 🙂

Top All Rounder

Nominees:

Christopher Roberts
Jonny Hankins
Alan Tay
Chadrack Irobogo

Runner Up

Now for the big one, the top all rounder. In the past I have referred to this as “Technology Bloggers ultimate award” as it is for someone who is an example an outstanding community member, which is why it is very deservingly that Jonny Hankins was nominated for this award, which he claimed runner up status for. One community award and runner up for another two, not a bad 2012 Jonny!

Winner
I am truly humbled to have received 91% of the vote for this award. I love this blog and the people who make it as great as it is, which is probably why I put so much time and effort into posting content, moderating comments, tweaking things and generally just doing my best to make it a fantastic site to visit. Again, I would like to thank everyone who voted for me, I am truly grateful.

Well that’s 2012’s awards over, 6 categories, with 7 unique winners and runners up, democratically chosen by you: the readers of the blog.

2012 was a brilliant year for us, and our visitor numbers prove it. Here is a sneak peak at some traffic stats that I wouldn’t usually publicly release.

The number of visits the blog has had (per month) since it started on April the 13th 2011.

Happy New Year everyone, here’s to 2013!

Community awards nominations 2012

10th December 2012 6 Replies Christopher Roberts

In around three weeks time I hope to reveal the winners of Technology Bloggers 2012 community awards.

To do that, there are a few things that need to happen, one of which is for you (the community) to vote as to who you feel deserves each award.

The aim of the awards is to recognise key and valued members of the community, and to celebrate the brilliant personalities that make up our blog.

Here is a quote from my article on the awards last year:

“…at the end of the year, we shall celebrate the people who have helped make this blog the huge success it is today.”

Last week I asked for your award suggestions and comments, and from the response I received, I am assuming that everyone pretty much liked the awards we had last year, so we are going to stick with them.

So, without further ado, let the voting commence!

Below you can find the 6 awards that are up for grabs, and the nominations for each award. Read the description of the award, consider the candidates and then cast your vote as to who you feel should be claimed victor.

Top Commenter

Who do you feel posts the most valuable and interesting comments, which you always enjoy reading?

Lillie Ammann's Avatar David Jamieson's Avatar

Top Writer (Contributor)

Which writer do you feel has made the most valuable contribution to the blog in the last year. Who’s articles do you love to read?

Links to writers archive pages: Alan, Hayley, Nick and Chadrack.

Top Writer (Author+)

Who has been your favourite author (including those of editor and admin status) this year?

Ron Fletcher's Avatar

Links to writers archive pages: Christopher, Jonny, Steve and Ron.

Rising Star

Who do you feel has great potential and in the future will become an ever more important member of the community?

David Jamieson's Avatar

Most Friendly Member of the Community

Who do you feel deserves this years award for conducting themselves in the most friendly, and supportive way they can?

Lillie Ammann's Avatar

Top All Rounder

As I said last year, this is Technology Bloggers ultimate award! Who do you feel is the bet all round community member?

I will be adding voting widgets to the sidebar to make sure that we get a reasonable level of votes in.

Voting closes on the 30th of December 2012. The winners will be announced in the community awards article hopefully on December the 31st, or soon after.

Congratulations to all nominated, happy voting!

WordPress Security Tips – Safeguard Your Blog

8th November 2011 18 Replies Jonathan

I recently came a cropper to a hacker on a WordPress Blog I was setting up – luckily I’d backed everything up, but what if I hadn’t? Well, I’d have likely lost everything.

Now the hacking was partly my own fault for not putting the right measures in place. This got me wondering about how many other webmasters fail to implement basic security measures that could save them a lot of trouble in the future.

So without further ado lets look at my top WordPress security tips. I’ll also point you in the direction of a few WordPress Security plugins that I’ve discovered that do a great job of adding that second line of defence.

Don’t Use Admin as a Username

Let’s start simple – the default username in WordPress is “admin” – don’t use this! It’s the first username that all hackers will try, and allows them to a launch a brute force attack, which simply means a bot that tries multiple attempts at guessing your password.

This is probably one of the most common types of hacks out there and it still works. As a second line of defence I’d install a handy plugin called Login Lockdown, basically it records IP addresses of all failed login attempts, if a lot are cropping up in a short time frame it bans all IP addresses from that range. It also goes without saying use a strong password.

Change the WordPress Table Prefix

This involves changing another WordPress default that makes it harder for a hacker to attack your blog via a SQL injection. The table prefixes are defaulted to wp_ – they are easy to change in your wp-config.php file prior to installation.

However, if you have a site that’s already installed and you’re trying to secure that – I recommend using the WP Security Scan Plugin to do so. Remember to take a backup before you change anything – it’s good practice! The WP security scan has a number of cool features (such as removing the WordPress version in the source code) so it’s definitely worth installing.

Don’t forget to use secret keys

I have a friend who works for a hosting company – and he revealed it’s amazing how many people forget to use secret keys. Now if you’ve installed WordPress via Fantastico or some other quick install tool that your hosting company provides they should automatically include these.

The hashing salt keys make your password even more secure. To make sure you’re using them – visit https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1 to generate your keys, and then put them in your wp-config.php file – you’ll spot them easily.

Secure your wp-admin folder

I missed this out when installing my blog and it’s another security tip that many webmasters fail to implement. The wp-admin folder is very important and if a hacker gets into that then they’re going to cause some serious damage.

This involves using a .htaccess file to prevent access. You have two options here – you can prevent access by only allowing certain IP addresses (which isn’t ideal if you have a dynamic IP or work form multiple locations or on the move) or you can use a .htpassword file.

To use the IP address method simply create an .htaccess file and paste in the code below (switching the xxx for your IP address) then upload it to your wp-admin folder:
AuthUserFile /dev/null AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "Access Control" AuthType Basic order deny,allow deny from all #IP address to Whitelist allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
You can add multiple lines of IP addresses if you want. If your site has multiple writers posting – like Technology Bloggers or accepts guest posts then it’s unlikely this method is viable.

If that’s the case use the .htpassword method – there’s a useful tutorial here: htaccess Files and WordPress Security.

Keep WordPress up to date

This seems obvious but a lot of people forget to upgrade their WordPress. Maybe through fear of breaking something or perhaps just laziness.

The majority of WordPress upgrades are made to increase security and patch up known vulnerabilities. So backup your install and upgrade to the latest version when they’re available.

Keep regular backups

Sometimes no matter how many security measures you have in place, a hacker it still able to get through, maybe through a plugin that contains an exploit.

In this case, you have to take regular backups as the last line of defence. Perhaps through the use of a plugin, or via your host. You can schedule them to run on a daily basis and then be emailed to you.

Having to restore a backup is probably a worse case scenario, but believe me, it’s far easier than having to re-setup your entire blog and redo blog posts from Googles cached pages.

What are your favourite WordPress security methods? Are there some great plugins that I’ve missed? Please let me know in the comments section below.

Technology Bloggers

Championing responsible innovation in partnership with the Bassetti Foundation

Technology Bloggers

Championing responsible innovation in partnership with the Bassetti Foundation

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Technology Bloggers community awards 2012

Top Commenter

Top Writer (Contributor)

Top Writer (Author+)

Rising Star

Most Friendly Member of the Community

Top All Rounder

Community awards nominations 2012

Top Commenter

Top Writer (Contributor)

Top Writer (Author+)

Rising Star

Most Friendly Member of the Community

Top All Rounder