Protecting your blog from idiots that would like to abuse it is essential. There are a lot of changes that you can make to protect it. Here we look at a few essentials.

WordPress is a good solid tool for blogging, but as with any tool, especially such a popular one with open code, security breaches are possible. It is therefore essential that you make some simple changes to protect your blog and keep it secure.

Keep Up To Date
The most important security step is very simple. Make sure that you are on the most recent version of WordPress available. As security problems are detected they are fixed in new releases. So if you do not have the current version installed, get a copy and install it now! I know some people like to wait a while before using a new release so that problems can be ironed out, but with the release candidate process that WordPress goes through, these problems should be minimal so I start my upgrades within a week, upgrading the least important blogs first, as tests.

Delete Your Administrator
The first change should be your admin id. From WordPress 3.0 when you install your blog you can choose a different user id to the default name of ‘Admin’. I do recommend using something different! If you are still using Admin, create a new user with Admin rights, log off, log on as the new user and delete Admin. You will be given the opportunity of moving all posts created by Admin to another name, so you can choose the new administrator.

Give Yourself A Nickname
Now, change your nickname! If your Administrator id is Fred and you display that the posts are written by Fred, you have given the game away. So give the userid a different nickname to the signon name. If you want to go a step further, you can create a new user and just give it author status and use that for adding new posts, keeping the administrator safe for when you need to upgrade the system. This means that if you are blogging away from home and someone gets your sign on details, they cannot change any of the admin side of your bog.

Activate Akismet
This brilliant plugin used to be optional, as with other plugins, but is so useful it is now packaged with WordPress. You must sign up for a Wordress userid and get an API key, but then you can activate the plugin and be protected from Spam comments, which will be automatically removed. However, you should check for false positives where valid comments are detected as Spam.

There are lots more changes you can make to your blog to secure it, depending on how you are operating. For example, if you are running many blogs on one hosting package and one MySQL database, you might like to create a new database userid that has less permissions than a database administrator and altering wp-config to use that database user. But, when you upgrade WordPress and install certain Plugins, you might need to go back to an administrator level.

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