John Wang

With the recent Twitter hacking fiasco, web designer Chris Herbert (@ChrisHerbert) provided us with some helpful tips for securing WordPress.

One of the tips is regarding security measures. These tips come from head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts. Matt talks about securing your wp-admin directory, creating a wp-content/plugins/index.html, and subscribing to the WordPress development blog.

The one tip I have for securing your WordPress instance is:

Don’t use the admin account

Using the default admin account normally leaves you open to Dictionary attacks depending on your password. Instead, create a very strong password for the admin account and create a separate administrator account of your own. See UX Booth‘s How To Pick Passwords That Protect Your Online Experience. You can also downgrade the authority level of the admin account if you so chose.

I would also recommend regularly using an author or editor account if you don’t need any of the administrative power.

Got any WordPress security tips? Please share them in the comments.

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People are always talking about the importance of sketching as part of a process in web, logo, or graphic design. For example: A List Apart, David Airey, and PSDTuts all have an article putting some sort of emphasis on it. Jason Beiard also touches on it as part of his layout chapter in his book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. And even the Twitterverse of Web Designers gave an overwhelming response when asked about sketching.

I can understand why people will bypass the sketching process in favor of jumping straight into Fireworks, Photoshop, or Illustrator as it does add a step and slow you down a bit. Even more so if you have access to a graphic tablet such as the Wacom Intuos or Cintiq.

Personally, I don’t mind the slow down and find it more helpful to do the sketching. I use a Moleskine Large Squared Notebook. It’s a small grid notebook (13 x 21 cm) with 240 pages. Recently, I have been trying to incorporate the concepts of The Divine Proportion, Rule of Thirds, and 960 Grid System into some designs. But first, I needed to find a way to incorporate them into the Moleskine for sketching. Unfortunately for me, a few Google searches came back with empty results and I was left to do them myself.

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I participated in the Honolulu Marathon on December 14, 2008. The race started off with a bang. Actually a series of bangs. Prior to starting, there is a fireworks presentation for all the participants. 20,302 people started the race this year. And 20,058 finished. Starting off with pouring rain for the first 2 hours and 30 minutes. Later the weather started to clear up and the sun came out as the vast majority of people passed Kahala Mall and headed towards the halfway point in Aina Haina. It was a great to see the various costumed runners as well. There was a Pikachu, Yoda, Darth Vader, many a santa hats and costumes, maids, brides, grooms, and many many more. It was definitely a great part of the event fun. Though, I did feel bad for them when the race started with pouring rain.

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I am sketcher. I like to draw out preliminary designs as much as possible. Even if it’s just a layout or something relatively quick. I also use a Moleskine notebook to do all my sketches in. Yesterday, I posed a question to the Web Design community on Twitter. The responses were overwhelming. So overwhelming that it required me to break it out of it’s original intention. Thanks everyone! Greatly appreciated!

Question to all web designers: Do you sketch/draw out your preliminary designs on paper first or just jump into Photoshop?

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Tom Sinclair (tommsinclair)

@jwang392 used to just jump into PSbut started sketching layouts/wireframes then rough ideas. I find it helps a lot, but does take longer!