The WP-CopyProtect WordPress plugin does two things – it disables right click function on your blog and disables selection of text, thereby reducing the chances of copying of content.

Download WP-CopyProtect plugin for WordPress

Image Credit: Flickr

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.6.5 is very easy. Since there is no database upgrade from the previous WordPress version, all you have to do is download the five files linked below and upload them into the respective folders on your server.

1. /wp-admin/users.php
2. /wp-includes/feed.php
3. /wp-includes/post.php
4. /wp-includes/version.php
5. xmlrpc.php

Hope you had no problem upgrading your WordPress installation to the latest version!

This, known as domain parking, is done in order to capitalize on all underdeveloped domains. But this renders a shabby look to your domain name, and even putting up ‘under-construction’ signs are pretty drab.

LaunchPad, an ad-free domain parking theme – comes to your rescue. It has the following features:

• Theme Options Page
• Integration with FeedBurner
• Professional design and typesetting
• GPL Licensed—it’s free and you can play around with it – as much as you want.

How to use LaunchPad Theme on your website:

Before you install the LaunchPad theme, you have to make some preparations:

1. Install WordPress – You can download WordPress from here.

2. Sign up for Feed Burner here. ( Note down your FeedBurner ID and FeedBurner Address)

3. Write a Welcome Post – a personalized post sends the right message to the visitors, rather than the same old ‘Hello World’

4. Set Themes Options – Set the FeedBurner ID and Address here.

With this you are ready to launch and ad free LaunchPad, like any other WordPress site, while you take the pains to design the ‘real’ thing.

Download LaunchPad.

For the uninitiated, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. Blog authoring tools like WordPress automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one. So every time you make a new blog post, these services will be notified about your blog post increasing your online exposure.

Updating your ping list is easy. Go to Settings in the Dashboard panel and go to the Writing option.

Scroll down till the end and copy and paste the following ping list into the Update Services box as shown in the screenshot below.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

WordPress will update all the services everytime you update a post or publish a new blog post. Alternately, you can use the Smart Update Pinger plugin which will ping these services only if you publish a new post and not when you edit or update an existing one. The Smart Update Pinger plugin has an advantage – you can check ‘smart-update-pinger.log‘ file in your ‘wp-content’ folder and see if any services refuse a ping request from your site. If that happens, then you can simply remove that service from your list!