I teach WordPress classes at Boulder Digital Arts (BDA) and code custom WordPress sites for clients. Over the past couple years, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people with questions related to WordPress: “What plugin should I use for video? What theme is best for custom coding? How do I migrate my site to a new server? Can you fix my hacked site?”
To capitalize on the time I was spending responding to all these questions, I started a Q&A blog and an online persona called “Ask WP Girl” at http://askwpgirl.com. With her “mighty MacBook Pro,” this persona built a reputation around town and has reached further via the blog. Even my stepson was surprised when his geeky twenty-something friends informed him, “You know your stepmom is WordPress Girl, don’t you?” I was surprised it worked, too. I guess all you really need is a Gravatar and one popular blog post.
WordPress security didn’t really dawn on me until a couple years ago. I was cruising through some Tweets (http://twitter.com/askwpgirl) and came across a post that enlightened me on the inherent vulnerabilities of PHP and MySQL (of which WordPress is made). It hit me like a ton of bricks that I was doing my clients a huge disservice by building their sites and having no plan for maintenance or backups. I also realized that every student I taught at BDA needed to know about these inherent risks before their sites got hacked as well. So, I started teaching WordPress Security Essentials. It’s a three-hour class that I’ve boiled down to 40 minutes for Denver WordCamp:
10 WordPress Security Myths that Leave You Open to Attack
AND
8 Simple Things You Can Do to Avoid Being Hacked
Protecting yourself against hackers is sort of like fending off the borg. In this presentation, I will address the PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE most hackers use and how you can protect your site against the majority of these simple exploits and known vulnerabilities.
Join me at 11:30 on Saturday for not-to-overwhelming and hopeful conversation about keeping your sites more or less hack proof.
