If you aren’t very technology-savvy, or just prefer to easily setup/upgrade your WordPress installations, there are a number of web hosting services that now support one-click installation of WordPress via Fantastico.

I’ve yet to find a good list, so I figured that it was time someone put one together to help these people know which web hosts they can choose from. Here are a list of web hosts that I have managed to confirm support WordPress installation via Fantastico:

• Hostgator
• DreamHost
• BlueHost
• Lunarpages
• A Small Orange
• PowWeb
• StartLogic
• SiteGround
• SurpassHosting
• Ace Net
• MySiteSpace
• HostMonster
• Site5
• Total Choice Hosting
• LinkSky
• AnHosting

Does your web host support Fantastico? If they aren’t on the above list, let me know in the comments below!

Matt Cutts is most commonly known for his job as the head of the Google Search team, but the guy also appears to know a lot about being a webmaster. A couple of days ago Matt wrote a post titled Three Tips to Protect Your WordPress Installation where he details three things you can do to help avoid having your WordPress blog get hacked.

Here is the first tip:

Secure your /wp-admin/ directory. What I’ve done is lock down /wp-admin/ so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory. I use an .htaccess file, which you can place directly at /wp-admin/.htaccess . This is what mine looks like:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 64.233.169.99
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 69.147.114.210
allow from 199.239.136.200
# IP while in Kentucky; delete when back
allow from 128.163.2.27
</LIMIT>

I’ve changed the IP addresses, but otherwise that’s what I use. This file says that the IP address 64.233.169.99 (and the other IP addresses that I’ve whitelisted) are allowed to access /wp-admin/, but all other IP addresses are denied access. Has this saved me from being hacked before? Yes.

Click over to check out the other two!

Most themes typically come with a 404.php page that shows up by default whenever an invalid URL is visited on your blog. Depending on how often you change the URL of existing posts or delete old posts, it may or may not be a high traffic page for your blog.

Either way, when a typical web surfer finds your blog and is greeted with the lovely 404 page, they will most commonly just click the “Back” button on their browser and continue browsing through the other search results. If your 404 page is setup correctly, you can often retain that traffic by either offering something funny to grab the readers attention or by offering a variety of methods for them to find the post they are looking for. Over at Theme Playground I ran across a great post about customizing your 404 page, which includes a bunch of suggestions for retaining that traffic.

I personally prefer to provide useful resources on my 404 pages, so I will typically use something like the following code to help search engine traffic hopefully find what they are looking for:

<h1>Not Found, Error 404</h1>
<p>The page you are looking for no longer exists.</p>
<p>Perhaps you can find what you are looking for by searching the site archives!</p>
<b>Search by Page:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Month:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
</ul>
<b>Search by Category:</b>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
</ul>

I will also sometimes call the search box (usually searchform.php) and the popular posts plugin as well to help retain that traffic, depending on the type of blog the 404 page is being built for. How do you have your 404 page setup?

There is no doubt that their combination of WordPress themes and WordPress plugins gives WordPress.org users a variety of options, but WordPress.com does not give its users nearly as much functionality. That is where Greasemonkey steps in, allowing users to control WordPress’ behavior locally within your web browser.Below you will find a list of what I consider to be the best and most useful WordPress Greasemonkey scripts. Most are for WordPress.com users, but some work for both. In order to use them, you will first need to install the Greasemonkey Extension in your Firefox Web Browser.

WordPress Greasemonkey Scripts

• Akismet Auntie Spam - This script re-skins the Akismet spambox page for WordPress admins. Download all spam at once, compress spam to make it more scanable and completely compresses obvious spam. Turns checking spam into a 10 minute per week activity.
• Find Images That Are Wide - This script scans your blog for images that are to big in Firefox, IE6, and IE7. Great for checking IE6 image compatibility and for blogs using fixed width templates.
• WordPress.com: Add Technorati Tags - This is not for the self-hosted version of WordPress, but it is to good not to list! This script adds a Tag button to allow users to easily add Technorati Tags to their posts.
• WordPress.com Stats Pages - Adds the missing stats links to the WordPress.com edit pages admin panel.
• WordPress Category Resizer - Ideal for people with 25+ categories on their blog. This script moves the category checkbox list from the right sidebar to underneath the edit post windows and makes it three columns wide instead of one column wide. Works with any version of WordPress or WordPress Multi-User (including WordPress.com).
• WordPress Comment Ninja - Respond to comments directly by post and/or email from inside your WordPress dashboard.
• Yahoo Pipe Cleaner - Removes most of the HTML markup from Yahoo Pipe run output so that it can be cut-and-pasted into WordPress blogs.

Unfortunately, this list is a little shorter than most of my Greasemonkey lists due to the lack of scripts available. If you know of some really useful ones I missed, please let me know in the comments below!

Back in early November I wrote about a great WordPress help sheet released by WPCandy that primarily focused on a bunch of PHP snippets for WordPress developers. You can download the PDF and have quick and easy access to these code snippets when you need it.

Today I noticed that Michael has followed this up with yet another great free PDF designed to be a more advanced WordPress help sheet. This one is similar to the WordPress code compilation that I created awhile ago, but his help sheet covers a few more advanced code snippets while still mixing in a lot of basic code that theme developers might use.

If you spend any amount of time working with WordPress themes, I recommend you click over and grab a copy of this PDF so that you have it when you need it!

Previously I talked a bit about How To: Add Widget Support To Your WordPress Theme.  Since WordPress 2.2 was released, offering widget support has become a basic requirement for any WordPress theme to become successfully received by the WordPress community. 

Recently I ran across a great post by Quick Online Tips which also does a great job of showing you how to widget-enable WordPress themes in 3 easy steps.  They’ve taken the time to break it down so anyone can easily update their theme to include widgets.  I recommend checking it out if you’d like to update your theme to support widgets.