This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, who is a 13 year old programmer and web developer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Today I want to ask all the web masters out there “Is your site hackable?”. I’m a test hacker, and I’ve seen some very popular sites get hacked in some of the simplest ways. Hacking wordpress is actually quite easy if you know what your doing. Two words my friend, “SQL Injections”, most people bypass this thought when they make a blog. Even know wordpress login forms prevent SQL Injections but what about form making plugins? Always check to see if your site is hackable through SQL Injections, for more information on simple hacking with SQL Injection visit my post about it by clicking here.

Also if you have a “robots.txt” file in your home directory, keep in mind that disallowing search engines doesn’t disallow people! Never leave directories with password’s in them, even if it is encrypted. If you have to password protect the director and/or password file. Also always keep your cgi-bin password protected because a lot of file management systems use it to keep passwords that you use. I know some cPanel file management systems do. So always check your site for rogue password files and SQL Injection prevention.

Editor’s Note: If you aren’t very familiar with some of this terminology, your best bet is to always keep your WordPress blogs upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

As I mentioned in a post written last month, I wanted to collect everyones WordPress resources so I could throw together a WordPress resources page. After all, WordPress is community-based and it seemed like a good way to support WordPress users. I am proud to say that I was able to combine my favorite WordPress sites with yours to create a WordPress resources page here at Hack WordPress, which I hope people will find useful.

If you are wondering why a couple sites are left off the list, it is probably for one of two reasons. The first is that I don’t know about it and the second is because I had to leave off (for the most part) any submitted blogs that occasionally write about WordPress (such as a category or whatever). This is because the collection of WordPress resources is already very large and these types of lists can get out of hand if you don’t draw the line somewhere.

As with my WordPress theme galleries and other lists I maintain here, my ultimate goal is to keep this page useful. As a result, I will make every attempt to keep this page updated over time. You can help by letting us know if you find any invalid links or you would like to see something added.

As for the list itself, here is what I’ve collected so far:

This weeks batch of WordPress talk includes a number of great posts from the around the blogosphere. It is good to see just how many people are writing about WordPress!

• Bootstrapper has listed their 100 most usable plugins. I’m a sucker for lists like this and hopefully you enjoy them also. It is always fun to see what other peoples favorites are.
• Last week I collected your input on what you’d like to see on WordPress 2.6. It looks like Dan at WPCandy has collected over 30 ideas he’d like to see with WordPress 2.6. Talk about thorough! This list has a lot of great ideas that hopefully the WordPress team sees.
• Noticed some of your favorite WordPress features missing? The WordPress Expert has listed the 5 features removed in WordPress 2.5. Hopefully we can get these back for WordPress 2.6 (if not before).
• ThemeLab has explained how to setup a privacy policy on your WordPress blog. This is crucial for people that monetize their blogs with Google AdSense.

This guest post was written by Herbert of Digital Media Break, where he writes about the latest digital technology. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I recently wrote my first guest post for Hack Wordpress, which didn’t really go as smoothly as planned. I made an honest mistake about copyrighted images, which lead me to think that the readers at Hack WordPress could use a good lesson from my blunder and not fail where I did.

I’m now ashamed to admit it - yep, I’ve used copyrighted images before. This is dangerous in the sense that your reputation can end up a bit banged up (hehe…), but can also result in legal action. Whoa, if you’re not careful what image you use, you can get sued? Yep. But in this day and age, there’s a ton of non-copyrighted images out there that are published under Creative Commons that can be used.

The Solutions

Not to worry - I’ve got a solution for you. My primary solution, YotoPhoto, is down at the moment (and has been for a while now) - so I ended up actually having to do some research to find some alternative resources.

I chose to bring up image search engines instead because I feel that as bloggers, none of us have enough time to browse around entire stock image sites. For those that have time, I personally find SXC.hu to be a great stock image site - best of all, it’s free! Also, some photos on Flickr published under the Creative Commons license can be used freely. If you’ve got any other free stock image sites to suggest, feel free to list them in a comment.

ReadWriteWeb’s got a great set of reviews on YotoPhoto and four other alternatives - Xcavator which searches iStockPhoto.com as well as six other photo providers, everystockphoto which searches through licensed Creative Commons images, PicFindr which runs through free-to-use stock images but also Dreamstime images if you prefer, and FotoSearch which examines pay images . Click here to read the article.

I personally also enjoy using the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin, allowing you to search through Flickr Creative Commons licensed images right from your blog’s dashboard.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for stock/creative commons-licensed images to take your post content to the next level, then why not give these search engines a try? However, if you want to take advantage of image SEO, then I won’t guarantee these will make the cut for you.