If your blog has over 100 subscribers on it, it is pretty likely that your blog is probably getting scraped, as they seem to be everywhere anymore.   Hack WordPress currently has 3 blogs scraping its content every time we publish a post, so we’ve become pretty familiar with them.   But that is not actually what I’m referring to when I came up with the title of this post.

What I’m talking about are people that manually reprint an entire post on their “legitimate” blogs.  One blog that has been doing this to me (and I assume others) is a blog called WordPress Collection dot com.  The link was intentionally left out.

The two most recent posts (as of publishing this post) are identical copies of two posts in our archives.  Here are our posts:

• How To: Display the Recent Posts of Specific Categories
• How To: Prevent Google from Indexing Your Images

Now, to be fair, I fully understand when dealing with code that it really doesn’t change, so I have no problem with someone taking one of our code hacks, or someone else’s posts, and publishing it on their blog.  We have done this on occasion, but we always have a fresh post where only the code is the same, and we link to the source.   Unfortunately with this site, it uses the exact same title and exact same content as our posts, word for word.   The only thing I could find changed is the permalink in the code, which was switched to the permalink of their blog.

So, when does content theft go to far?  I’ve never liked scrapers but I have learned to live with them.  They usually only reprint a excerpt of the post and link to the source.  This, however, is going to far in my opinion.   At least change the wording around the code and link to the source.  As a result, this website has been added to my blacklist of sites I don’t visit or link to, etc.

I’ve seen people mention contacting their web hosting as a good method to deal with content theft when something like this gets out of hand.   What methods have you used to deal with content theft?

If you take a step back and look at the successful premium WordPress themes available today, the first thing you’ll notice is that they offer much more than the standard blogging template that most free WordPress themes offer.  You’ll find magazine themes, news themes, video themes, social networking themes, and all sorts of other themes that are designed to function as content management systems.  

In looking at the future of WordPress, my hope is that the standard build of WordPress will continue to grow and many WordPress plugins will fill the gaps to make a fully functional content management system. 

Recently BloggingPro did a great job of showing the versatility of WordPress with their post showing 7 different ways to use WordPress.  In their post, they highlight these 7 ways you can use WordPress:

1. Blogging
2. Photoblog
3. Tumblelog
4. Magazine
5. Online Shop
6. Contact Manager and Customer Relations Management
7. Twitter Platform

Click over to see the examples of each!  

I personally use WordPress for most of my content sites, including several static sites, a tumblelog, and of course several blogs.   Its versatility is amazing.   In what unique ways have you used WordPress?

This guest post was written by Leland of Theme Lab, where he has released over 50 WordPress themes. In addition to themes, Theme Lab also provides some WordPress guides. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

In this guide you’ll learn how to display Adsense on just your first post within the Loop. Sure, there may be plugins that will do this for you. This guide, however, will use code examples to accomplish the same thing by editing your WordPress theme.

The first step is to open up your index.php file in your theme editor. Find the following line:

<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>

Just above that, insert the following like this:

<?php $i = 1; ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>

Now, scroll down a bit until you find this line:

<?php endwhile; ?>

Insert the following above it, like so:

<?php $i++; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

The final step is to insert your Adsense code. Locate where exactly you’d like it within the Loop, and place it between a conditional tag like this:

<?php if ($i == 1) { ?> [YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE] <?php } ?>

And that’s all you have to do. You can be creative with this code as well. You could add a certain css style class to the top post in your Loop. It doesn’t even have to be the first either, as you can just change the number in $i == 1 to whatever you want. This same method can be used in other archive templates such as archive.php.

You can display ads with WordPress in other ways as well, including plugins such as WhyDoWork Adsense Plugin (formerly Shylock Adsense).

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.

Learning More About Javascript Injections

Ok, for those of you who don’t know what javascript injections are, they are ways to manipulate the page source of any web page. Some very simple javascript injections are to simply display an alert box with any text you want. To execute any form of javascript injection enter “javascript:” in the URL bar in your browser, then after the colon you can enter any javascript code in the same way you would in a normal web page. For example if you type in “javascript:var a = “hello world!”; alert(a)” in the URL bar an alert box would pop-up displaying the value of the variable “a”.

Now that you know the basics to javascript injections lets learn how to hack with them, as you should know javascript can manipulate anything on a web page. Here is a simple way to hack into a username on a website. Although the site you try to hack you have to be logged into that site. Once logged in type in the following javascript injection in the URL bar: “javascript:alert(document.cookie)”. This will display the cookie information that the site has on you, look for something like “user_id=xxx” or “PHPSESSID=xxx”. Typically you want to change this string’s value to 1, because the administrator is usually user_id number 1. To change it type in the following in the URL bar: “javascript:void(document.cookie user_id=1);alert(document.cookie);”. Now the user_id’s value should be 1, so refresh the page and you should be logged in as the administrator.

Please remember that you should never mess around with someones site. Always contact the administrator if you find a security hole in their site. Now remember how I said javascript can manipulate anything on a webpage? Well lets start manipulating stuff, for the basics we can just start with forms. Lets say a web page has a form to buy something using a debit card or something like that. Lets say the price for this item is fifty dollars, now lets manipulate this price. Lets say the submit button is a form itself, and it has no other values. In the URL bar type the following: “javascript:void(document.forms[0] = $1.00)”. Ultimately this will change price to one dollar, yes! The “[0]” represents the form number on the page, for example if there are 3 forms on a page. The first one would be labeled “0″ the second one “1″ and the third one “2″.

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: