Today while going through the site to read and respond to comments, I was thrilled to notice that Hack WordPress has reached its first milestone, 500 subscribers!

It has been just under 4 months since this domain was registered and the site was launched. It has been a ton of work, but in that time I’m pretty proud of the work we’ve done and look forward to working towards the next milestone, 1000 subscribers. I’m also hoping to release our first WordPress theme this weekend so keep an eye out for that.

If you have knowledge of WordPress and would like to contribute to the growth of this site, as well as gain some exposure for yourself and your website, we currently have some opportunities available to write for us as a guest author or weekly contributor. Contact us with questions.

Thanks to everyone for reading, commenting, and making this site so great to write for!

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!

When it comes to WordPress 2-column themes, people seem to fall into one of two categories: left sidebar or right sidebar.   Which do you prefer?

I’m not sure which is better, but in browsing through my 2-column WordPress theme gallery, one of the first things you’ll notice is that theme designers seem to prefer releasing themes with a right sidebar.   Is this a coincidence or do theme authors find that they get more downloads with a right sidebar?

I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I know that most “A-list” bloggers use 2-column themes with the sidebar on the right, so I suspect that this has something to do with the trend.  I know from my personal experiences that I prefer a right sidebar because I feel it looks better and creates a much more friendly experience for readers.

David of CyberCoder argues that people that have advertising on their websites should use a left sidebar for their 2-column theme.   His argument is that heat maps show that people read from left to right and your advertisements are more likely to get noticed on the left side.  While this is probably true, most advertising these days seems to be moving away from PPC advertising and more towards direct advertisements.   This is why the few theme designers that offer 125×125 banner slots on their themes are getting a ton of downloads.

So, what do you think?  Why do you prefer to use a 2-column theme?

If you use the WordPress Write panel to create your blog posts, you have probably noticed that the buttons available for you to use are often lacking. Recently WordPress added an advanced panel to the Rich Text Editor, but even that is still missing a lot of options that people would love to use. I know that I personally have always wished that there were a few other options available, such as underline, headers 1-3, etc.

For people looking for a way to do this, I recommend you read the tutorial written on WPCandy called Adding Buttons To The Post Editor. Michael has taken the time to spell out each individual step so that someone without any coding knowledge could easily make the necessary adjustments. As always, don’t forget to backup your quicktags.js file before making any changes so that you can easily restore it if something goes wrong.

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!