I was speaking to John Lessnau via email yesterday about the WordPress plugin for LinkXL (which I am planning on reviewing soon). The site scans your website and looks for keywords etc but it wasn’t able to do it.

John then pointed to my plugin directory and said that one of the many plugins installed was conflicting with theirs. I pointed out that I didn’t actually have that many plugins installed and had just tried a few out (ie. most were not activated) but what did concern me was that everyone could see my plugins. I am not an expert with htaccess but I’m familar with most basic techniques. I’ve just been lazy and taken the time to hide my folders from the general public. Thankfully it is painfully easy to do this!

How to stop people viewing files in your directories

Branding is a very important part of promoting a website, be it a blog, forum, online shop or service. Personally, I can design basic websites and simple logos and graphics but on the whole, design is not my strong point. I always say I’m a jack of all trades and master of nothing!

Due to this I outsource a lot of my design work. In the past I have contacted designers directly when I have been looking for a new logo but recently I have instead held a contest. The site I use for this is 99designs.

Many of you may already be aware of 99designs. It was originally the contests section in the SitePoint Marketplace but was later moved to the domain 99designs.com (your sitepoint login should work on the site). The premise of the site is simple : 99designs is a place where webmasters hold design contests and designers submit their entries and the webmaster chooses what he thinks is the best design. Thousands of designers visit the site regularly and the standard of designs is pretty high.

Do you display the time on your website and want to add a small greating next to it? Now you can with this simple tutorial. We will take the current time and display a greating depending on the time of day.

This tutorial is a follow up to our PHP Login Script Tutorial. You will learn how to encrypt passwords to make your login script more secure.

Have you ever wanted to know when Google crawls your website? Well now you can using a simple PHP script which emails you everytime GoogleBot crawls your site.