WordPress, in recent versions, have forces the display of WordPress as the generator in meta tags along with the version information in the header of your WordPress blogs - <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />. Unlike previous versions there is not easy way to remove it. Unless WordPress is using that to provide support (which it doesn’t), I don’t see any good reason for providing that extra bit of help to hackers, do you? Here is a simple plugin which will remove the WordPress generator meta tag along with its version information.

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Newer versions of WordPress (2.3.1 and above) adds two extra lines to your blog header. They are:
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://blog.taragana.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /><link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://blog.taragana.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
You need them to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. However many, like me, do not use Windows Live Writer. For them such headers are simply junk and add to the size of their pages (and download time) without adding any value to them or to their users. For such bloggers (majority I presume) here is a simple WordPress plugin (Angsuman's Windows Live Manifest Remover WordPress plugin) which removes these two header links from your WordPress blog.

Download Angsuman's Windows Live Header Remover Plugin, rename the file to angsumans-windows-live-header-remover.php, upload it to wp-content/plugins folder of your blog and activate it from Plugin Management screen. It requires zero configuration. It does one thing and does it well - remove these two useless headers from your WordPress blog.

Technical Note: There is a similar WordPress plugin which does the same thing. This plugin works differently in that it doesn't add the code directly to the plugin body but to the 'init' hook. This ensures that this plugin will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress as it doesn't depend on the relative order of execution of the plugins versus the default WordPress filters. Sounds complicated? To put it simply - Install the plugin and then forget about it forever. It will continue to serve you (your blog) in the background for a very long time.

You can get more free WordPress plugins here.

Any PHP based software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, MODx etc. will serve pages both from http://your-site.com as well as http://your-site.com/index.php. This creates duplicate content for search engines, which may then decide to penalize your site for duplicate content. You can safely prevent duplicate content with the following apache code / directive added to your .htaccess file (or in httpd.conf):

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GMail overall has a nice spam filter. You can leverage the GMail spam filtering capability even for your corporate emails without paying a dime.

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These add-ons are so useful that I cannot work for a single day without them and so I would suspect most web developers and QA Engineers. These plugins / add-ons makes Firefox a formidable web development and testing platform. They are:

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While running some Java applications (like Thinreader) you may see this strange looking error - Couldn’t find per display information. You may find this error when running such applications in JDK 6 or later. Let’s find out more about it and how you can easily fix it.

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VLC Media Player is a leading player for displaying video on Windows & Linux. It supports a wide variety of formats. You can also use it to save the video to a file.

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Anaconda Theme for WordPress 2.x blogs is a next generation 3 column CSS based theme provided by us. Anaconda Theme requires an attribution link at the bottom of each page. That is all we ask for our hard work in developing and testing this theme. However you may not want to have this attribution link / link back in every page of your blog for some reason. Here is what you can do to remove the linkback / attribution legitimately and without feeling guilty about it.

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1. Login to the Admin account (not the normal account)
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Let’s look at all the ways to change MySQL password, for root and other users:

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