Having spent a lot of time and effort into putting together a well thought out blog post, how annoying would it be for you to find that someone just came to your blog, highlighted the text and copied it and then reposted it as their own?

What if they just right clicked and copied the images as well. If you write good content then this is something that you will face at some point in your blogging career. For users of Wordpress there is a plugin that will help you prevent this from happening.

Called WP-Content Protector it provides you with the ability to control how your content is used. Through the settings you can decide to turn off the ability for images to be “right-clicked” and the ability for a reader to highlight text. These can be selected individually.

I think this is a great start to protecting your content, and considering the amount of time you probably put into it why wouldn’t you want to protect it? One more thing about this plugin that adds to its recommendation, it is already Wordpress 2.8 compatible.

Have you ever had your content stolen?

If you have a wordpress based blog you no doubt have it installed to a directory either called “Wordpress” or “WP”. How do I know this, because thats the default that everyone uses.  Because of that it makes it very vunerable to hackers or just people who would like to browse your directories.

One of the easiest changes you can make to your setup is to ensure that all the directories within your wordpress directory are protected.

To do this simply add the following link to your .htaccess file that exists in the main WordPress installation directory - “Options All -Indexes”, painless quick and easy and now you have at least some protection from nosy browsers.

Although you might think I am going to tell you the forsaken secrets of defeating your direct Internet competition, I am not about to do it yet. Still working myself on doing that for now.

What I am going to tell you guys today is that you really need to protect your blogs. And I am talking about their whole existence. You’ll have to start that right away. Getting your great domain name, buying the best hosting offer money can buy, or the one you can afford, and starting a long blogging journey are all worthless steps if you don’t protect all those resources.

The most annoying thing that can happen is getting attacked by hackers. Weather intentional attacks or simply coincidental, those attacks can harm your blogs and your daily activities. A hacker can set your blog back and you might find yourself working harder on reconstructing what has already been destroyed. I had two of my blogs under attack yesterday. Both MobileWhack and ScreenHead were targeted by hackers. As you can see they are all fine and nothing serious happened. Everything works and the attacks were futile. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t concerned about their security. Anyone would be. It’s only human nature right? But keeping your cool and doing what you do best will get you through the day.

Here’s what you can do to avoid having your blog destroyed by unwanted attackers:

1) Be aware of the possibility that something like that can happen. It can happen to you too. No one is actually really safe out here.

2) Get a decent hosting solution with great customer support. Those people will really work with you for solving your problems.

3) Keep changing passwords and make sure they aren’t that easy to be discover. Don’t store them on anything that could be hacked into, lost or stolen.

4) Back-up your blogs frequently. If the hackers do succeed in getting your blog down, you will rebuild faster if you have back-ups. The more blogs you have, the more difficult it might be to keep backing them up. Nonetheless do it! It’s part of your great blogging plan.

5) Install WordPress 2.7. It’s the latest version of Wordpress. It was released about a week ago and it brings lots of new features. Wordpress is by far the best blogging tool available yet. Its security tools will see your blog making it through this Internet jungle.

6) Be present in your blog’s life. If you are going to be a successful Internet entrepreneur that means you will have to spend lots of hours in front of your computer. You’ll pick up an attack in no time and you will have time to act accordingly really fast.

7) Fight back! I am not saying do whatever it takes to find those hackers. It’s almost impossible to do that, although that would be a fun option to consider. But you can take control of the situation and handle it accordingly. You don’t have to be a programming guru either. Just be sure you have someone standing by ready to help.

At the end of the day it’s you who will have to win. And your blogs will see another day. Or a lot more days for that matter. It’s all part of that long term relationship I was talking about.

I hope you haven’t had the “opportunity” of getting attacked by a hacker and that you never will. But if it should happen, be prepared. I’ll be back for you folks with more details about WordPress 2.7.