Cannot Delete Admin Account in WordPress
To secure your WordPress blog, many experts will recommend that you create a new WordPress administrator account and delete the default WordPress admin account. The idea is that since every WordPress installation comes with an admin user, you’ve given away half of the battle for security. Automated hacker bots can come at your WordPress blog by using the default admin username and then all they have to try and get is the password.
Deleting the admin account removes it as a target for hackers. They can try all day long with automated or non-automated attacks to hack the admin account, but if it isn’t there, they’ll never get in that way.
There is a small glitch that most people fail to mention.
If you have already setup your WordPress blog before deciding to remove the admin account, chance are that WordPress won’t let you delete the admin account when you try and click delete.
Why won’t WordPress let you delete the admin account?
Because under Settings –> General there is a field where you enter an email address. That email address is the administrative email address contact. You cannot delete the account that the administrator email account is assigned to.
So, take one more step and switch the admin email address to match the one you setup with the new admin account. Then, you can go back to the Users screen and delete the admin account without any trouble.
FYI – If you have not created another User account and assigned it administrator rights, you won’t be able to delete the default admin account either. In WordPress, there always has to be at least one admin account, so you have to create the new admin account first, and then delete the old default administrator account.
WordPress PSD Framework
A lot of people use WordPress to build and run their blogs.
A lot of people use Photoshop to mock-up an layout of their web site design and then use that layout to create the actual website layout, usually via some sort of grid.
There are a growing number of WordPress Theme frameworks than can be used as a starting point for WordPress blog design.
There aren’t really any WordPress-based PSD frameworks available for free. Not true.
The guys over at Area381, who I have never run across before today offer a WordPress PSD Framework file for free download.
Now, no matter how you start your website design, you have a solid jumping off point.
Pings WordPress and Feedburner
For many years now, I have just followed the conventional wisdom when it comes to maximizing things like pings, trackbacks, feeds and WordPress. But, lately, I’ve been looking into it a little bit more, and I have come to find out, that 99% of what is out there isn’t conventional wisdom, its slightly re-written copies of the same information.
Today, I stumbled upon (figuratively and Web 2.0-ly) the first site I have read that actually acknowledges the fact that some Ping servers do not take all pings and that you are just generating traffic and spam for pinging them. And also, that Ping servers do come and go. Several no longer exist, and yet are still on everyone’s “Ping These Servers” lists, proof that there is rampant list copying and not multiple versions of research coming to the same conclusion.
My conclusion? I don’t have one yet, but this is most definitely an area where a little more research is in order.
WordPress 2.7
On a semi-related note, I have just begun to play around extensively with the new WordPress 2.7 interface, and I have to say that I am very impressed. What was a product that was rapidly becoming data and having trouble keeping up with easily managing itself has been transformed into a product with a clean, well thought out, interface that easily handles most regular tasks.
Kudos to the WordPress 2.7 developers.
Denial and Windows Live Writer
Here is a good lesson for business owners and management. Do not pretend that you don’t know what is going on in the business world. It only makes you look like a fool.
There was an episode of the West Wing in which the staff insist the President not use his opponent’s name because it gives him free publicity. The President asks that if he doesn’t use his opponent’s name, won’t it just look like he doesn’t know his name? The absurdity being that everyone already knows both names; presidential elections are like that. (Whether you are Republican, Democrat, or hate politics, by now you know that names of the two guys running this year.)
This brings me to today’s post. I always laugh when people or companies try and pretend to be oblivious of the obvious to make themselves try and look good. Ironically, they only end up making themselves look foolish.
The folks at Microsoft’s new online push have released a new version of Windows Live Writer that addresses some of my previous problems with it, so I’ve re-installed it and am starting to use it again. So far, so good.
Windows Live Writer’s Absurd Omission
While setting up my blogs, I noticed that Microsoft has declared itself to be the victor in the blogging universe despite the fact that it is currently a tiny niche player. When you setup Windows Live Writer to work with your blog you get a setup screen like this one:
If you aren’t laughing out loud right now, you probably don’t know much about blogging. The most used blogging service is WordPress. The other most common ones are Blogger and TypePad. These are so ubiquitous it’s like, not including Google, Yahoo, and MSN in your new search related software. Only, on the Microsoft blogging software, none of the top three are listed. Sure, they are there under “Another Weblog Service,” but what kind of message does this box send? If you have a great new search product and it says “What Search Engine Do You Use?” — Bob’s Search, Lycos Search, or Another Search Engine, what kind of message does that send regarding your understanding of your target users?
Microsoft hopes that this box add legitimacy to its Johnny-come-lately addition to the online universe called Live Spaces. What it really does is give everyone a big fat reminder that Microsoft is not only not a leader in the online world, but frequently a hinderance. (It’s Internet Explorer is legendary for it’s terrible implementation of standards it supposedly supports — Search anywhere for IE and CSS for examples.) Furthermore, it suggests that Microsoft is pretending that there aren’t thousands of people and sites out there who have been up and running and doing just fine while Microsoft was trying to decide if the this whole Web 2.0 thing was real or not. So, your average Internet professional (like Moi) sees this screen and thinks, “Who are they kidding?” I mean, I’m assuming that they aren’t delusional enough to know that the likes of WordPress and Blogger make up the vast majority of sites out there. So, they have to be doing it on purpose. I guess they hope people will be setting this software up and decide to give one of these services a try.
What they have actually done is to put out a software that reinforces the notion that Microsoft software is cumbersome and difficult to setup. Not long from now, other blogging software will update or a new one will come along with features. But, this other software will have easy default buttons for setting up WordPress and Blogger and the reviews will start to say things like “Much easier to setup than Windows Live Writer” and before you know it, Microsoft has released yet another product that no one has any interest in actually using. The only users they’ll be left with are the lowest end people who use whatever comes pre-installed on their computer without doing any research or investigation. Needless to say, these won’t be the people producing the top blogs on the Internet.
So, welcome to Windows Live Writer. It is cool today, but absurd corporate politics have doomed it to be a weak player in the market. Feel free to use it as a place holder until a Mozilla backed version of blogging software comes along.
