DNS-Changer – how to test your computer

There appears to have been an increase in attacks on private computers in recent weeks, and in some cases even a good virus scanner has not been able to block them.  Yesterday we learnt about a new threat called “DNS-Changer”.  This is what you need to know:

DNS is short for “Domain Name System” and is like a telephone directory for the internet.  When you visit a website, the address of that site is turned into the numeric address – the IP address – by a DNS server.  Your computer then uses the number to contact the site.  Cymeradwyo, for example, runs on IP address 85.214.111.207.

The DNS servers for computers in private households are usually run by the internet providers such as T-Online.

But what would happen if instead of asking your internet provider for the IP address, your computer asked a different DNS server?  If this server gave and incorrect answer, the computer would pull up the wrong page.  Now if that page look different to the one you were expecting, then you would notice.  But what if it looks identical?

[Read more…]

Feedburner done

The first step is complete: all RSS feeds have been re-routed to Feedburner!  So now all of our blogs can be tracked better and can be delivered by e-mail.  They should be more compatible with differend RSS readers, and we are able to place AdSense advertisements into the feeds.

One thing about Feedburner bothered me – I cannot edit more than one feed at a time, eg. to compare settings.  The system gets confused and always shows me the last feed that I clicked on.

If you haven’t done so already, you might like to sign up for the Cymeradwyo.net feed.

How many archives should I show?

If you’ve been blogging for some time, then your archive list will be getting quite long.  I’ve been having that problem on some blogs, as the list of months in the archives was getting longer than the rest of the sidebar put together.

So I started wondering about how I could improve the situation.  I’ve come up with two possible solutions:

– use yearly archives instead of monthly ones

– limit the number of listed months

For blogs that have been going for a number of years, the yearly option is not bad, as long as the posts can still be found without going through too many pages.  I solve that using tag clouds or category lists.

But for most of my blogs, I’ve gone for the limited month option, and have set the limit to 12.

To do this, I’ve edited the sidebar.php and changed the call to wp_get_archives to

wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&limit=12’);

or

wp_get_archives(‘type=yearly’);

Which do you think is the better option?  Of is there an even better way?

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