Why is it that we wait till after someone has broken into our home to install a burglar alarm?  Do we think we are somehow immune to theft and vandalism until we become a victim ourselves?  I, for one, have heard of a rash of horror stories where Internet marketers sites are getting hacked leaving them devastated and angry after losing hours and hundreds of pages of content.

What can you do?  WordPress makes every effort to make their blogging platform hack proof but it turns out that the leak comes in other more easily accessible avenues .   Like your password.  It seems that that is the easiest place to gain entry.  So trick number one is to pick very hard to guess user names and passwords.

You can get a free WordPress security plugin that will plug up the remaining easy to find holes.

Basically, what we need to do is to make out site hard to hack so the “thieves” will give up and move on to easier targets.

How do I know all this?  Thanks to blog master, Craig Desorcy, who just put out “Blog LockDown” – you cannot lose with his excellent instruction and step by step screen shots. Even a technodummie like me can get under the hood of my sites and lock them down.  Read more about it here.

So, what is a little peace of mind worth to you?

If you have been in Internet marketing for long, you have probably long since switched to Firefox as your internet browser of choice.  I know I took me a while to care about the difference between IE and FF but once I had to make the change for a coaching program I was on, I was sold on Firefox.

Well, I thought I was happy with Firefox and except for one thing i missed form IE, I think FF has far surpassed IE in EVERY way.  Till now!

Enter Flock.  Now before you pass this post by read with me a bit longer.  Flock takes all the best pints of Firefox and takes it 200% more.  Flock is actually built on the same Mozilla platform as Firefox so it really isn’t that different.  Only Flock has at least two features I squealed for joy when I saw them.

#1 favorites in the sidebar – I missed this in Firefox.  That is one thing IE had that Firefox didn’t.  Well, Flock has one upped even IE in this department.  It has a clean, color coded organized look to it with a nicely prominent search just for your favorites.  Now, Firefox does have a search but I never saw it before but in Flock it is right there right on top and ready to use.  Did you lose track of where you stuck a certain bookmark, well, here is the search you need!  I lost where I had tucked the Lego site way down in one of my files.  Search brought it up right away!  yes!

#2 social sidebar (!)  yup you can tweet and follow your friends right in you sidebar.  You can add Digg and Facebook, too.  It updates right along, too so out of the side of your eye while working on the main part of yor window you can see when someone updates in Twitter.  Now you don’t have to leave the Poeple sidebar up all the time but it is nice to have it up when you do want it.

#3 one touch add to your favorite Reader.  Now I know it is there is Firefox, but in Flock there is a bright orange RSS button in the address bar that lights when a site has RSS.  So, should you want to add the blog or news feed to your favorite reader, it takes just a touch (well, you do need to choose it as your default reader in Tools>Options>Applications and find Web Feed and choose your reader, mine is Google)  But once you have configured your default reader, just clicking that button adds the feed to Google.  Now all your feeds can be read in central place.

#4 more of a side note: You do have the option to read all your feeds in Flock in a sidebar.  While I don’t use this feature, you may find it useful.

You can use nearly all the Firefox add-ons with Flock, too.  I am a very happy customer.

Today was a very educational day for me.  I learned how to use Snagit while I wrote out my report, “Create A Cool Looking Opt-in Box with a Red/green Submit Button”.  Yes, just like the one on my opt-in box on the right sidebar.

Snagit was surprisingly easy to use and it took less time than I thought to put it all together.  It is 11 pages long so I put in a pdf.  Get a free copy of the report here:  http://thehinessite.com/blog/redgreensubmitbutton.pdf

I am anxious to hear what you all think.  Did you find it useful?  What improvements can be made?  You technical types, any suggestions?  I am all ears!