Here is the introduction to make you more eager to read it:

WordPress became very popular with the ever growing number of blogs. People started creating all sorts of guides and tutorials for WordPress itself. But little has been talked about security, even though it is such an important topic. For that reason I wanted to step forward and create a comprehensive WordPress security guide.
Really, there is no reason not to follow along this guide and make your blog more secure. Think of how much it would cost you if your blog were to be hacked?

I hope you like the WordPress security article.

Tell me what you think of it! Do you like it? Do you think such in depth articles are valuable or just a waste of time?

WordPress Security: Another Expert Article is a post from And Break

In order to make this blog even better I thought of creating a content policy. This policy is not only useful for me. It is also for you, for all my readers. It is supposed to give you an overview of what you can expect from this blog.

And I hope that through this policy you will see why it takes so long to create and publish new posts.

This is essential since I want to create a higher standard of quality on my blog. And that’s what I hope this policy will help to uphold.

Here are some of the main ideas of my content policy:

1. The topic of an article will be researched in depth
2. Articles will cover a topic thoroughly
3. Articles will be at least around 500 words
4. A number of valuable links will be included in every article
5. Articles are written for You!

The last point of this policy is especially important to me. I write articles for you to learn new things. To present you different views on a topic or things you didn’t know about before.

The only problem is that it usually takes a lot of time to write and publish an article. Because you want to present content to your reader, you ultimately get under pressure.

Under this pressure the quality of your articles suffer. In order to not put me under such as pressure I will take more time to write posts.

What do you think? Is this policy useful?

And Break's Content Policy is a post from And Break

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Obviously WolframAlpha aims at answering questions not by providing links to web sites (they actually do link to web site, but only to a few) but by presenting aggregated data.

How Does it Work?

WolframAlpha is based on the Mathematica core which took around 20 years to develop. WolframAlpha automatically detects what kind of information you are interested in by using the keywords you typed in.

For example let’s say you typed in John. WolframAlpha’s engine will then automatically detect that John is a name and thus it will return information about the name John back to you. To make it clear that you want information about a name use name John as a query and it should return the same information.

It works the same with different keywords such as countries. Enter france into the search box and hit enter. Again you should see information popping up but this time concerning a country, i.e. France.

You can further compare names or countries to each other just by entering USA France into the search field.

If you are completely new to WolframAlpha it might be best to get used to it by taking a look at the query examples.

There is also an interesting article on SEOBook about the new search engine which is worth to look at.

Conclusion

In my opinion it is a very successful approach as a search and knowledge engine. I think it would be even more effective if the company would start to create country specific versions of the web site, which they are probably working on at the moment.

Overall WolframAlpha is something totally different compared to other search engines and that’s what makes it so interesting. I am further very interested in how WolframAlpha will change in the future.

What do you think of WolframAlpha?

WolframAlpha: A Successful Search Engine Approach? is a post from And Break

The New And Break! Design

It took me a while to get started but now I am done with creating my new theme. Actually I didn’t create it all myself but I bought a Premium WordPress Theme from WooThemes.

If you want to use the same theme you can go ahead and download it on WooThemes. It’s called BusyBee but it actually does not look the same as mine since I customized it.

In the last few days I customized BusyBee a lot to fit my needs. It took me a lot of time to get it to work the way I wanted it to but now it does.

What has changed?

Header

I’ve added my logo that I have designed a while ago to the header. There is also an And Break Tips section which will include tips about blogging in general.

Post Section

In the post section I’ve now included an Google Adsense banner right under the content. I’ve also added some social bookmarking buttons and got rid of the old ShareThis button.

Sidebar

In the sidebar there is a new banner ad system which can show up to six 125×125 ad banners. The tab with popular and recent posts is also new to the sidebar. When reading posts I’ve also added a related post section to the sidebar to make it easier to find new content.

Footer

Not a lot has actually changed in the footer. I’ve actually only stripped it to the basics to keep it from becoming too crowded.

How do you like the theme? What do you think could be improved? Do you think it was worth spending the money?

And Break's New Layout is a post from And Break

The steps to receive feedback are really simple. You enter your website url and then questions for the people giving the feedback. Someone for example asked “What are your first impressions?What do you find confusing? What didn’t you understand immediately?” Afterwards you have to transfer the money via Paypal.

Some people also may doubt the value of the feedback but I guess the comments seem to be valuable otherwise nobody would pay for the service.

To get a glimpse of how the feedback looks like just visit the web site, there are lots of examples.

Tell me what you think about it? Do you like the concept?

Feedback Army – Testing Your Internet Ideas is a post from And Break

The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.

As Google states the tool is especially useful when using AdWords because it then creates results directly customized to the websites you are advertising on.

It is also useful for websites that are not currently advertising. If you have a computer blog it might give you an idea of what kind of computer is searched the most heavily for. Because of that you could decide to write a review about that particular personal computer and receive a lot more traffic than you normally would.

What do you think of it? It seems like Google is constantly creating new software.

Google Search-Based Keyword Tool Available is a post from And Break

This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language that dramatically simplifies the ability to track Flash, Flex and AS3 content. This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version.

The tracking library for Flash and Flex can be downloaded here as a zip file. The developer documentation also gives you insight into how to use these libraries correctly.

If you still need more information visit the project page.

Google Analytics for Flash Released is a post from And Break

Whenever you fill out the “Website” or “URL” field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet.

A New Twitter?

There are a lot of similarities between Twitter and BackType. BackType lets you follow other people, as you can do in Twitter. Furthermore it allows you to create fully customizable profile. This is also a feature of Twitter. You can also reply to comments in BackType which of course exists in Twitter too.

How is it Useful?

If you take a look at it you will find several useful things you can do with it.
First of all BackType has an API which you can use to, e.g. show how many total comments you have. Since it also shows you the Top Comments it gives you an idea of the trends in the blogging world. Further you could also examine the comments made by respected and well-known bloggers to get an idea of how they communicate to their audience.
Update:You can also use BackType trends to find the latest trends of bloggers – Thanks Mike

BackType – A New Twitter? is a post from And Break

The Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. It achieves this by optimizing your placement in each ad auction to avoid unprofitable clicks and get you as many profitable clicks as possible.

However there are several criteria to be able to use the Adwords Conversion Optimizer.

• Adwords Conversion Tracking must be enabled
• A campaign history of at least 50 conversions in the last 30 days
• The campaign must have been receiving conversions at a similar rate for at least a few days

The second criteria is only there to make sure that there is at least some conversion history to be able to make accurate predictions.

There is also a video introduction to the Adwords Conversion Optimizer. Take a look at it! It might be worth it if you are using Adwords.

Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer is a post from And Break

WordPress Spellcheck Problem

As you might notice in the picture, there are several typos in the text shown, especially in the last few words (if you can call them words). WordPress marks typing errors by underlining them with a red dashed line. However in this case the only word underlined is “Spellcheck” even though there are a lot more typing mistakes. This only happens if you are in “Visual mode”.

If you switch to “HTML mode” then every single typo is shown.

I actually do not know why this happens. It seems to be a bug. I think you can also see the typos in visual mode when you switch a few times between HTML and Visual mode.

-UPDATE-: One really important thing to do when writing articles in the editor included in WordPress is to spell check your headlines. For some reason WordPress does not perform a spell check there.

WordPress Spellcheck Tip is a post from And Break