In short, approximately 90,000 computers are currently working together to attack WordPress sites. It’s the largest DDoS attack ever coordinated.

And everyone is telling you to delete your Admin Account and change your passwords.

Both are excellent advice. The default Admin account that WordPress creates is a huge security loophole. One that WordPress should tell you to change as soon as you start your blog or site. But they don’t.

But just creating a new user and having a super strong password (more on that in a moment) is not enough. You should also have a super strong user name.

Why? Well, let’s take a look at what these bots are doing. They are finding WordPress blogs, assuming Admin still exists and using a password generator to break into sites.

But just how smart are these bots? Maybe smart enough to scan your blog or website and pick out words and/or phrases that you use a lot that might also be used as a user name. And how many of you are using your real name? Or your child’s name? Or even Editor?

I would bet a lot.

My display name here at Designed To A Tee’s Blog is Robyn. But that’s not the username that gets that display name. I am not going to tell you what that is, but I assure it is 100% obscure. It’s not something that’s on this or any other Blog I write. The likelihood of a bot, or even a human, guessing it and then using a password breaker to hack my account? Small. Very very small.

And, of course, on top of that I have an obscure and unique password. One of numbers and letters and symbols and many many characters.

So do both. Create a username that no one who isn’t inside your head will ever figure out. And a password to match.

Not just here on WordPress. But everywhere.

Be safe!

The brief was for a clean, word based logo/header. No graphics, just nice text in ‘on trend’ colours. You can see the header at the link above and here are the business card and social media logos:

Business card logo

Social media logo

Add you can see the logos are all slightly different but within the same family in order to create an overall brand. Even when your company, or even a hobby, is “just” blog, it’s fairly simple to keep all parts of it together and have them match to create a finished look.

I should probably note, as well, that SGS is pretty much the Poster Girl for successful blogging. Avril started it just about a year ago and has gone from strength to strength via the blog and social media. She’s been written about in the Daily Mail and just recently was in Easy Living Magazine. You can find the article here on the blog.

So it was an honour to be chosen to update her logos.

And I learned something doing so. I learned that Twitter hates and despises anything other than a perfectly square logo. It kept cropping the logo in weird and wonderful ways until I figured this out. All the documentation seems to indicate that any height is fine if it is no more than about 250px wide. Not true! So all my Twitter logos are now square.

Yours should be too.

And doing this.

What do you think?

It’s too new.

It’s too varied.

It’s too changeable.

So either take the time to learn it or hire someone like me who has the time to play with it.

Here’s something else you should know about it:

If your company doesn’t have it? You’re missing a huge opportunity for free advertising and improved customer relations.

Basil, coriander and oregano!

So well, in fact, that my mother in law may be jealous as she’s been trying to grow coriander for ages and getting no where. That’s the plant in the middle there!

Next up is to find some pots for repotting and making pretty.

I’ll keep you posted!

The main problems being, of course, time and the fact that I am not a programmer!

The site redesign is, in fact, under way, it’s just taking me ages as I teach myself CSS and HTML5 as I go along.

But I’ll get there.

Hopefully before the end of the decade…

Our first pot..well, planter.

Today our order from Lakeland arrived. I ordered our first set of seeds and such from them as they were on deep end of season sale. I like to save money.

The planter is hardly pretty, but it will do to germinate our seeds, which are coriander, basil and oregano. Not sure I sowed them right as I don’t really speak garden, but the instructions on the back says they can be planted together. So we will see what happens!

Once they start sprouting, we will move them into prettier pots, although winter is coming quick so I am thinking they will move inside.

Just not sure where yet…

And that I’m a mother to a 3 year old boy.

And now I am announcing that he is my chief assistant for our next design project: our family garden!

We’ve just signed a new 2 year lease on our house and so have decided it’s time to put some work into the back garden. We are going to do it in containers, since we don’t own the house, but it still needs to laid out, planted, tended and harvested!

I’ve just ordered our first set, some herbs and things from a kit and we’ll see how it goes from there. I promise to take pictures and post them so everyone can follow along.

Assistant Designer and Chief Dirt Digger Adam is very very excited.

So’s his mother…

So far all I’ve done is change the theme for the blog. I’m working on the rest of the site.

So keep checking. Who knows what I might do next!

Check out Jump Magazine if you have a pre-teen or teen girl. It’s very cool.