Blocking PHP Execution From ALL of Your WordPress Sites Upload Folders

When looking for advise on hardening your WordPress sites many blogs recommend adding the following in a .htaccess file in each sites upload folder:

<Files *.php>
Deny from All
</Files>

For those of us with a large amount of WordPress Sites, this is obviously labor prohibitive. If you have a regularized folder structure you may be able to do something like this:

<Directory /home/*/public_html/*/wp-content/uploads>
	<FilesMatch "\.(php|php\.)$">
		Order Allow,Deny
		Deny from all
	</FilesMatch>
</Directory>

And put it into a Apache configuration file as such:

WP-Block-Apache-Conf

And then enable it:

a2enconf block-wp-uploads-php.conf

Cursor Disappears After Upgrading to Windows 8.1

One of our family friends came over tonight complaining of her cursor going missing after applying the Windows 8.1 upgrade to her new laptop. After a lot of fussing with it for 20 minutes and some google-fu I found this thread:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-tms/windows-8-mouse-pointer-disappeared/0814da98-0e28-4a3c-b0a1-8125440eacab

Which explains that for whatever reason toggling the trackpad disable button causes the cursor to re-appear and stay visible even when re-disabling it. Quite an irritating bug.

wlalias makes adding aliases on Windows Live Domains possible

Now that Google Apps is no longer free many of us have been left high and dry as far as offering high quality groupware/webmail to our customers and friends. Windows Live Domains is certainly not as polished as Google Apps was but it is certainly still free. A major frustration however is the lack of the ability to create aliases in the WebUI. Many users want to have an address like contact@ aliased to themselves at auser@. Microsoft has not provided a way to do this easily via their UI. Fortunately someone has stepped in with wlalias an open source tool that makes adding an alias as easy as:

wlalias add userid@example.com alias@example.com

Check it out over at: wlalias.com