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Has your WordPress blog ever been hacked? Did the culprit somehow add a whole bunch of malicious content to your blog that you had no clue how to get rid of? It has happened to me and I’m sure it has happened to some of you as well. Next time you’re in a stressful situation like this, let Sucuricome to the rescue! If you’ve been a victim of blog hacking and malware or are just looking for some ongoing protection and monitoring for your site, they can help.

“The Sucuri Web Integrity Monitor detects unauthorized changes to your websites, DNS, Whois and SSL Certificates.” By entering your URL into their security scanner, you can receive a free limited scan.

If you’d like more in-depth details though, you’ll need to sign upfor an account. Their accounts range from $9.99/month to $74.99/month ($89.99/year to $789.99/year). Also, if you just have website that is already infected and needs to be cleaned ASAP, you can have your site cleaned for $69.99. Recovering a hacked blog can be very frustrating and involve a lot of trial and error; so $9.99 is really a small price to pay to insure your sanity the next time something like that happens!

The free, limited scan will let you know your site’s status and whether it is blacklisted or not. There is also a pretty detailed Technical Report that follows.

The Technical Report has three different tabs: Web Site details, Blacklisting status, Malware information. The Web Site details tab then has four different sections: Web server details, List of links found, List of JavaScripts included, List of iframes included. So, just from simple little scan, you can really find out some pertinent details about your site.

The blacklisting status shows whether or not your domain is considered clean by Google Safe Browsing and by Norton Safe Web. You can click on a “reference” link to be directed to the actual (Google and Norton) sites for more details. I imagine if something was not right here, they would let you know. Sometimes it may take days or weeks before you even realize that something is wrong with your blog, so it’s a good idea to scan often just to make sure everything is ok.

With an account, you can also receive Sucuri alerts via email and Twitter. If you’d like to learn more about how Sucuri protects your site, be sure to check out the tour.

If there is one place that we recommend you visit in Turkey (and the world for that matter), it’s Cappadocia and the Göreme Valley. Its peculiar rock formations, colourful canyons and magical fairy chimney’s make this tourist hotspot unlike any other place on earth – literally.

Check out these photos of Cappadociato see what we’re talking about.

The historical region of Cappadocia has become famous for it’s hot air balloon tours, eccentric cave hotels, underground cities, ancient cave churches and the extraordinary terrain in the Göreme National Park (proudly added to the UNESCO World Heritage Listin 1985).

There are several towns in the Göreme Valley that offer tourist accommodations, but Göreme is the most popular because of its wide variety of hotels, restaurants, tour operators and stores that cater to foreigners. That, and because it’s one of the world’s most unusual cities!

Many travelers that book cheap holidays to Turkey will arrive and depart from Göreme when touring Cappadocia, making it a popular stop on the backpacker trail. Budget travelers can find good deals in Göreme and luxury travelers will find spectacular cave hotels that are truly one of kind.

Here is a photo of the cave hotel that we stayed at.

The town of Göreme, located in the Nevşehir Province of Central Anatolia, is also conveniently situated within walking distance to the Göreme Open-Air Museum(pictured below), one of the top tourist attractions in Cappadocia.

Helpful travel tip: Most people that travel to Cappadocia arrive via bus (typically from Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir or Antakya). Even if you book your ticket directly to Göreme, confirm with the bus driver/tour operator that the bus drops you off directly at the Göreme bus station (even if the bus ticket says Göreme). Like many other travelers, we were dropped off in Nevşehir, which is located about 20 minutes outside of Göreme. It was very confusing but fortunately other passengers guided us to the appropriate transfer bus (which was actually a small tourist bus – not your standard coach).

Read more from our travels to Cappadocia, Turkey:

Have you visited the town of Göreme in Cappadocia?
Share your experience and travel tips in the comments section below, our readers will thank you!

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There is nothing better than a good old-fashioned carbo-loading session. Pizza is great! Pasta is fantastic! Pasta on pizzais overkill, but still pretty awesome! On that note, here’s another carb-on-carb creation for you to lustily drool after but, under doctor’s orders, not eat.

KFC Singapore has released something they lovingly call the Deep-Fried Pasta Shrimp Roll.This bread-based divinity features hunks of shrimp, pasta and cheese which is then rolled in dough and deep-fried for your culinary pleasure. They’re sort of like egg rolls, only with cheese and pasta to make them even more unhealthy. Yes!

If you are in or around Singapore, these shrimp rolls are available now and only for a limited time. Get them with soda and fries to complete the health trifecta.

If this news makes you long for some fresh fruit and produce, get Cooking Channel’s best healthy summer recipes.

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Most gaming notebooks have a certain stigma attached to them. While some of the better systems available are more than capable of running the latest graphically demanding PC games out there, they’re often hulking beasts that can easily tip the scales at over 12 pounds.

Recently, however, gaming notebooks like the Razer Blade have helped steer the industry towards slimmer form factors. Case in point is the MSI GS70 Stealth Pro notebook we’ll be looking at today, a descendant of the hefty GX60we looked at early last year.

MSI GS70 Stealth Pro – 17.3″ 1,920 x 1,080 IPS LCD (130 ppi) 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4700HQ 16GB DDR3 1,600MHz RAM Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M GPU 6GB GDDR5 3 x 128GB SSD RAID 0 1TB HDD 7200rpm SteelSeries keyboard backlit in full color 4 x USB 3.0 , HDMI, 2 x DisplayPort Wi-Fi b/g/n, Gigabit Ethernet Windows 8.1 5.9 pounds, 16.47″ x 11.29″ x 0.85″ inches

MSI’s GS line consists of portable gaming notebooks with a focus on performance and portability. They’re generally very slim, very sleek and lightweight compared to the GT series, MSI’s most powerful (and big and heavy) line. But don’t be fooled, as the top-of-the-line GS70 Stealth Pro is packed with the sort of hardware that’ll likely put most desktops to shame.

The unit we tested came packed with an Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor clocked at 2.5GHz, paired with 16GB of DDR3 1,600MHz RAM and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 870M GPU with 6GB of GDDR5 memory. A 17.3-inch full HD anti-reflective display takes care of the visuals with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 but it’s the storage system that may surprise most.

One would expect a solid state drive to go along with this sort of configuration. Instead, MSI is using not two, but three 128GB solid state drives in a RAID 0 array for a blazing fast boot drive. There’s also a 1TB hard drive spinning at 7,200RPM to handle storage duties.

Other specifications include a Killer E2200 Gaming Network card, Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 and a backlit keyboard by SteelSeries. Our price as tested here today is.

MSI describes the outer chassis of the GS70 Stealth Pro as brushed aluminum grey, although under the right lighting, it almost takes on a purplish tone. The two-tone outer lid features MSI’s and the gaming series logos. The right side of the machine is home to a battery reset hole, dual USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, the power connector, a Kensington lock and ventilation slots.

The back of the notebook is free of any connectors as the remaining I/O ports are found across the left edge. From back to front, we have an Ethernet jack, HDMI, two mini DisplayPorts, one powered and one standard USB 3.0 port, and headphone, SPDIF, mic audio jacks.

A series of LEDs are positioned across the front left edge of the system. These are indicators for battery status, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, caps lock, number lock, hard drive and sleep state.

Opening the lid reveals the 17.3-inch anti-reflective, matte display. It’s framed by a textured flat black plastic bezel that’s a bit of an eyesore due to how thick it is, especially across the top and bottom where the 720p webcam with dual microphones and another MSI badge reside.

The SteelSeries keyboard with number pad fills the area nicely without feeling cramped. It’s slightly inset but more importantly, the keys are backlit in full color and can be programmed to your liking. A sound bar and the power button sit above it and a large touchpad below.

A set of six rubberized feet on the bottom keep the system firmly planted on a flat surface. There’s also a series of vents (one hiding a subwoofer that’s part of the Dynaudio sound system), the obligatory stickers and multiple screws holding the back panel in place.

With 16GB of memory and plenty of storage, there’s really no reason you’d need to open things up for expansion purposes. This does, of course, meant that the battery is non-removable — hence the aforementioned battery reset button. Pressing the button will initiate a battery reset, the same type you’d expect if you removed and reinserted a battery in any other notebook.

The GS70 arrived with a 64-bit copy of Windows 8.1. As I typically do with a new system, I first headed over to the add / remove programs to gauge the amount of bloatware I’d be dealing with. In this case, there were half a dozen or so apps that I removed from the get-go including XSplit Gamecaster, MSI Social Media Collection, MSI Remind Manager and a trio of Norton programs.

All graphics-based benchmarks (unless otherwise noted) were performed with the discrete Nvidia GPU selected as the recommended graphics card in the Nvidia control panel.

As you can see above the GS70’s GTX 870M GPU can handle modern games at 40 – 60 fps when using medium graphics settings in full HD resolution, but max out the eye candy and more often than not you won’t be able to hit the 30 fps playability threshold. As long as you keep it reasonable you’ll be able to enjoy most games on the market, which is great for a laptop this thin.

The GS70 breezed through our informal YouTube 4k resolution video test without breaking a sweat. CPU usage never went higher than 10 percent and the clip never showed any lag.

The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation’s duration in seconds. The GS70 was done in just under a minute.

For file transfers, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same drive. The small files test consists on transferring 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB, while in the large file the same MP3s were zipped into a single 2.52GB file.

I conducted our standard notebook battery tests on the GS70. Our video playback test consists of looping a 720p rip of the movie Inception at full screen with max brightness and Wi-Fi disabled. This is a taxing test that resulted in just 1 hour and 18 minutes of battery life.

These results were obtained with the graphics card set to “auto” meaning it selects either the integrated Intel graphics or the discrete Nvidia card based on what it thinks is best for the task at hand. The battery life was so poor that I ran the test again with integrated graphics selected but received the exact same results down to the minute. We were able to bring that up to 2 hours and 16 minutes, however, when toning down our test with 60% brightness.

I was thoroughly impressed with the Dynaudio system as it was able to fill a large room with crystal clear music at only 50 percent volume. At 100 percent, tunes remained distortion-free but it was simply too loud for regular listening. Around 50-60 percent was the sweet spot for me.

The speaker system is only one part of the equation as the Sound Blaster Cinema 2 software certainly helps things out. I’ve always been a fan of Sound Blaster’s Crystalizer, a tool designed to “restore portions of audio lost during compression.” Enabling it and adjusting the slider certainly makes music seem more “alive” which is the intended effect.

Just to see how much of a difference the Sound Blaster software made, I disabled it and was instantly met with a flat and muddy experience. I’d certainly keep it running if given the option.

Keeping expectations in check, I’d rate the speaker system as one of the best I’ve heard on a mobile platform. That’s important on a gaming machine although I suspect most will prefer having a set of quality headphones handy for extended gaming sessions.

It goes without saying that the storage system in this machine is incredibly fast, easily outperforming the dual SSD RAID 0 setup found in the Acer Aspire S5. With that speed, however, also comes the risk that in its RAID 0 configuration if any one of the three drives fail, you will lose everything. This is somewhat offset by the fact that you also have a terabyte drive available for storage — and offsite cloud backups are getting ever more affordable as well.

In any case, I personally like the idea of exchanging risk for speed as I’d keep mission-critical data backed up at all times but I can’t speak for everyone.

MSI has done a great job with the display on the GS70. Electing to go with a matte finish over a glossy panel will no doubt appeal to gamers as it virtually eliminates reflections under bright lights. Side-to-side viewing angles are superb but there is a bit of color shifting present when looking at the screen from above or below. That shouldn’t be much of an issue, however, as one could simply tilt the screen for optimal viewing.

The GS70 can get pretty loud during intense gaming action. As for heat output, the fan on the left side of the system seemed to expel much more heat than the right. Even still, the top area of the notebook just below the left bottom corner of the display got extremely hot — far too hot to even hold a finger on for more than an instant.

The system also heats up just as much on the underside which is likely why MSI covered the upper half of the base with a felt-like material. Without it (I touched a few of the exposed areas), it’d be far too hot to sit in one’s lap.

That said, I still wouldn’t feel too comfortable using the GS70 in my lap while gaming. Find a nice desk or a similar flat surface that gives the machine plenty of breathing room and you’re good to go. Fortunately, the keyboard area and the palm rest don’t get very warm at all.

The touchpad on the GS70 is one of the very few faults I could find with the machine. I would describe its operation as finicky at best. On several occasions, it would completely fail to recognize finger swipes. And not just once; I’m talking four or five swipes before the touchpad would register an input and move the mouse.

Not to sound as though I’m making excuses, but again, I suspect most serious gamers will use a quality gaming mouse anyway. The touchpad is still very annoying to deal with during normal use but given the system’s target audience, I don’t think it’ll be a major issue for most.

The SteelSeries keyboard, meanwhile, worked great. I’ll admit that the font used on the keys is a bit different but that doesn’t actually impact performance. The keyboard as a whole did exhibit a bit of flex during use but again, it’s far from a deal-breaker. I had no problems as it relates to accuracy when typing as there was plenty of real estate so I never felt cramped.

The backlit keyboard is another solid addition to the GS70. I especially like the fact that the characters on each key are transparent and let light shine through. Most “backlit” keyboards only illuminate the edges of the keycaps which pretty much defeats the purpose entirely.

There’s plenty of customization available with backlight coloring and macros within the SteelSeries software. There’s even a feature that’ll record how often you press each key. I’m not entirely sure why such information would be useful, but it’s pretty neat nevertheless.

With four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connections, this system is more than capable of handing a multiple input accessories, an external drive or two and some larger monitors. MSI certainly did a nice job here.

If you’re serious about spending $2,100 on a notebook computer, odds are that you’re either looking for a desktop replacement or something that will handle real gaming without breaking your back while on the go. As evident by our benchmark results, you may not always be able to run every single game with every bit of eye candy on but you can get pretty darn close, and that’s saying something for a laptop that’s just 0.85 inches thick.

The MSI GS70 Stealth Pro isn’t without fault – namely a flaky touchpad and poor battery life – but if you can overlook these few glaring issues and value a lean footprint, this system is more than capable of meeting the needs of pretty much anyone.

TechSpot
score

Pros: Vibrant display with a matte finish to eliminate reflections under bright lights. Blazing fast SSDs. Keyboard with configurable backlighting is a nice addition. Solid gaming performance in a portable and elegant package.

Cons: Touchpad operation is rather finicky when it comes to registering gestures or even swipes. Battery life was another weak point, although that’s to be expected for a machine of its kind.

Entrecardis one of the newest blog promotion sites that’s causing quite a buzz around the blogosphere.  In short, Entrecard requires no monetary commitment but a fairly significant time commitment in order to provide real benefits.

Entrecard gives bloggers the opportunity to create a virtual business card that looks like a 125×125 ad.  As an Entrecard member you’ll install a widget on your blog that provides a place for other Entrecard members to drop off their “cards” when they visit your blog as well as a place for other members to place their 125×125 ads (see the picture above).  Members pay for ads with Entrecard “credits.”

You can earn credits by visiting other members’ blogs and dropping off your business card through their Entrecard widget (1 point), when someone else drops off a business card on your blog (1 point) and when someone pays you with credits to place an ad on your blog.  Ads cost an amount of credits equal to twice as many cards that are dropped off on the site where you want to advertise each day, so if 100 people drop off cards at a site each day, it will cost 200 credits to advertise on that site.  Members can approve or reject ads, which is a great feature, and approved ads run on that site for 24-hours.

It seems that Entrecard is a great way to generate traffic, but how much of that traffic is truly targeted (meaning they’re interested in your blog’s topic).  In other words, how much of that traffic is staying on your blog for more than the few seconds it takes to click on the Entrecard widget to drop off their cards then moving onto the next site to drop off another card in order to build credits?  Can Entrecard produce meaningful traffic that converts into loyal readers?  I understand that the team behind Entrecard is trying to find a way to combat this “drop and dash” behavior, but as of today, it’s still the reality of Entrecard.

Of course, there are tertiary benefits to using Entrecard.  Increased traffic can help your blog’s rankings which can potentially lead to advertisers being interested in advertising directly on your blog (possibly paying more to do so than they would have without Entrecard traffic).  And it could be argued that each page view could lead to a click-through on another ad on your blog.

In terms of actually placing your own card as an ad on other members’ blogs through your Entrecard credits, this could be helpful to drive a lot more traffic if you save up credits to purchase ad placement on a very popular site (but remember, each ad unit you purchase is only up for 24-hours).  Alternatively, it could be very helpful for strong niche sites, where you can specifically target other sites to place your Entrecard ad to drive relevant traffic that is likely to convert to loyal (or at least repeat) readers or to click on related ads.

Is Entrecard right for your blog?  That really depends on your goals for your blog.  As with any advertising or marketing opportunity, don’t be afraid to test it, track your results through your blog stats and see what works and what doesn’t in terms of reaching your goals.  Then tweak your advertising and marketing strategy and try again.

Have you used Entrecard?  What do you think?

Before You Start

Before you start, we want to emphasize a few things. The process of switching to a new domain will temporarily affect your search engine rankings as Google and other search engines adjusts to the changes. Yes, this will also temporarilyaffect your search traffic as well. Please keep in mind that this is normal, and it happens to all sites that switch to a new domain.

However, the best part is that you can dramatically decrease the negative SEO effects that migration can have by following this guide. We will show you the right way of moving your WordPress site to a new domain name, setting up proper 301 redirects, and notifying search engines.

Please note that this guide is not for moving your WordPress site to a new web host. This is for switching a domain name. Yes, while the process is similar, there are more things involved in this process as you set 301 redirects and more.

In this guide, we are assuming that you have your WordPress site setup on oldsite.com, and you are trying to migrate it to newsite.com. We are also assuming that you have a web hostingaccount, and you are familiar with your web hosting control panel.

You will also need to know how to use FTP.

Before you do anything, it is very important that you create a full backup of your WordPress site. There are tons of plugins and solutions out there that allows you to create a backup. You can use VaultPress, BackupBuddy, BackWPup, or WordPress backup to Dropbox.

Once you have created a complete backup of your old site, it is time to start the domain migration process. First thing you need to do is install and activate the Duplicator pluginin your WordPress installation on your old site. Once activated, the plugin adds Duplicator menu item in your WordPress admin. Click on the Duplicator manu, and you will see a screen like the one below. Simply click on the create button to create a new package.

Clicking on the create button will start the duplication process, and the plugin will ask you to give your package a name. By default, it will use your website’s name with a date prefix, but you can give it any name you want. The plugin will start creating a zip package of your WordPress database and all your files. This may take some time depending on how much content you have. Once the process is complete, then you will be taken to Duplicator packages screen. Download both the package and installer files on your computer.

Next, you need to open your FTP program and connect to your new site. Make sure that the root directory, or the directory where you want to copy your website is completely empty . Upload the installer.php file and your package zip file to the new site. After uploading the files, simply launch the installer.php in a web browser. You can access it by going to http://www.newsite.com/installer.php

The installer will ask you to provide database information for the new site and check the box for Table removal. Make sure that the database you are using is empty, and does not contain any data that you would need later.

Read the Warning and Notices section and check the box that says “I have read warning and notices”. Next click on the “Run Deployment” button. The duplicator installer script will extract the zip package, install your database from old site, and install WordPress with your themes and plugins. This process may take some time depending on how big your site is. Once the installation is finished, the plugin will show you the update page.

On the update page, you will need to update your URLs. The duplicator will try to guess your old and new URLs on its own, but you can also enter URLs manually and click on the Update button. The plugin will then replace all instances of oldsite domain name with newsite domain name.

Once the entire process is complete, the Duplicator plugin will remind you to take the post installation steps. The first step is to re-save your WordPress permalinks. Login to your new site’s WordPress admin using the same username and password that you had on the old site. Go to Settings » Permalinks in your new site’s WordPress admin and click on the save button.

After that delete the installer.php, installer-data.sql and the installer-log.txt files from your root directory using FTP.

Lastly, check your new website for broken links, missing images, posts and pages. Please make sure that everything is working and all the functionality is there.

Now you have successfully moved WordPress to a different domain name, but the process is not done. We still have to add the proper 301 redirects and notify the search engines to keep all your SEO rankings.

Setting up a permanent 301 redirect is very important for both SEO and user experience. This allows you to redirect users and search engines to your new site. In other words, whenever someone lands on one of your old posts or pages, then they will be automatically redirected to your new site.

To setup a permanent 301 redirect, you need to connect to your old site using FTP and edit the .htaccessfile. This will be located in the same directory as your wp-includes or wp-admin folder. Open the .htaccessfile and paste the following code at the very top:

Note: Replace newsite.com with your domain in the above code.

Once you have applied these changes, then visit your old site. It should automatically redirect you to the new site. If it doesn’t, then it means the redirection is not setup properly.

Login to your Google Webmaster Toolsaccount to submit a change of address. Basically click on your site and look at the left menu under configuration. This allows you to notify Google about your new site and the transfer. Yes, you have to verify your new site, so go ahead and do it.

While the 301 redirects do the job, it is always good to make a public announcement about the migration. You can do this by simply writing a blog post on your new site. This can be helpful in a lot of ways. First and foremost, your users are more likely to remember the new domain once they read about it. Second, you can ask your users to let you know if they see any bugs. This can be very helpful because you alone cannot test your site in all different type of browsers and system environments. Besides it always help to have a fresh pair of eyes looking at it.

We hope that this tutorial helped you move your WordPress to a new domain name. If this tutorial helped you, then please don’t forget to share it. We appreciate all retweets, likes, and +1s. Lastly, let us know about your experience and/or questions by leaving a comment below.

Simply put – it’s like swimming in an aquarium fit for a giant! The deep blue waters are crystal clear, some of the best visibility we’ve encountered underwater. About 50 metres from the dusty Dahab beach is a steep wall drop, home to countless varieties of coral reef formations, colourful tropical fish and eerie underwater wildlife.

While on our first scuba dive, we spotted a timid Reef Octopus (also known as a Cyane’s Octopus or Big Blue Octopus) that camouflaged itself by changing its colour and texture of its skin to match the reef surroundings. Luckily our dive master spotted him because he blended right into the rocky formations.

Rather then trying to describe the surreal underwater paradise, click on the short video below and experience it for yourself!

Having trouble viewing the video image?
Click here to watch on YouTube – Snorkeling and Diving the Red Sea, Egypt

We spent 10 days exploring the warm, crystal clear waters of Dahab, easily one of the best snorkeling and scuba diving experiences we’ve had (sorry Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea steals the top spot in our books).

There are about a dozen prime snorkeling and scuba diving spots within walking distance from the main strip in Dahad (where the hotels and restaurants are located), which is ideal if you’ve got your own snorkeling equipment. Our adventures in the Middle East completely exceeded our expectations.

Don’t you love it when that happens?

You might also like our Photo Blog: Snorkeling the Red Sea in Dahab, Egypt

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Where is your favourite spot to scuba dive or snorkel?
Share your story in the comments section below!

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