Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

So I’ve been searching around the web for a way to implement the NextGen gallery slideshow in the header of the WordPress blog and I was able to find a couple of pages out there explaining how to do it but they would either insert a standard slideshow with not much option to modify the behaviour or wouldn’t work at all.

The tutorials had little explanation of what each piece of the code meant, which honestly isn’t entirely their fault since there is little documentation from the people that create the imagerotator application that is used by NextGen for the slideshows. Se here is my best attempt at explaining how to get that working.

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Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

This past Wednesday I read this article about using icons to enhance your WordPress blog and I’ve also wanted to do so for quite a while. What I did first was search for small and good looking icons for my blog and they had to be small so that I could place them on the same line as the title and I was able to find this site which has a lot of icons hat are free and can be used non-commercially.

I looked through the icons and found the ones that I wanted and that also would fit with the categories that I use on my blog and came down to a list of 12 icons which will be used.

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Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

So I got tired of getting high amounts of spam in the comments of my posts that I decided to do something about this that would definitely prevent spam. This isn’t a solution that will work for everyone as there are people that have strict policies when browsing the web but for most of the people out there there won’t be any issues.

I could have used a plug in like Bad Behaviour on the site but that actually caused for some users to be blocked, I know this because I was unable to access my site from my house since my IP was reported to have been sending spam, something I looked into and found that it was quite improbable for it to be happening.

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Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

I'm a listener of the Security Now Podcast from TWiT network and a couple of episodes ago Steve Gibson spoke about a One Time Passwords system that he had created which is denominated Perfect Paper Passwords and he explained how it works.

The community has actually taken this security system and have developed ways to implement this technology into various systems so that it can be used to better secure servers and other applications. There is one project in Google Code which created a PAM module for Linux and MacOS X so that the user can implement the PPP.

I have taken this into consideration and applied it to my SSH server so that my log ins require for me to enter an OTP. For more details on how this work you can check episodes 115 and 117 from Security Now. I'll try to explain how this work, though on a more general level, and how I managed to implement this on my current infrastructure.

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Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

My home server is located behind a NAT, my ISP hasn't given me my Public IP, so what can I do to connect to my home server when I'm at work. Simple just do a SSH Reverse Tunnel. I'll explain how on this small HowTo.

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