Well done is better than well said.

One question I’m asked frequently by people wanting to beef up their computer security is “What programs do you use to keep your computer virus free?” While I don’t use too many programs, most of these people are looking for one program to take care of all their problems. Once I mention the second program, their eyes start to glaze over and they look as confused as a cow on AstroTurf. To help enlighten people who are looking to beef up their computer security, I am providing this list of software that I find helps keep my computer running in tip-top shape, while keeping my files secure. I have attempted to provide a brief description of each program to assist the user grasp an understanding of what the program does. If you don’t need the type of program, don’t use it.

avast! – This is a free antivirus program that does as good a job as any. You do not need to pay for Norton AntiVirus or McAfee. Avast will keep you safe and I find that it does a great job protecting against internet threats. Another terrific and free antivirus program is AVG. Microsoft has their own antivirus software named Microsoft Security Essentials and this is free as well. You should not be paying for virus and malware protection. These programs work well and are completely free.

Clonezilla – This is more of a backup utility, but it helps me get backup and running in case something happens to my computer. Clonezilla makes an image of your hard drive or partition and compresses the image to save on storage space. I make two images of each machine. The first image is after the install of the operating system, this allows me to have a clean operating system in minutes, rather than hours. Clonezilla can quickly restore the image it created and have you back up and running in no time at all. The next image I make is after I have all my essential programs installed. If I do happen to get a virus or think I have become a victim of malware I can revert to this image in minutes, saving me the frustration of having to run virus scans and hope all the malicious files have been removed. An alternative to Clonezilla is Norton Ghost, but it isn’t free, nor do I find it as useful.

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After installing WordPress and setting up this website I tried to set the site up exactly how I wanted it, by going through each page in the admin panel and playing with all the settings and learning what they did. By default, my install for permalink settings was set to “Default” which creates the URL at http://yourdomain.com/?p=123. This is not how I wanted my pages linked because it is poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practice.

I wanted the URL to display using the month and name setting (http://yourdomain.com/index.php/2011/04/sample-post/), but my Permalinks page was blank. I didn’t know how to change this outside of the admin interface, so I needed this page to work. Well, as you may notice from the URL of this page, I was able to fix the problem.

Fixing this issue is simple enough, here’s a quick how-to. First we need to download the misc.php file with FTP from the /wp-admin/includes/ directory. Open this file in your favorite PHP editor, I’m using Notepad++, if you don’t know how to edit a PHP file (and are running Windows), right-click on the misc.php file and choose edit with Notepad. Now with the file open we need to edit a line of code. For me, it was line 17.

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