Paypal provides a good method of paying for online shopping or conducting any online money transaction. But instead of going to the Paypal site everytime to start a transaction, how about using email, IM, a web browser, a social networking site or a blog? Below are the ten best hand-picked tools and plugins to help you out. Skype Send Money Skype Send Money is a Skype tool through which you can send Paypal money to your Skype contacts. Next time you and your friends or family are on Skype, surprise them by sending them some money though Paypal right there on Skype. To send money through Skype, right-click the contact’s name. This will open the Paypal wizard, which will guide you though the rest of the process. Skype will also alert you whenever you receive any money from your Skype friends though an alert message in your system tray. Paypal Mobile Paypal Mobile allows you to check your balance, send and receive Paypal money, contact Paypal support, and cancel a pending payment by sending a SMS message from your mobile phone. You can also use the Paypal Mobile service to shop from ebay’s mobile site. One interesting benefit of this tool is that you can use it to check your account balance before using your Paypal debit card at an ATM, or maybe even a restaurant. Saves you embarrassment on a date! Payment Request Wizard for Outlook and Outlook Express Payment Request Wizard for Outlook and Outlook Express is a plugin for these email clients that allows you to add a Paypal ‘Pay Now’ button inside the content of an email that you send out to your contacts. Your email recipients can click that button and finish the transaction on the Paypal site. To use this, click the Payment Request Wizard button on your Outlook/ Outlook Express toolbar. This will open the wizard where you can choose from a list of ‘Pay Now’ buttons. Paypal Application for Facebook Paypal application for Facebook allows you to request money from up to 20 of your Facebook friends in one go. You can also use the application to build a customizable badge that you can display on your Facebook profile and request your friends for a donation to a cause, for instance. This might work well if you have a large number of friends. Paypal Browser Toolbars Paypal Browser Toolbars are addons for Internet Explorer and Firefox that add a small Paypal button on your browser. You can click this button to launch a wizard Follow

Matt Cutts recently wrote a post giving four good tips to protect a WordPress blog. Try these tips if you own a WordPress blog. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory - lock down your wp-admin folder so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file - it helps prevent people from finding out which plugins you use. If you use an outdated plugin, someone could hack your blog by exploiting a bug. To prevent people from viewing which plugins you have installed, just create a blank index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog - you could subscribe to the development blog to be alerted as soon as a new WordPress version is released. Upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as possible or it could be hacked. I haven’t subscribed as we already get notified of a new WordPress version from the dashboard. Hide your WordPress version: by default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source). Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> and replace it with <meta content="WordPress" name="generator" /> 1) Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server. WPdesigner advices us to NOT use this search code in the search.php <?php echo $_SERVER ['PHP_SELF']; ?> Nobody should be allowed to search your entire server, or? Use this one instead: <?php bloginfo ('home'); ?> Block WP- folders from being indexed by search engines, the best way to block them in your robots.txt file. Add the following line to your list: Disallow: /wp-* 2) Directories should not be left open for public browsing There is a potential problem letting people know what plugins you have, or what versions they are. If there is some known exploit that is linked to a plugin, it could be easy enough for someone to use it to their advantage. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file or just add this line in your .htaccess file in your root: Options All -Indexes 3) Drop the version string in your Meta Tags A Follow