Setup your own Social Networking Websites

There a lot of social networking site available in web which includes the Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter etc. Its public and the open to all. But if you wish to Setup your own Social Networking site that is private and for a closed group you can use one of the following Open source scripts.

1. Elgg: Elgg empowers individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment. Elgg, started in 2004, is an open source social engine which powers all kinds of social environments – from education and business to martial arts and rugby. If you are looking for a professional social intranet or want to run a site for your organisation, Elgg is a great choice. Click here to download.

2. Dolphin: Dolphin is the world’s most advanced community software. Open-source, independent, downloadable, scalable, customizable, full-featured, free software for building social networks, dating sites and web-communities. Loaded with video chat, recorder, video player, forums, groups, events, video messenger, mailbox, desktop app, video sharing, photo sharing, iPhone app and much more. Build your own business or advance your hobby with Dolphin!. Click here to download Dolphin.

3. Jcow: Jcow makes it easy & interesting to create Social Networks and online communities, Build a member community for your existing website, Build a social networking site like facebook/myspace/twitter. Click here to download JCow.

4. Etano: Etano can be used to start up a dating site, a social networking site, a classifieds site or any other type of site involving groups of people, companies, products. Click here to download.

5. Oxwall: Oxwall is used for a wide range of projects starting from family sites and custom social networks to collaboration tools and enterprise community solutions. Oxwall is unbelievably flexible and easy to use PHP/MySQL community software platform. Click here to download.

6. PeoplePods: PeoplePods is a framework that makes it easier to create community or “social” applications. It provides a flexible infrastructure within which members of a site can create, comment upon, and consume content of arbitrary types. Popular social functionality such as friend lists, personalized content views, bookmarking, and voting are automatically available within any PeoplePods application. PeoplePods can be used to build stand-alone sites, or can be layered onto existing sites such as those run using WordPress or other PHP applications. Click here to download.

7. Beatz: Beatz is a free opensource online social networking community script that allows you to start your own favourite artist band website just like Pure Volume. The script is coded in Php, Mysql and licensed under Creative Commons GPL license. In other words, its an online community script for sharing, discussing and learning about new artists and your favorites. Click here to download.

Open Source Micro blogging applications

Twitter is the most famous Microblogging site used by users all over the world. There are some famous Open source microblogging site available. Following are few among the Open source PHP scripts.

1. StatusNet: Previously Laconica, is the engine which runs the popular microblogging site Identi.ca. You can download the same from here.

2. PageCookery: PageCookery is the first public offering of single-user version of the open source microblogging program, PHP + MySQL based architecture is a set of safety, efficiency and stability, to “share”, “discovery” for the concept of Web 2.0 solutions to micro-blog. Click here to download.

3. JaikuEngine: Jaiku was the microblogging site of Google. However, they decided no longer to develop the code but make it open source under the name JaikuEngine.

4. Sharetronix: Sharetronix is the world’s favorite opensource microblogging platform. Sharetronix enables people to exchange ideas and multimedia in real-time. Click here to download.

5. Storytlr: Storytlr offers a single touch point for your online life in your own style. Easily post anything you find interesting, import your web 2.0 stuff and share your life online. Storytlr is an open source lifestreaming and micro blogging platform. You can use it for a single user or it can act as a host for many people all from the same installation. Click here to download.

6. Jisko: Jisko is a light-weight open-source microblogging system that allows you to stay in contact with the people you want. Click here to Download.

7. WordPress: The WordPress is a popular blogging tool. But the Power of wordpress can be derived to work as a Microblogging application with the help of a simple theme. P2 WordPress Theme converts the Powerful WordPress into a Microblogging tool. Click here to download.

8. Yonkly: Yonkly Open Source twitter-clone and microblogging platform developed on the asp.net mvc framework. It is the famous Open Source app available in the Dot Net side other than the PHP scripts. Click here to Download.

WordPress Blog hacked, All admin username changed to “CIHAN” and Emails deleted

I felt embarrassed when I found my WordPress blog was hacked. Here is what happened. It was on August 26th, 2012 at around 10 PM IST, I tried to login to my wordpress blog and found that my WordPress Admin account was unable to login. After some investigations i found that the usernames, email address of the WordPress administrator accounts have been changed.

Usually I have two users as Administrators. I tried with both, but failed to login. I ran through some basic steps/tests with the assumption that I would have lost the password, which I ended up as password lose was not the reason.

Sequence of the steps I followed:

1. First I tried to reset my password with my email id: result: WordPress gave a message that my Email id is not valid. And for other admin email I did not receive any password reset mail.
2. Since my email Id was stated as invalid. I suspected a Hack and logged into Hosting cPanel.
3. Opened phpMyAdmin and shocked to see that my username and email were changed. I found both the usernames were changed to “cihan”, the email address was deleted for one user. but the other email remained same.
4. I updated the DB and reset my password using WordPress. Still I am unable to receive mail to my Yahoo account because of some problem with my hosting account.

My Observations:
1. I have logged into my account and updated a comment on 8th August 2012 for the last time.
2. I have a plugin which send a email on every 404 error page to the Administrator email address (the email which was deleted in the Hack). The last email which was send to the Admin mail id is on 10th August 2012 – The day after 10th should be the ideal hack time.
3. WordPress does not allow any user to edit/delete username from its control panel, so this is either updated directly in the Database or it should be done through a Script from the web page – But I do not find any scripts or files updated in these days.
4. I changed my hosting accounts password and other details just few days back to the Hack suspect date. I updated the password from my laptop, which is very personal. There was no body using my Lap and my password is brand new which nobody could easily guess, I did not login in any other public machines. so I don’t think this to be hack based on Password Theft of cPanel.
5. I do not find any other changes in the settings or passwords or data loss in my website/Account/cPanel.
6. I do not find any moto of data stealing.

Atlast I backup all my data from the webserver to my local and put the site into maintenance, Sent a detailed mail to my service provider. Few days back I received a mail stating that they do not find anything suspicious in logs but they insisted to changed My custom wordpress Theme as they suspected it. Later i updated removed all my custome stuffs from the site and updated the site completely. I lost few contents from my site at the time of migration and I’m working on it get them all back.

If some one out there faced the same kind attacj on your WordPress site please contact me.

Filezilla FTP client – 421 Sorry, cleartext sessions are not accepted on this server

Sometimes we get a error Message when using the FTP clients: 421 Sorry, cleartext sessions are not accepted on this server.

Problem: This error mean that the FTP provider has secured the access with Transport Layer Security (TLS) or its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Solution:

Change the protocol of the host to “ftpes://”

The configuration will be

Host: ftpes://hostname.com
port: 21