OC WordPress Security/Maintenance Talk.
We gave a presentation on maintaining and securing your WordPress installation at this month’s OC WordPress meetup. These are our notes from our presentation. Continue Reading
We gave a presentation on maintaining and securing your WordPress installation at this month’s OC WordPress meetup. These are our notes from our presentation. Continue Reading
It has been said that the majority of readers don’t comment on blog posts because they don’t feel like they have anything specific to add to a conversation.
This plugin allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post. A simple box with text that you define when writing your post is added above the comment form. The box can be styled to match your site by adjusting some predefined options. Continue Reading
WordPress 2.8.6 was released today. It includes some security fixes for vulnerabilities found by WordPress users.
As always you can get the newest version of WordPress from the WordPress.org download page. We recommend always upgrading WordPress to the latest stable version available. If you don’t have the time or don’t know how, you can always hire us to make the upgrade for you. Just fill out the form on our “need help?” page and we’ll be in touch.
2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.
The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.
Sency is a real-time search engine. While the service is still in its infancy, I think it has the potential to become a big player in the search industry. My initial reactions to the service were of the “so what” nature, but after talking through the goal of the service with the founder, Evan Britton, I’ve changed my tune a little bit. This service differs from Google in that it’s not really a web search engine. It’s more of a conversation search engine. The interface mimics a “dressed up Google”, but the functionality couldn’t be more different.
Sency searches the web (predominately Twitter at this point) for conversations related to your keyword search. Not only does it filter out a lot of the junk that comes through Twitter, it actually separates the most popular links for that search term throughout the day so you can see what’s most popular at any given time.
Pretty cool, eh?
Well, we think it’s going to catch on, so we built a plugin that lets you put Sency search results in your WordPress sidebar.
Download Sency (137.86 kB) Update: This plugin is now hosted at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to attend Blogworld Expo as well as WordCamp Las Vegas. Blogworld was pretty huge, but WordCamp Las Vegas was a much smaller conference within the main conference. I had the chance to talk with some really great WordPress users and developers. I really got a good sense of what’s going on in the WordPress world. Unfortunately, Automattic decided to call a last minute pow-wow in Ottowa (if I remember correctly), so there was no official representation from the main developer of WordPress. I valued the opportunity to meet both Matt and Beau at previous WordCamps, so it was a little disappointing not having an Automattician there.

If you want the short version, stop reading here. Otherwise, block out a good twenty minutes and read the rest of my ramblings about the weekend.