Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Mallow Camera Club are holding an exhibition of photographs in Mallow Town Library for charity for the next three weeks and fellow blogger, photo blogger and WordPress lead developer, Donncha O’Caoimh will have one of his photos in the exhibition for sale - well done Donncha.
Head along if you get a chance, it is for a good cause.
WordPress was updated to 2.1.2 overnight after it was found that one of their download servers was compromised and malicious code introduced into version 2.1.1 to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution!
From the WordPress site:
What You Can Do to Help
If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files, especially those in wp-includes. Check out your friends blogs and if any of them are running 2.1.1 drop them a note and, if you can, pitch in and help them with the upgrade.
If you are a web host or network administrator, block access to “theme.php†and “feed.phpâ€, and any query string with “ix=†or “iz=†in it. If you’re a customer at a web host, you may want to send them a note to let them know about this release and the above information.
This only affects you if you are hosting your own copy of WordPress and it is version 2.1.1. If you are on any other version or are on WordPress.com then you can safely ignore this.
WordPress 2.1 has be updated to 2.1.1
The update is a low to medium priority update and:
includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.
This is a list of the files changed from 2.1 to 2.1.1:
* wp-includes/post-template.php
* wp-includes/cache.php
* wp-includes/formatting.php
* wp-includes/category.php
* wp-includes/post.php
* wp-includes/version.php
* wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/wp-scriptaculous.js
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
* wp-includes/capabilities.php
* wp-includes/cron.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-includes/bookmark-template.php
* xmlrpc.php
* wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
* wp-admin/admin-functions.php
* wp-admin/custom-header.php
* wp-admin/options-general.php
* wp-admin/edit.php
* wp-admin/index-extra.php
* wp-admin/options-reading.php
It would be irresponsible of me to recommend that you simply update those files. Instead I’ll recommend that you read the upgrade instructions.
Looks like Twenty Major has moved over to WordPress as his blogging platform.
Good move Twenty! Wonder what Donncha thinks?
One thing though - on Blogspot (Twenty’s old blog host) wouldn’t it be easier for Twenty to maintain his anonymity?
Although I see the crafty old bugger has gone through Domains by Proxy!
I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 this morning and the whole process was remarkably painless.
The entire process took about ten minutes - the majority of that time was spent on backing up the previous version and FTP’ing the new files into place.
Of course, if you are a client of mine and I maintain your blogs, it actually took waaaaaaaaaaaay longer. Hours of research, planning, etc. were involved and if you need me to upgrade your blog, my invoices would obviously reflect that 
The only glitch I found so far was that when I was double-clicking a word to select it in the Visual mode, the paragraph I had just been writing disappeared. And that disappearance was then auto-saved!
Clicking into the Code tab revealed that I had somehow inadvertently switched the paragraph style to hidden. Deleting the style info revealed the text once more.
I like the auto-save feature (see in the image above, the post is being saved) and the ability to quickly move between the Code and Visual (wysiwyg) views.
The builtin spell checker will prove handy too when I’m not using Firefox (Firefox 2 also has a spell checker which is fabulous for illiterates like me) or the Visual editor.
The other very nifty improvement I noticed was the ability to set any page as the front page of your site. This will allow many more people to use WordPress as a simple CMS for their entire website.
WordPress just gets better and better, great job guys.
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Akismet 2.0 is a life (and comment) saver
Akismet is the default anti-spam plugin which comes with WordPress and it has saved me from literally hundreds of thousnads of comment spam messages (124,200 last time I looked).
A new version (Akismet 2.0) was released the same time as WordPress 2.1’s release so it’s release was kind of drowned out in the hoopla.
To my mind, the most significant change in Akismet 2.0 is the ability to tell Akismet to automatically delete any comments on posts over a month old.
As Matt himself said:
Typically I used to get >500 comments per day flagged by Akismet. There was no way i could go through those looking for genuine comments accidentally flagged as spam by Akismet.
Today though, having configured Akismet to dump all suspected spam comments on posts over a month old, I now only have to check 20-30 comments per day.
And just this morning, I rescued two comments which had accidentally been marked as spam by Akismet.
Well done to the guys in Automattic again. I love Akismet.