wordpress Archive

For Edelman VP Steve Rubel, Posterous is the hottest thing out there today. Last summer Rubel talked about how Posterous changed how he looks at blogging.

Posterous is a simple way to create a blog by using email to create online content and store it for easy viewing and sharing. You send your photos, videos and text to Posterous and they make the posts on-the-fly for you. Your posts can then be shared on the social services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Your readers can also subscribe to content on your Posterous blog using RSS or email. Posterous co-founder Gary Tan was recently interviewed on the This Week in Startups show hosted by Jason Calacanis.

Yesterday WordPress announced that they have created a “Posterous Importer” for hosted customers. Similar to their other importer tools, this new one takes the content on a Posterous blog and imports it into a wordpress.com hosted blog. The Posterous importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the post that WordPress can handle “post via email” which is the core functionality of Posterous.

Compete shows Posterous at 1 million unique U.S. visitors in January and WordPress at 27 million for the same demographics and time period. Last week WordPress added a new email subscription option to hosted blogs.

A couple of weeks ago, technology blog Techcrunch was hacked. At the time of the hacking they were using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service as their hosting provider.

Today I noticed that everything  on Techcrunch is now pointing to WordPress.com. If you run a traceroute of the techcrunch.com domain, it points to WordPress. Images and static files (e.g. s3.wordpress.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch) are also hosted by WordPress. Most likely this means that Techcrunch has moved off of the Rackspace Cloud Service and has become a VIP customer. GigaOm is another popular blog that is also hosted on the WordPress VIP service.

Assuming I am right and Techcrunch has moved to WordPress.com for hosting, it’s interesting how short of a time they were hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. I have pinged a couple of Rackspace employees and will update this story once I get any further details.

Update: I can now confirm that Techcrunch has moved to WordPress VIP hosting as noted in their footer. Rackspace employee Robert Scoble has also confirmed the move in the comments. It will be interesting to see if they continue to run the Rackspace advertisement going forward. It does appear the other sites in the Techcrunch family are still hosted on Rackspace – they could be in the process of moving.

CenterNetworks is currently hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service (we pay full price, actually lately we’ve paid a lot more than the base rate). I’ve never posted a full accounting of all of the good and bad of using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. Alison Gianotto posted an open letter to Rackspace management last month. In January Rackspace raised their Cloud Sites base pricing by 50% for new customers.

While browsing some blogs today that are hosted on WordPress.com (as opposed to the self-hosted WordPress version), I noticed something new. Under the comment box, there is now an option to, “Notify me of new posts via email.” Seems like a small change and you might be wondering why I would even bother to make a post about such a minor change.

It’s because the change isn’t minor. Today’s change will offer bloggers more discovery and more traffic. WordPress blogs have allowed you to subscribe to comments by email which basically means that each time a person posts a comment on a blog post that you have commented on, you will receive an email notification. I’ve long believed that these notifications are a big help in getting visitors back to a blog because many commenters are hit-and-run. The email alerts the commenter that another person has left a comment. The email recipient will then click on the link (providing another pageview) and then can continue to interact.

This new post email notification option is even more important because it provides a reader with an instant update each time a new blog post is added. FeedBurner offers an email subscription service (here’s our email subscription link) which creates a daily email from a blog’s RSS feed. It appears the WordPress version sends an email for each new post. Another benefit of the local email subscription option is that you control the email list. With Feedburner the list is basically managed by Google.

Continue reading “WordPress Adds Blog Subscription By Email Option” »

For over a decade I was responsible for posting financial documents either online or, before the Internet, to a variety of reporting sources. One thing was absolutely clear…post early and it won’t be pretty. Financial documents have associated post times and if the content was to be posted early (or late), it could affect the financial markets (e.g. stock trades, etc.). I can’t even count how many times I had to be up at midnight or later to make sure content went to the correct sources at the precise time. Not once did I enter a client document into any CMS system early because no matter how much we want to be careful, the content was just too sensitive to create a timed post.

It is amazing to read story after story about a blog that has broken an embargo or an agreed-to timed post because of “a problem with the clock in WordPress.” I am not going to name any names because sadly the list would be pretty long. We’ve seen some bloggers make one mistake and use the “WordPress” excuse while others have used the same excuse for nearly a week of “early” postings.

So bloggers…come really close to your monitor…I am going to teach you the secret, free of charge to make sure that your timed posts never go live ahead of time.

Most of the larger blogs have multiple team members and people working in multiple time zones. There is absolutely no excuse for pre-posting before the agreed to time, period. Some might say that a story is placed into the content management system so that it can be edited by the team. I say hogwash – use Google Docs or Zoho, etc. to edit the story. This is actually preferred as it’s easier to see the edits by each team member or blog editor.

If you are a single blog author or don’t have a teenager working for you, then stay awake to make the post live manually at the specified time. Unlike the financial documents I noted above, most tech news story embargoes are issued at a reasonable time.

Bottom line – never use CMS timed posts when an agreement is in place. See how simple that is? Remember, trust is earned.

And then ya’all can stop blaming WordPress.

Earlier this year Michael Galpert looked at what type of products and services we are willing to pay for. I think website creation tools are one of those offerings that users are willing to open their wallets to use. There are plenty of website creation tools on the marketing including Germany-based Jimdo.

A new offering has hit the market that offers something I haven’t seen before. Page.ly offers a full website service from soup-to-nuts.  Typically the current process is to: buy a domain, set up the new domain with a hosting provider, install WordPress, install any needed patches, instal the most popular plugins and find/instal a theme. Page.ly says they can reduce that entire process down to two minutes (see video below).

Page.ly includes domain management, email manangement, a variety of themes, patch management and they backup each site nightly.

I asked Page.ly co-founder Sally Strebel for a comparison of what Page.ly and WordPress.com offers. Her reasoning makes a lot of sense. She ended the conversation with, “What we hoped to do is create a system that would drastically minimize the setup time and headache of a full hosting account and wordpress for the consumer, or micro-small business. More of a complete web solution if you will. Bottom line, if you need a full fledged wordpress install + web hosting + email service + unique domain (everything needed for a complete web presence) we think page.ly is the fastest and easiest way to do it.”

Continue reading “Page.ly Breaks the Speed Record for Website Creation” »

This weekend CN’s WordPress core was exploited and spammy hidden links were added to the footer. We’ve had this happen several times since moving to WordPress back in April. I’d like to share the details of what I’ve learned since the attack happened and some links and tips on how to make sure you don’t fall victim to the same issue as we did.

It appears that a person logged into the CN admin panel and manually edited the footer file to add all the link goodness.  The only reason I caught the links so quickly (24 hrs later) is because I manually do a view source on all of the CN blogs every day or two since the exploits began.  I cleaned out the links immediately but they had already made their way into Google.

Hats off to Rackspace for calling me at 11pm on a Friday night to try to help with the cleanup and also start an investigation into what happened. I pay Rackspace full price currently for my sites and it’s awesome that Rackspace has helped considering how small my sites and bill are in the grand scheme of their overall customer base. Over the weekend I spoke with several “Rackers” about the issue and finally they figured out what they believe happened.

Continue reading “Follow-Up To The WordPress Exploit and Tips to Protect Your Blog” »

This evening I did my twice-weekly check to see if any of my WordPress blogs have been exploited and what do you know…CenterNetworks has been exploited. I was checking every day but moved it to twice a week checks after the last security patch for WordPress that moved the blog to 2.8.4. The exploit took place last night as far as I can tell and has already been indexed in Google so there goes my traffic and earnings.

When the “big hacker” event happened earlier this month, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg noted, “The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading.” As of this evening, I can only assume his promise no longer stands valid.

I can’t tell whether the exploits are coming through WordPress or my host, Rackspace. Rackspace always says it’s on the WordPress side. I am happy to provide whatever I can to WordPress to help them figure out what happened and I can only hope that eventually they get this fixed. Rackspace personnel called me this evening and noted that the permissions are all set correctly on the server. If it’s something on my end, I’d like to know that as well.

Update Midnight: Rackspace is now running a XSS checker on this site.

Update 4:30pm Saturday: Rackspace is now saying that they believe someone logged into CN and manually changed the template file. They are supposed to be sending over some logs soon.

Update: 8pm Saturday: I’ve received the log files – unfortunately they don’t show much beyond someone editing the footer include. If someone from WordPress would like the files, please contact me.

Each and every time that my WordPress sites are exploited and/or hacked,  I seriously regret moving away from Drupal where in over three years I wasn’t hacked once.

Related: The Good, The Bad and The Exploited – My Move from Drupal to WordPress