To everyone using a Wordpress custom installation I strongly recommend upgrading to the latest patch version 2.8.4 which not only includes the previous point patches but prevents a malicious hack of the admin backend. Per the official statement from Automattic:
“[A] specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner.”
It is easy to install the update – simply click the upgrade button from your admin backend and confirm that you want to apply the patch. Be sure to backup your database using a plugin like Lester Chan’s excellent WP DB Manager in advance, to be sure.
Facebook is feeling the heat after Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart of the Canadian federal privacy commission laid down the law, citing that Facebook contravenes its citizens privacy laws by keeping users personal information indefinitely and for “sharing users’ files with nearly one million third-party software developers around the world.”
Facebook has until Monday August 24th, 2009 to respond to the claims and offer a solution.
Facebook must take this seriously, given that Toronto, Canada, a city of over 5 million people has the highest usage per capita of the platform in the world.
“Facebook security firm Trend Micro has been researching malicious practices on Facebook, and has discovered numerous rogue apps on the social networking site this week. They’ve been alerting Facebook of them as they find them, but apparently more keep popping up as fast as they are eliminated.”
Google Voice for Blackberry – Change the Way You Use Your Phone
Today, Google Voice application arrives for Android and BlackBerry phones.
Here is the good word from the Official Google Blog:
“The new application improves the way you use your phone. You can get transcripts of your voicemail (see the video below) and archive and search all of the SMS text messages you send and receive. You can also use the service to make low-priced international calls and easily access Goog-411 directory assistance.”
GrandCentral lets you use a single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones, a central voicemail inbox that can be accessed on the web, and call screening via listening in live on your callers as they leave a message.
Wordpress for Blackberry App!
The second reason to rejoice, is the new Wordpress blogging app for Blackberry announced at this year’s WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco which will allow you to run your your own custom Wordpress installation from your Blackberry phone. It looks great and promises to afford BB/WP users newfound freedom and mobility to run blogs as they jetset around the planet.
“Automattic is developing a full-blown Wordpress blogging app for all models of Research in Motion’s Blackberry phones including the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm. Although the app is still in beta, it can be downloaded for free so you can test it out and ideally even offer some feedback on its progress.”
Check out the article for the full details and a video from Wordpress TV about the development of this amazing new application for your BB.
Many of you who read Blogging-Fool.com may be familiar with some of the big names in the blogging world. I don’t mean people who write famous blogs like Perez Hilton or Steve Pavlina – they are islands of success in their own right – but instead the power bloggers who blog about power blogging.
I had a conversation with my old friend Jamie the other day – he’s the guy who introduced me to the Internet back in 1990 – and I was telling him about the power players in the blogging world. Jamie studies how networks form and the ways in which they affect and are affected by things as a result of their formation and he told me about a book called Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi who writes “the fittest node will inevitably grow to become the biggest hub.”
So as Timothy Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich watched John Chow do a presentation about blogging, he decides to do one of his own and John Chow then promotes this video to his hundred thousand email subscribers, as does Darren Rowse, creator of ProBlogger.net , Louis Gray, David Risley and Yaro Starack who runs Entrepreneurs-journey.com and it goes around and around the circle among five or six uber power bloggers until everyone even remotely interested in upping their blogging game has heard about Tim’s video (or whatever it is this small, focused group is promoting).
Are they some sort of Illuminati of the web? A secret Masonic order trying to keep us all out, or like the Vatican where they hoard treasures untold while taking the peasants? Er, no.
Although I first some of their websites seemed to me like Get Rich Quick products, I quickly realized that they were the real article – with huge subscriber-bases and legitimately generating over six figures a year from their blogs and email lists. I also noticed that they were all somehow cross-promoting one another.
They are people who found other people doing the best they could, with standards and similar mindsets and formed a network, a cluster – one that was probably comprised of far greater numbers at one point, until all the wannabes, untrustworthy types, takers but not givers and weaker or less cunning fell away. This is how power networks operate and what they are for – a circle of trust and mutual support that has a whole lot of shorthand.
I created this post today to share Timothy Ferris 50 minute long video with you titled How to Blog Without Killing Yourself, but I couldn’t present it without you understanding that it was informed by and cross-promoted by all the people I have mentioned above. Listen to all that Mr. Ferris has to say and keep in mind that the combination of good blogging practices do a heck of lot better if you build or integrate into a network of peers to go with it. Find someone nearer your level, but slightly ahead of you – this way you can learn and be lifted up to what they are doing or have learned.
OK, without further ado, I present to you Timothy Ferris – How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself.
As a bonus – afterwards watch this video from John Chow about what the Dot-com lifestyle is real all about:
Blogging Fool:
Cheers, sir. This one affected too many people close to home. This one came from the heart - the amount of time and destruction that these new insid
Colin:
Good post :)
Sadly these damn things are cropping up everywhere and use fast flux techniques as the domains are constantly changing.
So many ge
Blogging Fool has been running internet communities since the days of Lynx, Veronica and gopher but only really understood the heart and soul of blogging as late as 2008. He has been invited to speak about emerging media strategies at conferences across North America.
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