I spent the day rebuilding.. you know what it’s like, you only find out how crap your backup is when you need to use it. Lessons have been learned.

Fail.

Don’t knock the bug report on securityfocus, you should be happy some kiddie was kind enough to leak a good bug in WordPress 2.5. If you took a few minutes to poke around in wp-comments-post.php then you might have found what RoMaNcYxHaCkEr did. Either way, upgrade to WP 2.6 now.

http://wordpress.com/vip-hosting/

Lots of folks who are basically publishers have a suck time when they need to move to a dedicated server once their WordPress blog gets to big.

I’d buy this service even if there was zero support. All I’d need would be the ability to load my own theme – maybe via svn, and also be in the wordpress.com network so people could easily make comments etc.

It would also be cool if you also offered hosted Mu. People always have the same problem once there blog gets too big. They’re smart enough to install it for a small user base but once you need multiple database servers etc it just becomes too much for your average punter.

Read what I wrote
http://www.bontb.com/2008/03/wp-content1-trojan-virus-for-wordpress-bloggers/

I have to admit, it’s pretty hard to maintain a number of WordPress websites simultaneously and keep them up to date. It’s apparent that you guys are aware of this, but the obvious point is that it will take an upgrade to the version where this feature becomes available before one click upgrades will take place 🙂

I’ve gotta say, it’s almost as if WordPress is in a competition with phpBB for frequency and sheer number of vulns. We’ve got this sql injection issue and then we learn the salted passwords work great, but users aren’t being educated enough to change the random phrase. http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2008/Apr/0164.html

I like the functionality of WordPress and I like the features but can’t recommend it to non-techies who want a hands off blogging feature. The problem is the non-techies have their techie friend install it and then never look at it again.

What I’d like to see is a WordPress.com along the lines of Typepad, where we get a packaged deal that’s not crippled like WordPress.com is. You guys could have the fun of patching and keeping a decent number of plugins available and we’d happliy pay money and blog.

WordPress will have a black eye soon because of all the comment spam and splogs that are built with it. Much like including the WP logo on prior versions made people associate database connection issues with WordPress regardless of what the problem is. I see that went away in 2.5.

People used to complain about splogs on Blogger, there are still some, but most of them that I run across these days are on WP. Hell, someone sells a tool to make them.

This is a prediction from Matt Cutts in his blog for 2008
“2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked.”

I think this will turn out true, though it might be one product rather than one web host, or maybe the product that gives them the door is WordPress.

Food for thought. I’m still running 2.5 for a couple of my blogs.

Sleeping with one eye open,

Ryan