So Emma has a blog now. Her first post is on Rock Band, which we played the other night at Randy’s house.
I will probably have to be working on some parental comment moderation type plugins (or modifications to existing ones like SK2), since I’d rather not have her dealing with the subject matter of most blog comment spam.
If you run your own installation of WordPress (and you’re paying attention to security) you’ve probably heard quite a bit of talk recently about a couple issues that could lead to a compromise of your blog.
I won’t go into too much detail here on the exploits, but they’re definitely out there, “in the wild”, as they say, because I’ve seen quite a few hacked blog posts show up in my RSS feeds in the last couple days.
This prompted me to get to work on patching these issues in WordPress MU. I put together a patch that addresses the two main issues: stored password hashes not being salted, and the cookie authentication vulnerability. (See those last two links for detailed discussion on the problems). If you’re running WPMU, I suggest applying this patch to keep your installation safe.
The patches have already been applied to the standard version of WordPress, but not in a released version yet. This may be complicated for those of you running regular WP, because there are a ton of other significant changes that have also been commited to the SVN repository , and you may not want some of those in your day-to-day install yet (specifically, the unfinished redesign of the admin UI).
The changed files are all the same as in my patches, though, (only the line numbers will be different) so you could probably use them to figure out what you need to change in your own installation to apply the security fixes without the other current changes.
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but I’m now hosting several different sites under this same WordPress MU installation. In addition to the freepressblog.org ones (mine and Martha’s), I recently added a couple other sites (other domains, hosted using the same WP installation): one for Martha’s school and the other for our latest foray into the land of podcasting.
All that to say that if anyone is looking for a place to host their blog, you’re welcome to do it here for free (friends only, non-commercial, normal traffic blogs of course).
The benefits would be that you would always be running in an up to date WPMu installation (similar to what you’d have if you signed up for a wordpress.com account), but with a bit more flexibility in terms of available themes, plugins, etc., as well as being able to pick your own name.
You can have whatever.freepressblog.org, or just use your own domain name that you’ve already bought but don’t want to pay for web hosting for, and you can have the whole scope of *.yourdomain.com to set up multiple blogs under.
The only drawbacks would be that I can be a bit picky about installing themes or plugins (I would have to review and approve them first), and I wouldn’t allow certain types of advertising or other monetization methods that I deem inappropriate (TLA, pay per post, etc.)
Not trying to make any money or anything, just throwing it out there in case it might be useful to anyone.
Well, I finally got around to working on a new theme for a bit, so here it is. It may still need a bit of polishing up, but I think it’s ready enough at this point.
I always qualify any of these announcements by saying that I certainly don’t consider myself a graphic designer of any merit, but I’ve been wanting to start from scratch on here for quite a while now, and I figured I might as well take the opportunity to get some practice.
I’ll eventually get around to packaging it up and releasing it for anyone who’d like to use it too. To get a feel for how it works with a wider variety of content, you can see it in action at a blog I added with some sample data designed for testing out the theme.
Hope you enjoy it!
PS - I’ll probably also package up the plugin I whipped up to replace the blog description with my Facebook status too, if anyone’s interested in that.