Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category

wordpress setup

Monday, January 24th, 2011

I have just added a couple of new plugins to this blog and tidied up some old cruft that I had been meaning to get around to for a while. One of the plugins I have added is a really rather good statistcs tool called Counterize II. It provides a very quick (and impressively comprehensive) set of stats about page hits, browser types, referring URLs etc. all readily accessible from the wordpress admin dashboard – so no need to trawl through web logs to find out where your visitors are coming from or which is your most popular post or page. Thoroughly recommended.

In the process of searching for such a plugin I also came across Angie Bowen’s posting about the top ten things she always does when setting up a new blog. Whilst I don’t agree with all her recommendations (identifying the ones I disagree with is left as an exercise for the class) I think this is a very handy aide-memoire. Her pointers about blog security and discussion settings in particular are sensible and worth reading.

critical security update to wordpress

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

This blog comes to you courtesy of those excellent free open source authors who have contributed to wordpress. Unfortunately, in common with all software, wordpress inevitably has some bugs. Worse, some of the those bugs can occasionally be sufficiently bad as to make the software vulnerable to remote exploitation by ne’er do wells and other assorted bad guys.

On 29 December last, Matt Mullenweg posted a notice to the wordpress security blog announcing a very important update which he recommnded be applied as soon as possible because it fixes a “core security bug in [wordpress'] HTML sanitation library, KSES”. Mullenweg rated this [3.04] release as “critical.”

I have just updated my installation. I recommend you do the same.