This morning’s WordPress update appears to have messed around with the theme I’ve been using for the last several years. Most of the formatting looks to be okay … except that I’ve lost the banner graphic at the top of the page. I don’t have time to fix it properly now (not to mention that I don’t remember what I did back in 2009 to get it working in the first place), so I’ve just dropped a placeholder banner there (it’s the banner from the old MovableType site, actually).
February 27, 2015
February 19, 2011
“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”
An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage:
There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.
What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.
[. . .]
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)
By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.
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June 17, 2010
New release of WordPress
I’ve been happily using WordPress since I moved over from the original site (under MovableType), and the latest version of WordPress has just been released. However, any software update can have unforeseen results, so it’s possible the site will be affected by some minor (or even major) glitch. Please excuse the mess as I try the upgrade and see what other changes I may need to make . . .
https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21
January 5, 2010
Updated to new version of WordPress
In case there are any style or functionality glitches, that’d be the reason why. If you do see something clearly not right, please drop me a comment on this post and I’ll flail around to try to fix it . . .
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October 23, 2009
WordPress plugins to consider
Charles Arthur looks at a few recommended plugins for WordPress blogs:
First, there’s been another upgrade to WordPress (it’s now at 2.8.5). The WordPress blog describes it as a “hardening release”.
Much more important, in my view, is the release of the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin. Plugins are little extensions to WordPress; and Exploit Scanner is probably the next one you should install. (The first you should install, in my opinion, is Dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2 – which weeds out spam comments more effectively than anything I’ve ever seen, and is specific to your blog.)
The Exploit Scanner does a number of things: it compares your files against an MD5 hash of the WordPress files for whatever version of installation you’re running; it finds examples of suspicious code in your files – three principal ones being the use of “invisible” text through CSS; the use of iframes to embed code from other sites; and base 64 encoding, which can be used to obfuscate entire programs. It will also look through your posts and users to see if there’s anything suspicious or spammy about them.
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October 21, 2009
Site admin
I’ve just updated to the latest version of WordPress . . . there may be a few stylesheet glitches until I notice ’em and fix ’em. Apologies if this causes any display issues for you.
If you do spot something, please let me know.
September 6, 2009
Some good advice from the WordPress developers
WordPress blogs (like this one) have been recently under attack by a worm tailored to a weakness that existed in older versions of the blogging software. Here’s the scoop.
Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.
In short, if you haven’t already upgraded your WordPress blog to the current version, you’re inviting trouble.
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August 4, 2009
Further adventures with CSS
I had to install a security update to WordPress yesterday. Remembering the last time this happened, I took a full backup of the site before running the install.
This time, I carefully downloaded the backup to my home machine, just to be sure. After running the installation (which, just like last time, blew away all my CSS modifications), I opened the backup, navigated to the location of my modified CSS file, and then hit a wall. I can see the file in the backup, but I can’t open or extract it. It’s rather frustrating . . .
So, once again, expect minor format tweaks as I try to reconstruct the last set of changes.
Update: Thanks to Jon, my former virtual landlord, the CSS and PHP modifications are back in place. If you notice anything still not working as expected, drop a comment on this post, please.
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