Category: WordPress

All things wordpress

WordPress Version Check

On By westiIn Development, Security, WordPress27 Comments

Recently a lot of people have been hit by a wordpress security vulnerability that was fixed with an hour of it being reported about a month ago. Why have they fallen prey to this vulnerability – because they failed to update to the latest version for one of many possible reasons:

  1. Laziness.
  2. They failed to notice the post on the dev blog in their wordpress dashboard.
  3. They failed to notice the number of people blogging about having upgraded.
  4. etc

To help alleviate this problem in the future I have crafted a simple wordpress plugin which takes a simple approach to get the users attention. Once activated the plugin checks an XML-RPC webservice for update news displaying a message at the top of every page in the wordpress admin user-interface. The plugin will check for an update to the message every 15 mins with an additional check being kicked off if the installed wordpress version changes so as to give instant feedback on upgrades.
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nofollow revisited

On By westiIn Asides, WordPress

io error has write a long and interesting article – “Nofollow revisited” – taking a look at the affect nofollow has had on the web since google introduced it about 4 months ago. The article contains some very interesting points and I have to agree with him in the fact implementing nofollow has had no real effect on the amount of comment spam attempts received on this site – the most sure fire way to reduce comment spam attempts seems to be to not post – every time I get round to making a new post a new set of attempts start to flood in a few hours later!

So far I have resisted using a nonofollow plugin on my site – mainly because I don’t exactly get that many comments and so I doubt I would be sharing much google juice – however this site does have a PageRank of 5 so I must be doing something right!

In general I have found that the combination of BadBehaviour and Spam Karma 2 keeps my site free of all but the most determined comment spammers – I think it may be time to abandon nofollow.