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WordPress – A Blogging Platform You Can Depend On
Web monitoring company Pingdom has tested the most-used blogging services to see how reliable they are over a period of two months.
The five most popular sites used for blogging included Google’s Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Posterous and Tumblr.
“For each blogging service, we monitored the uptime of the homepage and four individual blogs, so we could see how the service as a whole performed,” said Pingdom in a December 17 blog post.
“The winner was without a doubt Google’s Blogger,” reports Pingdom. “The Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by WordPress.com which had very little downtime.”
The average downtime for popular blogging site Tumblr was 47.5 hours. Posterous had the second highest rate of downtime, 2.1 hours while rivals Typepad and WordPress.com were almost always online with just 0.2 hours and 0.1 hours of downtime respectively.
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WordPress Theme Styles With CSS
WordPress has many themes to choose from and many of them have customizable backgrounds, menus, content layouts, and headers you can change to suit your own preferences.
But you can also take your site’s customization a step further and completely personalize any theme’s stylesheet by changing fonts, colors, borders, backgrounds, and even the layout of the site using the Custom CSS upgrade, a paid upgrade that costs $14.97 per blog, per year.
Many WordPress fans have made a beautiful home for their content using one of the basic WordPress themes as a base and customizing the site with the Custom CSS upgrade.
Here are some examples:
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WordPress Toolbox
Hot off the press from WordPress is news of a new December 2010 theme, Toolbox. What can you do with WordPress Toolbox? Lots of great things with a minimalistic look is the short answer.
Toolbox provides all the markup you need to build your very own theme with CSS alone–with one difference.
Toolbox uses some really exciting new HTML5 elements–like <article>, <header>, and <nav>–that better describe what your content is all about. (Head over here for a demo.)
Download Toolbox at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/toolbox
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Password Hacking As Easy As 012345
Hackers have posted a list of the most commonly used passwords on a popular gossip website, sending a warning to internet users not to use obvious words.
Of the gawker.com users hacked, 123456 is the most-used password, while the next popular is … password.
Demonstrating why you should not use the same password for multiple websites, the hackers used those they had gained from gawker to break into Twitter accounts.
TOP PASSWORDS
1 012345
2 password
3 12345678
4 lifehack
5 qwerty
6 abc123
7 111111
8 monkey
9 consumer
10 12345
More at the New Zealand Herald.
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Monty Python Comes To Facebook
The upcoming launch of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Games on Facebook is the latest entrant into the fast-growing world of social gaming, dominated at the moment by titles like FarmVille, which boasts annual earnings of $600M for its owners.
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Wikileaks Continues Web News Domination
It would seem to the world that Wikileaks has pushed the envelope one step too far.
In the past week, the website and its Australian founder, Julian Assange, have come under a barrage of pressure.
And its week from hell started started when it published diplomatic cables leaked to it by a (now-incarcerated) US military private.
TIMELINE (in Australian time zones)
Monday 29 November.(Sunday 28 November US Time)
- Hacktivist calling himself th3j35t3r (The Jester) launches cyber attack on Wikileaks, taking it offline. Makes his announcement on Twitter. (Click on the image above to launch the larger version.)
- Wikileaks redirected DNS configurations from its Swedish hosting provider to sites hosted by Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service in Ireland and later the United States.
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Meet WordPress Matt
This is Matt Mullenweg. He’s not as famous as Sergey Brin or Larry Page.
No-one’s made a Hollywood movie of him like Mark Zuckenberg.
But Matt deserves a teeny bit of a spotlight because he’s the guy who is the founding developer of WordPress.
WordPress makes it incredibly simple to create and publish content, from a computer, a mobile or even an iPad.
In today’s age of citizen journalism, that’s important. Not everyone who works for your company is going to be net-savvy or confident about using a content management system.
But if you can drive a Word Document, you can drive WordPress.
Furthermore, because it is open-source software, you can customise it to your hearts content so it really delivers on the features, functionality and look-and-feel that you’re after.
“We do everything for the author,” Matt is on record saying. Every tool, every acquisition and every new feature must be right for the author or, says Matt, it doesn’t happen.
After 25 million global downloads, meaning 25M WordPress “homes” on the Internet, you can be sure that he’s doing something right.
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WordPress Mandatory Security Update Shipped
Maintainers of the open-source WordPress blog publishing platform has shipped a mandatory security update to cover a potentially serious security vulnerability.
The vulnerability, rated moderate, could allow a malicious Author-level user could gain further access to the WordPress-powered site.
“You should update immediately even if you do not have untrusted users,” according to a notice from the maintainers of the project.
The WordPress 3.0.2 update also fixes a flaw in the trackback whitelisting feature that allowed comment spammers to bypass certain security features.
A minor cross-site scripting issue was also addressed in this update.
WordPress can be updated from a users dashboard or contact me here if you need help.
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Twitter Analytics Coming
Mashable is reporting that Twitter has started inviting a select group of users to test a new analytics product (a Twitter executive said earlier this year that Analytics would debut by the end of 2010).
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500K Windows Live Spaces Blogs Move To WordPress
In hot WordPress news, Microsoft has just announced that it has migrated more than half a million Spaces blogs to WordPress, the open source CMS/Blogging platform that I use for many of my clients.
In addition to this, almost half a million additional Windows Live customers have decided to create entirely news blogs on WordPress.com
All 30 million users of Microsoft’s Live Spaces blogging service are expected to be migrated to WordPress by March next year or face having their services cancelled.
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, flexible content management system, you’ll be hard-pressed to beat WordPress. Furthermore, Google loves WordPress, so if you’re wanting your website to rank organically in the search engine, you’ll do yourself a favour by choosing one of the world’s most beloved CMS.
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