WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

If your ping list has grown beyond the original, included with your blog – I bet you quite familiar with a problem of super long wait after hitting that “Publish” button.

I know it annoyed me quite a bit until I have finally decided to research the issue and how to work around it. While pinging RSS aggregator services is quite necessary – amount of services on your ping list greatly contributes to the problem I described above. But fear not, once again solution is here.

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Some might say that it is a rather unusual headline coming from someone who builds entire blog around benefits of WordPress and making it into a true Web 2.0 platform. But as everything else in this world [tag-tec]WordPress[/tag-tec] is far from perfect and dealing with my recent issues I have discovered 2 things that I had no clue about.

What is even worth – presence of these 2 problems severely impacts your WordPress blog performance and slows down your blog. But as always I will not just stop on describing the problem but also provide you with a guide to turn this problem to your advantage and get ahead of 99% of other bloggers using WordPress.

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WordPress functionality is greatly enhanced when plugins are added but picking the best is not always an easy task. Each plugin needs to be evaluated by you prior to adding it to your blog for one simple reason – each new installed [tag-tec]plugin[/tag-tec] adds to load time of your blog. If you are not using it – de-activate it.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look at source code of your own blog and between “head” tags you will find that most of the plugins you use that provide an output on your page – there a file or two been loaded on each view. Add too many and it will considerably increase load times. But in this post I want to discuss some brand new plugins for you to consider as functionality they provide might be well worth the load time!

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I have received several emails as result of my post on upgrading WordPress to latest version 2.2.1. As I have mentioned in my previous post – in my experience of upgrading live blog from version 2.2 to the latest I didn’t have to update database and all changes appears to be related directly to code within files.

Obviously it raises simple question – if no database upgrade required – would it be possible to simply upload modified files to address issues and implement the fixes? I don’t know for 100% but as a technical person I simply had to investigate. What you see here is a list of files that I have found to be modified and different between 2 releases: wordpress-2.2.zip and wordpress-2.2.1.zip. I have verified that files actually have changes within code and while in some cases it is simple fixes, in some it looks like actual code modifications.

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If you have installed WordPress 2.2 you absolutely MUST upgrade to the latest version 2.2.1. This new version not only addresses the few bug fixes but most importantly several security issues. Read all issues addressed here.

At least one of them already has an exploit out “in the wild”. XML-RPC exploit affects ONLY WordPress 2.2 and only blogs that allow registration or blogs that already have registered members as it relies on existing account to perform SQL injection and allows attacker to take full control of your blog. Here are some details on this exploit on WordPress support forums and here is a post by someone who already been hacked.

Second security issue addressed was PHPMailer and if you use Sendmail on your blog for mail function – you need to check this one.

Upgrade Notes: If running 2.2 then you must upgrade, this is not optional if you want to save yourself pain of recovering from hack. Here is some information you might find useful.

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What do all these things have in common? Actually quite a lot …

But lets start with Jack London. He is one of the most known American writers and he was also “one of the first Americans to make a huge financial success from writing” (Wikipedia). Well guess what?! You are NOT him! And neither am I, or do I ever expect to become like him. So here is the Big Question:

• Why Give Me A Cut-off Feed From Your Blog?

Yeah, there I said it. Feel free to blast me for it in comments but before you do perhaps my short explanation will be worth reading?

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Web 2.0 is all about interaction about people without boundaries. Unfortunately not everyone speaks English and I think giving an option to people to read your pages in their native language is a definite fit for any web 2.0 blog. Should you add an option to have your pages automatically translated or not is up to you but here is what I have found:

• After just 2 weeks my logs show that an option to translate my pages have been used over 300 times. Not much you might think but I look at it as I managed to reach a market that I would have never got a word to before.

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