Blog Flak

Blogger Buzz has announced the release of two new built in widgets for users of the “new” or “beta” publishing using the Ajax API. One is for easily adding video from places like You Tube and Google Video and the other is for easy to add headlines from Google News.

The Newsreel searches Google News for your chosen keywords and displays an ever-updating list of their search results. The Video Bar does the same for Google Video and YouTube searches, and even lets you play the videos without leaving your blog!

To use the new widgets, click your blog’s Layout link on your Dashboard, then click “Add a Page Element.” You’ll find the new widgets right at the top. As a bonus, the Newsreel will change from a list of summaries to a scrolling ticker depending on whether it’s in the sidebar or the main column, so drag ‘em around and see what you like.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

tags: Blogger, beta, video, Blogspot, You Tube, Ajax, News

I’ve put up a new tutorial that explains how to change the publishing mode on Blogger from either “classic” or “beta”. Apparently a lot of people are still having trouble installing free or customized web templates in Blogger because they don’t understand the differences between the two modes or how to switch back and forth. It seems like at least once a week I get a complaint that one of our Free Blogger Skins templates won’t work, when they’re actually trying to use it in the wrong mode and there’s nothing wrong with the template.

It’s too bad that Blogger didn’t see fit to clearly mark the template editor pages with a designation to tell you what mode you are in. Then to top it off they’ve “hidden” the link to switch the mode UNDERNEATH the editor at the very bottom of the page. If you try to install a new template that you’ve downloaded and you get errors that won’t allow the template to work, this is a must read! You can find the new tutorial here:

How to Switch Blogger Modes

Hopefully this will help clear up some of the confusion.

tags: Blogger, beta mode, classic mode, Blogspot, themes, skins, templates

Never, ever delete your old blog even if you have no use for it again, that is, unless you don’t mind having it taken over by blog spammers. There’s an ever increasing use of automated software that can detect when someone stops using a blog address and it WILL be taken over by assh%les that will try to capitalize on whatever traffic and incoming links you may have been receiving before you deleted it. The type of sites they will set up can vary anywhere from pornography, to illegal drug sales and casinos and just about anything else you can imagine. No one wants to see the their old blog address associated with these types of web sites, it can be rather embarrassing!

Just imagine your mom or friends or neighbors clicking on your old blog address expecting to find you and pictures of your kittens or newborn baby and spotting X-rated pornography instead! It’s best to just leave your old blog there with a forwarding link to your new location or if you want to become anonymous, don’t put anything. Just don’t delete it!

If this has already happened to you, I encourage you to Contact Blogger and report it as a Terms of Service violation, because link farms, porn sites and spam blogs are in clear violation of Blogger’s rules. If you are blog surfing and happen upon one of these sites that is clearly NOT a blog but is on a Blogger/Blogspot address, please report it. Blogger will investigate and pull the plug on it.

Sometimes, you will click a link or hit “Next Blog” and you’ll notice the page quickly change to a new location to a link farm or spam site, this is a redirect that the spammer has set up on their site to take you away from Blogger. Don’t let these people take over! If you see that kind of violation, report them vigorously!

tags: Blogger, scumbag spammers, Blogspot, exploits

If you’ve downloaded and installed Wordpress 2.1.1 in the past few days you may have a nasty explotable bug in the files that was installed by someone that cracked in to the Wordpress server files. You need to download and re-upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately to insure the safety of your website or blog.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution. More on this story from Wordpress.org

The good people over at Wordpress.org have had to take stronger security measures to make certain that this never happens again. There’s always someone willing to try to steal, damage, deface or screw things up for everyone else isn’t there? I hope they figure out who it was and hopefully have the scum ball prosecuted.

tags: Wordpress, security, hacker, exploits