I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for quite a while to offer readers a quick and easy way to share what I’ve written on different social networks. It’s fairly configurable, allowing you to select where you want to make it easy for people to share things with. I have about half a dozen little icons at the bottom of each post that you can click to share the entry with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or by email, or add it to your favourites, share it in Google Reader or post it to Digg or Reddit. There are other social networks that I could choose, like MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?), but I don’t want to clutter things up with a zillion little icons.

There was a major upgrade that appeared in my WordPress control panel today bringing it up to version 4.0.3, from 3.whatever. Usually WordPress plugin updates are fairly painless, so clicking on it didn’t really concern me, so I upgraded and then watched as all my icons disappeared.

Grr. (more…)

I mentioned the WordPress app on my list of essential iPad apps recently. In my write-up I noted that the editor was very basic without any formatting controls. This morning I checked the AppStore and found that an update for the WordPress app has been released. And lo and behold, they’ve added some formatting controls to the editor to make it easier to markup text.

Now, instead of having to manually enter HTML tags to bold something, for example, I can highlight the text and poke a markup button. This is long overdue and makes the app much more useful. There are still some tweaks they need to make, such as allowing you to specify whether a link opens in the same window or new one, but this is a good start.

The author of the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter Plugin has released an update. Presumably, version 1.4.9 will address the brokenness I wrote about a couple of days ago that happened when WordPress 3.1 was released.

If you implemented the solution I wrote about, you should probably upgrade to version 1.4.9.

I upgraded to WordPress 3.1 at the end of February. Usually, there’s very little breakage, but this time the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin (version 1.4.8) I’ve been using to automatically post a tweet with a shortlink using my dew.is short URL service broke, which was very annoying. I was able to turn turn on the Tweetly Updater plugin as a stop-gap measure, but it uses bit.ly and I really wanted to use my own dew.is.

Browsing through the comments on the author’s website, I came across one from someone else who had managed to track down what appears to be the offending code, so I thought I’d try it out.

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@DaniGirl retweeted a link to an article about the pitfalls of installing free WordPress themes that you find by searching for them on Google. In a nutshell, the author of the article, Siobhan, found that all but one of the first ten links Google returned pointed at themes that were incredibly dodgey. Most of them used obfuscated code in the theme to insert links and ads that the owner of the blog had no control over.

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WordPress 2.8.4 has been released. While most releases are important, this one is particularly important. It addresses a security vulnerability that was discovered yesterday. The vulnerability allows a very specially crafted URL could allow a malicious individual to bypass a security check to verify a user requested password reset. It only affects the first account without a key in the database, which is usually the admin account. The owner of the account would receive an email with the new password, so the attacker wouldn’t gain access, unless they had access to the email associated with the account in question, but it’s still annoying.

WordPress 2.8.3 has been released. It addresses a couple of things missed when a privilege escalation issue was fixed in 2.8.1. Applying the upgrade was a simple matter of a precautionary backup of the database (always backup your database when doing an upgrade just in case) and clicking the upgrade link in the administration panel.