HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

Are you an Obama fan? Here’s a free download that you would love. This is a eBook version of a paper back that sells for $30. They are giving this book away to promote their print edition, the download is a PDF which is approximately 7MB, so be patient while it downloads.

British Prime Minister’s #10 blog is apparently not honoring the copyright agreement of the theme developer, in spite of the Creative Commons licensing. Theme copyright infringements are a serious issue that many non-themers overlook, mostly because it conveniently services their purpose. The old theme viewer was plagued with this issue that eventually led to creation of a new admin monitored repository. With the growing popularity of WordPress, this issue left unaddressed will only lead to more such goof ups or worse, blatant rip-offs, which will eventually lead to a decline in free quality themes.

Two stats caught my attention this afternoon, according to Matt, WordPress page views apparently grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month. That is billion with a B. At almost the same time, according to IBM’s X-Force 2008 Trend Statistics, WordPress, as a blog platform is the 9th most vulnerable application vendor. Go figure.

I get this question often, and I wonder, are people really encountering themes that are having compatibility issues with WordPress 2.5.x? If so, what are the issues and how to fix it? This quest led me to searching the WordPress forums for folks complaining about their theme not being compatibility with WordPress 2.5, nothing there. Next I searched on Google, all I got were hits to sites that claims their themes being compatible, so no real compatibility issue to report.

So why is it that each time WordPress releases a newer version, folks start doubting if their theme is compatible? The answer might be not in the themes themselves, but in the …

I will be experimenting with partial feeds for the rest of this month. The splogger issues with my content is not yet resolved. I know switching to partial feed is going ass backwards and will inconvenience those who read my blogs on readers, but bear with me while I figure a work around.

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

When a client of mine upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 from WordPress 2.5 she encountered an issue where the database will not upgrading, resulting in the “WordPress 2.5.1 is available! Please update now.” flashing in her dashboard and every other admin pages. On initial search of the WordPress support forum, we found the following strings that pointed us in a certain direction:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/172004
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/168964

Neither strings suggest solutions that are easy or safe, however, I urge you check these posts and then search your install via file manager/FTP/WebFTP to ensure you do not have files with the following extensions anywhere within a writable …

Not sure if I am reading too much into this, but just yesterday a WP daily builds tester complained of his site being Cracked and partly hijacked using SQL injection, and today, less than a month before the 2.4 version release, a security bug fix! Here’s the message posted on the docs.
WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.
I …

DavidAirey.com was recently hacked and completely hijacked. David is pursuing legal channels to restore his site, in the meantime he continues his work and services at http://www.davidairey.co.uk/. This incident should serve as a somber reminder to everyone to frequently change your passwords and keep them secure.

October is “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”, I might be a few days late, but I thought I will share the Java for the pink ribbon that is pinned to the right end of my site. The variables you might have to change are the left margin (currently set at 750px) to ensure it fits your site width and the “nofollow” tag, which I included as optional tag just in case you are not sure of the site you are linking to. I have included the GIF for the script from my Photobucket account, feel free to download it and use it as needed, if you need the …