Updating Wordpress is a pretty important step in keeping your blog safe and secure. Older versions of wordpress (even those just months old) have security flaws/bugs that are public knowledge, what this means if that if you run an older version of wordpress for your blog you’re vulnerable to these security bugs unless you upgrade. What’s even worse is that the security threats are public knowledge and even a un-skilled hacker could compromise your site. So upgrade to stay secure and get the most out of blogging experience.

So here’s how you update your Wordpress. It’s actually very simple, and I’m going to use the manually way which should be applicable regardless of which webhost you’re on. For this example, I’m using my own blog at www.keithrozario.com which is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.

It’s been near

ly 3 months since I started this blog and so far I’m no where near my target of 1000 hits a month. At least I’m about 30% of the way there, but that last 70% seems like a difficult mountain to climb here, but I’m going to try. Once again with hard work, good content and savvy marketing I’m hoping to jack up the blog hits from where it is (383 hits/month) now to where I want it to be  (1000 hits/month).

Fox news, the great TV channel that brought us the Simpsons and Bill O’ Reilly today had it’s twitter account hacked. Hackers manage to break into @foxnewspolitics twitter account and start posting bogus tweets, one notably about an assassination of Barack Obama. The hackers painstakingly painted a picture of Obama dying from two shots to the head over the course of 3-5 tweets separated by a couple of minutes.

Recently I registered at fetch.io for a free account to try out it’s service. For those who don’t know, fetch.io was a site that ‘fetches’ files for you from rapidshare, megaupload and a host of ofther file sharing websites and ‘Full Speed’. What that means is, no waiting 5 minutes for the file to begin download or throttled speeds. Fetch.io will get the file at full speed and store it on its servers for you to download. You can then download the file…once again at full speed (presumably).

A cool poster from bonkers world demonstrating just how fragmented IT companies really are…I’m not sure where they got the data from, but it’s just cool.

It’s not often I get to write about 2 topics I’m deeply passionate about, politics and technology. So when I got wind that my very own government (whom I voted against by the way) spent nearly USD600k on a facebook page you can imagine how I blew my top. Now let’s be honest, RM1.8 million isn’t going to make Malaysia bankrupt but it does represent huge amount of government expenditure into something that cost peanuts to develop.

Twitter Blackbird is a cool wordpres plugin that let’s you embed tweets the way they appear in twitter without having to go through snapshots and uploading jpegs into Wordpress. The tweet will then appear prominently and with all it’s formatting intact (if the tweeter had a black background, the backgroud would appear as part of the tweet…AWESOME!).

Notes.io is a great simple online app that allows you to store your notes in a quick online interface. Of course you’re wondering why you’d need a note taking app when you carry your iPhone or Blackberry all over the place, but notes.io offers a couple of cool nifty features that make it quite practical.

A lot of my blogs are tech-centric with a focus on web 2.0 technology. However, this decision to start this ’new’ blog and abandon my old political slanted blogger blog was in part due to a book I read by Guy Kawasaki. Guy seems to be of the opinion that good is good enough, and if you’re going to do something…do something first, and then improve it as you go along.

In that spirit of doing first and improving along the way, I started www.keithrozario.com, which is the blog you’re reading right now. I’m absolutely loving blogging about tech and it’s an inner passion I should have pursued much much earlier in life.

If you’ve got a wordpress site hosted on your own,  and you use  AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache and you updated your site within the last 48 hours, beware you could ‘potentially’  have installed an infected plugin that gave hackers backdoor access to your site.

The guys over at naked security advise you re-install those plugins and for an added security measure I advise you backup your wordpress and database just to be safe.

The vast majority of you are alright, but those are some pretty popular plugins for wordpress, I wonder where the source of the breach came from, what I know for sure is that a proper backup policy and a some added security for your blog is a solid investment for rainy days like this.