These past few weeks has been hectic, I’ve been moving into my new house which inevitably involved talking to a lot of contractors/plumbers/repairmen and I had a very busy go-live period for my project. (Go-Live refers to the point of an IT project when it successfully becomes available to the users). To top it off I upgraded my blog from wordpress 3.1.1 to 3.2 and the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.

Reflecting on my blogging and my goal to reach 1000 hits/month, I think there’s a lot I learnt from this blogging experience so far from a technical perspective (setting up a website/installing a database..etc etc), but there’s a whole lot more I learnt about other things as well. Here’s the top 3 things I learnt from blogging that have nothing to do with programming.

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).

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!).

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.

I have a problem with my wordpress site, it was just too slow. It was taking me 20-30 seconds to load the page, initially I thought it was nearlyfreespeech, and was contemplating moving the blog to dreamhost (both of whom happen to be amazing webhost by the way).

The reason I thought it was a host problem because my browser kept displaying ‘waiting for keithrozario.nfshost.com’ while the waiting, so I assumed that it was their servers response time. That however was too presumptuous on my part, and it took me a while to get to the bottom of things, but I finally figured it out.

I used a nifty little Firefox plugin called firebug.

One of my favorite Wordpress plugins,  Tweet This by Richard X. Thripp stop working ever since Twitter moved to the ’new’ twitter. I just realized this yesterday. A quick search online revealed that everyone is experiencing the issue with the plugin and Richard is MIA. When you get a free plug-in don’t complain if it breaks, I’m sure Richard is quite busy or probably has more pressing needs that write code for a free plugin that he’s not getting any money out of. Most of the complainers haven’t even donated. Plus the code is open source, and you can fix it yourself. Richard did a stand up job creating this super plugin and giving him a hard time because it’s no longer with the ’new’ twitter is just stupid.

One of the great things about open source software is the code is made public, and the general public usually has it’s collection of super-geniuses as well. One of those super-geniuses is a guy named Jeffry Pilcher from the financialbrand.com who shared on the official website of the plugin how to sort this out quickly without getting angry at Mr. Thripp.

Here’s what you do:

Google has just hit back at Facebook with the new +1 button. Similar to facebook’s like, it’s a one-click button to symbolize you ’like’ the site. However, that’s where the similarity ends:

Previously I bloged about adding a contact form

to your wordpress powered site. The recommended approach was contact form 7, a clean and simple plugin to implement contact forms on your site. However, there are some limitations, what contact form 7 makes up in simplicity it loses in added functionality. For instance there were no captchas on contact form 7 so you can’t prevent a bot from simply continuously spamming you with messages from a nigerian prince wishing to share his vast wealths with you just because you’re a ’trust-worthy’ person.