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Security Vulnerabilities
Out of the blue today, a user of one of my plugins contacted me to ask why I was so slow in patching a security vulnerability in my system. The question came as a complete surprise. Apparently, back in January, someone discovered a potential security hole in one of my plugins, WP Publication Archive. The frightening thing about the report, though, was the fact that he never bothered to report the vulnerability to me so I could fix it. Instead, an open report sat there on his site, and was then picked up by a few other security sites and…
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Keeping it Realtime – Day 2
I will once again be liveblogging the Keeping it Realtime conference in Portland, Oregon. If you want to catch up with yesterday’s stream, feel free. Otherwise, stay tuned for more today! You can also leave comments at the bottom of the feed … — 4:56 pmNext on the schedule is Jack Moffitt on “Imagining the Future of Realtime” at 5:20 … 4:55 pmIs it true? Do we really have a 25-minute break before the next session? Time to stretch! 4:53 pmThe various frameworks are being built out of very different use cases. So “real time” is more a family of…
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Keeping it Realtime
Today and tomorrow I’ll be at the Keeping it Realtime conference in Portland, learning about all the cool new interfaces available for a real-time web. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish my liveblogging plugin before today … so you’ll be stuck hitting F5 repeatedly to get update from me in this space. On the other hand, this will serve as a real-world demonstration of why the non-real-time web is so ineffective for real-time communications. Maybe we’ll both learn something! 🙂 — 6:00 pmWell that just about does it for the day. Time to go home and recharge the batteries for tomorrow’s…
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Statement of Faith
I find new ways to challenge my faith in the oddest of places. Lately, though, it was a random political conversation I had with some friends on Twitter. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you might have missed the “Occupy Wall Street” movement sweeping across America. It’s something I’ve only paid attention to in passing, but on the whole many of the “we are the 99%” arguments resonate with me. Yesterday, the whole conversation started off innocently enough: https://twitter.com/#!/mikeschinkel/status/126358719364726785 We quickly began discussing and debating the point. Everything from what the Progressive Era represented as an…
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WordPress Weekly
Last night, I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Chandler on the weekly podcast WordPress Weekly. We talked about a lot of things: should automatic WordPress updates be opt-in or opt out? Will/should Automattic ever be acquired by another organization? Does it matter how many plugins your site runs? It was a fun chat, and I hope to call in to the show sometime again soon. For now, you can listen to the show yourself: Or you can download the show from iTunes.
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Live Blogging – AJAX Polling
I’m in the midst of developing a real-time publishing system, and I wanted to give an example of what it is and why I want to do it. Gizmodo’s live blog Today, Apple is promoting a live press event, and Gizmodo is live blogging their coverage on http://live.gizmodo.com/. It’s a really basic page, but it updates automatically as new changes are available. Their update engine is also pretty basic, but illustrates exactly what I want to do … just in a very inefficient fashion. The core of their code (I’m summarizing it) is written in JavaScript [cc lang=javascript width=”580″ height=”500″] function update(…
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Installing a New Engine – Nginx
I originally started blogging with WordPress via the one-click installer that came standard with a basic Network Solutions website. It’s been several years since then, and I definitely advise against getting started that way. There are better hosts out there, and better server systems. Take your pick. For the past year, I’ve been running my blogs on a VPS that I manage myself. I got started with the basic LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySql-PHP) stack that just about everyone else has. And it worked … for the most part. Unfortunately, Apache is a bit slow on the VPS I have. And to handle some…
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One Time Password Security
My day job has primarily consisted of migrating an old-school ASP.Net WebForms website to a new ASP.Net MVC application. This has involved a massive layout/structure redesign, database overhaul, and a lot of custom coding. I’m mostly happy with how I structured the MVC-based content management system. It’s very similar to WordPress … only written in C# and using a MS SQL database for the back end. It also borrows heavily from designs found in DotNetNuke, BlogEngine.NET, and just about every other CMS I’ve ever used. But the trickiest – and coolest – part came when my boss asked that it…
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Shortcuts in Chrome
Yesterday, we were bouncing ideas back and forth on Twitter regarding a specific ticket on WordPress’ Trac system. At one point, a developer lamented the fact that Twitter didn’t automatically link “#18149” to http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18149. I jokingly commented that someone should come up with a Chrome extension to do just that. Apparently, something that does that already exists. https://twitter.com/#!/helenhousandi/status/116979340759146497 I’ve never used Firefox keywords, so I had to do a bit of Googling just to figure out what we were all talking about. But apparently, Chrome supports custom search engines and shortcuts in the address bar. You’ve probably noticed that sites you search…
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Reflecting on a Decade
Ten years ago today was picture day at my high school. Despite everything else that happened on September 11, 2001, we all still gathered in the Auxiliary Gym to take our annual year book photos. Business as usual, except for the tone that overtook the entire day. In every class we sat glued to CNN waiting for updates. No one really knew what was going on, but even if we did there was little we could do from Oregon but sit, watch, and shake our heads in anger, frustration, and fear. It was those three emotions, though, that brought out…