digiculturetravelexpatasia

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WordPress 2.7.1 must be the easiest upgrade ever. One click upgrade – no plugins. Nice.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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photo by Cayusa

It would be cool to have a WordPress plugin that auto linked words in my blog posts to matching tags on my friends posts on their blogs or suggested links to friends posts from the WordPress edit console. This could be done via FriendFeed API or better yet FriendFeed could host a custom search feature that would query my friends blog posts from links in my posts.. Does anything do this already? mmm… Sandwich… back to work.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Take a look at some WordPress 2.7 features.

Via WordPress blog

Popularity: 4% [?]

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After a small wait, Greg Johnson has release his Coda WordPress CMS theme complete with PSD source files.

Looks great! Have at it.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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The LinkedIn WordPress app is super easy to install and has a nice feature to filter posts on your profile using tags.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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photo by Defensor Fortis

Think WordPress security is not safe enough for your site?

Mark Jaquith has published the list which includes the US Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Goard, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of State, Department of Treasury, DEA, FBI, CIA, SNA, and more. Matt’s point was that if they are using it, WordPress must be doing something write with security – especially with these security concious agencies helping the WordPress community.

via The Blog Herald

Popularity: 33% [?]

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logo by EMMEALCUBO

Thanks Andrew Mager at ZDNet for the great coverage of Wordcamp SF 2008.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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My free room.

Recently I was in Batam, Indonesia for a few days. While looking for a Wi-Fi signal on my macbook I discovered a bunch of open access points. Although I could get on a few networks I was not able to get web access. I did noticed several shared computers on one of the hotspots, one of which was named, “Reservations.” Also listed were several other non descript names like Sales, Marketing, HR and such.

Being the curious type, I clicked on reservations to find some office files. A quick view of a spread sheet with Mgr in the file name showed me every cent that went through one of the largest hotels in town. I could see how many rooms were available, vacant, walk-ins, no shows, average room rates, budgets and revenues for all 5 restaurants, laundry.. and how many complimentary rooms were in use.

The last bit there gave me an idea. I was staying at a smallish inexpensive hotel. I was by myself and a big cushy place did not make much sense for a what was basically a 48 hour trip. A nice cushy place would be fine though, if it was complimentary :)

I grabbed some screen shots of what I’d seen then walked down to the lobby and out the front door, turned right and continued down the road to the Big hotel.

I was wearing a Barcamp Auckland t-shirt, no shave, jeans and toting a Crumpler. Confidently, I asked the receptionist if I could speak to the GM. She asked what it was regarding and I replied that it was a security issue. They told me he was in a meeting but would be available in 20 minutes if I was able to wait. I took a seat and waited about 15 minutes.

The GM came up and introduced himself. I quickly got to the point and let him know that without any hacking I was able to see all kinds of information about the hotel over their public wireless network. I showed him some screen shots since I’d already deleted the files from my drive. He was obviously surprised and asked how I could have accessed all that information. I told him that I did not have much time left in town to help fix things but that if could set me up with a ‘complimentary room’ I’d be happy to tell him how to go about getting his IT people started on getting the problem fixed.

He said, “sure” without any hesitation. I got his email and was directed to the the front desk to get checked in.

10 minutes later I had a new room key and was heading back to my old hotel to checkout and grab my stuff.

I came back and went up to my room. I now had a pass to get on the same Wi-Fi that I’d seen from my rather bland room down the street. This was much better!

Here is the list of suggestions that I sent over to the GM.

Network Security Suggestions

1. Remove all back office / hotel systems from Guest/Public Wi-Fi networks. Hotel employees and systems should be on a private network.
2. Disable Windows File Sharing on all employee computers that would be using public Wi-Fi
3. Disable broadcast of SSID for private Wi-Fi network. Use WPA or WPA2 type wireless encryption. Do not use WEP, unsafe / easily cracked.
4. Implement official policy for employees and network security / best use practices. Don’t change settings without notifying IT admin, No windows file sharing on public networks, no P2P file sharing, don’t open attachments that you were not expecting, never open .exe or .vbs attachments, use firefox instead of IE, etc..

Should you ever have any queries please do not hesitate.
My room is great, thank you.

This is one of those circumstances where being a good samaritan paid off. Let me know if this ever works for you in a similar situation.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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photo by luc legay

That was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. I searched for and tried several MyBlogLog plugins for WordPress and none worked. I went back today and found another plugin that was easy enough to set up and is actually working. Check out Abyss Knight’s MyBlogLog WordPress plugin.

1. Download and unzip
2. Place mbl_plugin_v0.5.1.php in plugins
3. Activate and go to Plugins:MyBlogLog Configuration
4. Enter your 16 digit tracking code from http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/yourusernamehere/widgets/ from the Your Code: field
5. Configure your widget from the URL in step 4 above then copy/paste the code into your sidebar.php or create a text widget and save changes.

It’s cool to see who is visiting and to checkout your sites.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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photo by axb500

I don’t have an iPhone and won’t be buying one until it records video like a champ + does not have a glass screen.. I drop my phone several times a year. It happens.. But if I did have an iPhone.. I’d be loading up the new WordPress app to give it a spin.

via TUAW

Popularity: 11% [?]

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photo by by elijah northen

The most recent version of WordPress has a tab called “Turbo” in the upper right hand corner of the admin dashboard. This is where you can configure Google Gears for a speed increase in WordPress administration. The speedup is noticeable however it does not feel quite like an app running off of you drive. Promising tech however and I look forward to seeing how far they can get with offloading repetitive code chunks to my local machine rather than having to download them every time.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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by zapxpxau

Earlier attempts at cross-posting to myspace blogs from wordpress worked initially but caused a few wordpress panics along the way that required turning off that plugin. I looked for another solution and came up with pingPressFM which makes use of the ping.fm API. At first I was concerned that this would update facebook and twitter status with blog posts but it is configurable to update via status, blogs & microblogs. I’ve got status turned off and blogging and microblogging enabled. Right now pingPressFM is updating blogs / microblogs on twitter, tumbler, pownce and myspace.

It does three updates in total. One status update (facebook, myspace), one micro blog update (twitter, jaiku), and one blog update (blogger, livejournal). You can easily configure each of the three ping types in your WordPress settings.

Popularity: 54% [?]

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Upgrade went very smooth here.

More here

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Testing to see if this shows up on my abandoned myspace blog courtesy of the MySpace Crossposter plugin for wp. I already have posts cross posting from wp to fb with the wordbook plugin / fb app.

Cool – it works.

update, wordbook is no longer posting to my fb mini-feed..looking for a fix

update, seems to have fixed itself or app has been updated on fb side.. working for now..

Popularity: 9% [?]

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I’ve just installed the Skype Online Status plugin for WordPress. After looking at and trying out others I think this is the best so far.

Lots of options, well done.

Define all your default Skype Status settings here. Start simply by setting the basics like Skype ID, Full Name and the button Theme you want to show on your blog. Then activate the Skype Status Widget on your Widgets page or use the Skype Status quicktag button Skype Online Status in the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) to place the Skype Online Status button in any post or page. Later on, you can fine-tune everything until it fits just perfectly on you pages.

Grab Skype Online Status here.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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Sorry guys but I won’t be passing you all those links anymore. I know.. so sad.. The upside is I’ll finally have a blog of my own, to cuddle (wife said no to the cuddling) and hold.. to take it out to pee in the rain while holding the umbrella just so..

The World needs more blogs anyways right?

Consider this a work in progress. I’m using wordpress for now until something snazzier comes along. I’ve been making websites for others and using wordpress as a cms for a few years now. Wordpress continues to impress me more than than it annoys me so… wordpress it is.

Thanks in advance to anyone that links to me. It’s a jump of faith because even I am totally unsure of what will be here.

Popularity: 8% [?]