If you have a blog on WordPress.com you can enable a new Dashboard design, today. The team is asking for feedback on the new layout.
We’ve drawn new icons, increased contrast and font size, and generally modernized the design from top to bottom. We’re still working on it, but you can preview it starting today! To step into the future, head over to Users → Personal Settings in your blog’s dashboard and check “Enable experimental admin design (MP6),” then Save Changes.
Via WordPress.com
I have TaB hosted on HostGator and like many other hosting services, they are under attack from the latest botnet:
As I type these words, there is an on-going and highly-distributed, global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence. This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack.
Via HostGator
This botnet is searching for wp-login.php and attempting to gain administrator-level access to WordPress blogs by running through a list of common passwords against the “admin” username.
Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem.
Via Matt Mullenweg
That’s really all there is to it. If you are the only one who uses your blog, there is no reason to have multiple user accounts (WordPress Dashboard / Users). And, as Matt Mullenweg says, there is no reason to have a user account named “admin.” There is also little or no benefit in using one of the various WordPress security plugins available. This is a very crude botnet, but even it is sophisticated enough to change IP addresses between login attempts – rendering IP blocking and login limiting schemes useless.
Are you currently experiencing any slowdowns or issues from this latest attack? I have not noticed any problems, so far.
I didn’t notice, either – see link for a fix…
Yesterday one of our writers discovered the WordPress spellchecker was not working properly—namely that it started always saying there were no errors (creating false-negatives). After quite a bit of research, it came down to the following: WordPress packages TinyMCE as WYSIWYG editor including their PHP spellcheck plugin.
Via Kenton Jacobsen
This is a killer idea for an app – think Instagram, but instead of handing your awesome high-contrast, X-Pro filtered photo off to some faceless third-party, just shoot it over to your WordPress blog. Help make Pressgram a reality by supporting it on Kickstarter.
I have had some good comments on my post regarding this strategy.
2) H1 Blog Title on All pages
Many themes might have this issue, the Blog title is tagged as a h1 tag on all pages of the site. This is a big mistake, Google place quite a bit of importance on the h1 tag to determine the relevancy of your site to any given topic. So, in an ideal world you will have:
– H1 tag as the name of your site on the homepage.
– On single post or pages, the Title of the page should be in h1.
– On category and Tag archive, The Category / Tag title should be in h1.