The WordPress dashboard, as secure as ever

ORDPRESS continues to be a secure and robust piece of Web-based software. Rumours, however, sometimes stand in its way. Below is one example among several, which have been ‘severe’ enough to trigger high-profile advisories. All the hoi polloi was, needless to mention, in vain.

It sometimes appears as though such rants are desperate attempt to stir up a hornet’s nest. WordPress has become a prime target due to its popularity and existence as Web-based software, making it more exposed to the factor of traffic en masse. Google have become a target for rumours, the reasons being very similar.

Apart from minor wishlist items or bugs, such as one that I recently filed, there are more pressing issues that need resolving and require open clarifications from the community. More latterly, a concern was raised over the visibility of WordPress plug-ins to all site visitors. My opinion on the matter was phrased therein (see full thread for context).

Directory listing, which in turn exposes plug-in names, is never being linked to. Thus, it will not be indexed by search engines and flawed plug-ins will not be easily discoverable.

You could trivially scan many blogs using a script in attempts to find vulnerabilities. PHP-Nuke, Advanced Guestbook and Coppermine are notorious in that respect.

All in all, getting a list of plug-ins may be a convenient way for learning the blog’s composition. If you target a particular vulnerability (due to third-party code), it gives the hacker no advantage. That, marke1, is why your argument and its ludicrous, overstated backing are void.

HERE is a certain stigma or two among Web designers. Blaming of Web design be attributed to miscomprehension of design principles. Take for example some astigmatic accessibility issues, among other key factors such as browser ‘racism’. These mistakes illusrate clumsiness in Web design and infuriate minorities, which comprise equally-important Net citizens.

Pedagogues in the field of design are either unaware of accessibility matters, or they cannot be bothered with them. In due time, they recommend Flash, user-agent (Web browser/reader) sniffing and the like — all of which are bad practices for the large majority of sites, if not all. It is dishonourable to many users who must suffer due to such cretins, owing to laziness in learning and implementation.

Then comes the issue of content, which can assume user proficiency at times and thus leaves many surfers baffled. The author must escort the less technically-inclined hand-in-hand. For example, one should always abstain from equivocal text that does not attempt to clarify the main points made. In my sites, I tried to incorporate a full ‘acronym striping’ facility, using style sheets. Those of us to whom English is not the mother’s tongue should hopefully be able to digest the key points.

In summary, there seems to be dissociation and estrangement when it comes to the small majority of visitors or customers, i.e. there is no desire to give contentment to all. This is one of the biggest crimes committed in Web development, authoring and design, more so in cases where the site gives exclusive information, e.g. where it serves as a gatway to governmental agencies.

ESTERDAY I received an E-mail from a stranger. The message contained a much-sought-for answer to a question which I had asked several weeks ago. This came to show the advantages of asking questions in public forums (news:alt.www.webmaster). What was my question then? Well, my intent was to merge multiple feeds and deliver them as just one aggregated feed. There were issues with implementation of such tools:

• Formats and versioning, e.g. Atom, RSS v. 1, RSS v. 2
• Tolerance for invalidity of feeds
• Sorting in merger based on category/time

I wound up finding RSS Merge, which enabled me to compose the following page. It combines various feeds from my main domain. Another Open Source package that is worth mentioning would be Planet. My only complaint (wishlist item rather) is that the tools do not deliver aggregated output in feed form. They are merely echoed as Web pages.

Perfect 10, which is an erotic magazine, has successfully sued Google for infringing some rights with its image search facility. This is not the first time a story as such emerged.

A federal judge has ruled that portions of Google’s popular image search feature, which displays small thumbnail versions of images found on other Web sites, likely violate U.S. copyright law.

I abide by my belief that Google make fair use of the material, yet erotica might be the exception. Image search in Google draws over 10,000 visitors to my Web sites every month, so I dare not complain!

OOGLE have introduced and released cross-desktop search, which is an extension of their popular Google Desktop. That piece of software was recently embraced by IBM and it was included in a Windows ‘distribution’ from Google. It already raises many questions and privacy concerns. Not only your trusted colleagues will be able to gain access to your data.

Google Copies Your Hard Drive – Government Smiles in Anticipation

Consumers Should Not Use New Google Desktop

Related items:

• Google Controversies
• Google Blind to Controversy
• Google and Pet Peeves
• Death of Privacy
• Search Engines and Spying
• Remote Data
• Nanny Country Snatches Search Logs
• Cookie-Based Search Results
• Is Google the Next Microsoft?

Two recent articles, which are definitely worth reading, are listed below.

• Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

• Another article I enjoyed reading is a critique of Web 2.0 hype

To you who are toiling over an AJAX- and Ruby-powered social software product, good luck, God bless, and have fun. Remember that 20 other people are working on the same idea. So keep it simple, and ship it before they do, and maintain your sense of humor whether you get rich or go broke. Especially if you get rich. Nothing is more unsightly than a solemn multi-millionaire.

This reminded me of a fun blog which is purely dedicated to Web 2.0 bashing.

recently volunteered to take browser compatibility more seriously. I never truly believed there was a place for platform discrimination. However, refusal to upgrade from Internet Explorer to Firefox is not quite so excusable. Web standards should be fundamental enough to be supported at the very core of a browser and behave reliably. And yet, I realise that my attitude must change.

The context of this post is WordPress, a blogging platform whose development and community I have been a part of for over a year. In fact, I have put my name down among the Roles in WordPress Wiki page. To quote:

Testing / QA

Browser Testing – Testing Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari against major WP functionality; documenting bugs; coding workarounds.

• I have a large variety of browsers which are built for Linux (including old versions), so I will continue to test nightlies and report inconsistencies and incompatibilities whenever time permits. I can use emulation to test under Safari and IE, but I have WinXP and an iMac at work. –[[User:schestowitz|schestowitz]] 3:38, 13 Jan 2006 (GMT)

The idea of roles in WordPress was introduced less than a fortnight ago. While editing the Wiki, I also decided to bind a vague personal description to an empty placeholder page which carries my name. I chose:

An ordinary guy who is overly fascinated by ‘anything Linux’ and ‘anything PHP/MySQL’.

My role involves using a large variety of browsers, especially exploring the Administration Panel (/Dashboard) side. Due to Safari and Internet Explorer, I will have to work on alternative platforms, too. Mac OS X is powerful, but rarely has the ‘expessivability’ of GNU/Linux. Also, it has commercial strings attached to it. Many of its applications bear a cost. To test cross-Web browser compatibility, I can disengage from the 3 Linux that I regularly use and take advantage of the iMac and Windows XP machines at the office. These operating system definitely have a place; just not in my house [smile]! They have not been switched on for months, but now there is a reason for a small change. I love WordPress! As matter of face, it was love at first sight and the affair carries on.

I have reported a few bugs already and some have been resolved:

• Published Articles for Future Appearance Get Counted in Categories
• Unbalanced quotes break RTE structure
• Opera Uploads iFrame Issue
• Char Encoding in inline-uploading.php