As those at WordCamp Gold Coast recently found out(Wow, this past month has flown by!), I’m now listed on http://twitter.com/#!/automattic/automatticians/members!.
Yup. I’m an Automattician (Pst. That means I’ve been hired by Automattic)
So where does this leave my other projects:
- My plugins will continue to be developed in my spare time.
- My other random WordPressy projects may get some attention in my spare time, as they always have
- I’m ceasing all development on WordPress.org to focus my efforts on WordPress.com
..just kidding, My involvement on WordPress.org will continue as it has in previous years, hopefully better than ever, whilst working on WordPress.org won’t be my day job, I’ll be able to give it the attention it deserves. WordPress.com was born out of WordPress.org, and I doubt I’d be anywhere near the first without the latter!
- In other words – Life as normal.
Tonight marks the end of my 3 weeks Support Rotation my first week doing Development (It’s taken me a week to hit publish on this post..), from here on, I’ll be known as a Renewable Engineering Specialist, Yeah, you have to love the Tech. titles!
I’m quite proud to be able to say Automattic is my “place” of work, I’m looking forward to learning a whole lot more off the amazing people who I already know (and the many who I haven’t met) at Automattic – not that there’s too many to meet, with Automattic having just crossed the 100 employee mark, that’s not bad for a company who’s primary product handles over 250 million unique users per week. It’s also nice to see the Automattic population in Australia explode, up from 1 a month ago, to 4 of us!
Questions? :)
(better make them good ones.. so no questions on this ever-evolving design huh? You’ll be glad to know I’ve not been hired as a designer!)
So, we all love using Opera as our browser, right? How many of you use IRC in Opera too? *cricket chirping*
Ok, Well, I do, and unfortunately Opera doesn’t support IRC auto-reconnection, this is rather annoying when you consider that hibernating the laptop will cause IRC to disconnect, and it doesn’t re-connect upon resuming windows.
“Simple, Just click Connect every time you resume!” yes well, I forget and can often not be on IRC for hours because of that.
So a solution. Add the IRC server to your speed dial!
That might sound a bit strange, but it works, Simply add irc://irc.freenode.net/ (or your favourite IRC server) to your speed dial, sure enough, when you open a new tab next time you use Opera, the icon will refresh, the refresh triggers a re-connect if there isn’t already a connection! (Make sure you also have the channels you use in your connections outgoing-commands section)
It’s not perfect, but it’s doing the job for me :)
Last weekend was WordCamp 2011, Lots of things were said and done, there was an afterparty that not many talk about (and many suspect the organisers were still drunk the next day), and of course – there were talk from a lot of interesting people.
But of course, this isnt to write about those people, the events, or anything else, this is purely a post to post up a few things which I mentioned.
First part, My presentation: How to become a WordPress Surgeon: An introduction to WordPress Core Contributing. – in reality, it was decided 5 minutes before hand the content, so give me some slack :)
Direct Link: http://wcmelb.blip.tv/file/4826938/
Now the links I promised:
- Search and Replace – An excellent plugin for replacing text throughout WordPress, good for updating old links from other domains
- Core Control – A Plugin of mine which allows you to see inside a bit of WordPress, The main use for this today is determining which HTTP Transport is in use, and the ability to disable those which are malfunctioning.
- Theres another plugin which is useful when changing permastructures to distinctivly different structs, in most cases the canonical redirect takes care of it, but it’s not 100% perfect, I cant find the plugin, but Advanced Permalinks looks like it’ll do the job, But might not be compatible with 3.0/3.1, and might be overkill really.. but search the Permalinks tag on the extend directory and see what you can find.
And links that are just awesome:
Hi all, Dion here, Recently there’s been a few “security through obscurity” discussions going around, I’m sick of them, It doesn’t work, and this is my proof.
There are a few Plugins out there which hide the version number of WordPress, The first example i found was Secure WordPress, It has over 170k downloads, But does it actually do what it claims?
Hiding the version number is Security through obscurity, You’re not making the install any safer, you’re merely not advertising the fact of which version you’re using.
But, do i hear you ask, “But if they dont know the version, doesnt that mean I’m safer?”
The answer to that is 3 fold:
- Just because they (the mystical hackers) cant see the version of WordPress you’re using, doesnt mean they’re not going to try the same attacks anyway, afterall, its only an extra 3 mouseclicks to run every exploit against every plugin known to man..
- Most exploits in the WordPress world will be related to plugins, this is only due to the sheer number of them out there
- And finally, because hiding the version number doesnt hide the version of WordPress you’re using, which is the point of this tool/site
To use an example, It’s like walking through a battlefield with your gun hidden, just because they cant see your gun, doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to walk through the middle fo the battle, chances are, you’ll be shot anyway. Exploits are the same, they’ll attack anything that moves, the number of Joomla! or Drupal exploit attacks i see against my WordPress installs daily is enormous, & I’m sure Joomla! and Drupal installs see significant exploits thinking that the site is running WordPress. My point is, Exploits dont care, they’ll attack anyway.
Type the URL of a site below, be it advertising the fact its WordPress or not, and I’ll tell you instantly which version, or which version its most likely to be running:
Example sites:
PLEASE NOTE: This tool uses NOTHING PRIVATE, This is not connected to any WordPress.org infrastructure or otherwise secret data, All information that this tool uses is gleamed from your WordPress installation, just the same as anyone else can do.