You put a plugin on your WordPress blog, and soon your site is hacked and defaced – coincidence?

I’ve talked in the past of the dangers of using ‘just any’ theme out there, and of course you should always update your blog as soon as a new security problem is fixed.

But are plugins an issue?

Now I’m not reporting about a specific plugin here, one that is doing bad things. However, the potential IS there, and here’s some reasons why:

A plugin, when activated, has access to all …

If you run a blog, you’ve got them – spam comments.

They are the comments like ‘like your blog’, or ‘bookmarked it’, or the more obvious ones with a quick comment before a page of links: ‘enjoyed your site (link to viagra) (link to porn) (link to cialis) (link to porn) etc’,

Your definition of spam comments may vary, but mine is very simple:

If they didn’t write something relevant to the blog post they commented on, it’s spam.

If I’m talking about a plugin, it doesn’t matter if they …

It’s true – FaceBook is moving from PHP to compiled PHP – with a performance gain of about 50% over PHP.

The move, using an in-house compiler program, HopHop, takes the original PHP code and translates it to C++ code, with then can be compiled and run on the Web server as a program.

As another benefit, FaceBook has released the HipHop compiler as Open Source, meaning anyone can convert/compile their PHP code.

C++, a language that allows very fast low-level access to computer hardware, is traditionally preferred for fast …

Another bug fix for the 2.9 versions, WP 2.9.2 was released this week to solve a security issue with deleted articles. Although deleted, they are still available, and unfortunately available to more than the original author! Download the latest version from within WP Admin, or go to their website.

For some time, Google has had a way to filter web pages, called Google Section Targeting – using it, pages can emphasize one part over another, and bloggers improve the focus of their site.

This can be important, especially for WordPress bloggers. For example, I once wrote on another blog about a dog ebook. For days afterwards, no matter what I wrote about, the Google ads remained for dog-related items!

On other occasions, I’ve received emails from people asking why they get ads for blogging items, although they never write …