UPDATE:

Didn’t get registered before classes started? No worries! You can register late through 1/16. There is a $5 late registration fee and you must use this link to register.

What are your New Years’ resolutions? Is this the year that you are going to start that blog, build that web site or figure what in the heck Twitter is all about? If so, I have a class for you!

• Blogging Basics with WordPress
• Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune
• PHP 101 for Web Developers
• Advanced Dreamweaver
• Twitter for Business and Pleasure

Classrooms open this week and the first lessons will be posted on Saturday, January 9. Lessons are posted each week during the six-week course and you work at your own pace, at a time that is convenient for you. Instructor guidance and support is available via the class message boards. Classes are only $30 for students new to LVS Online and they are only $24 for returning students.

Registration deadline is January 6, 2010

Hope to see you in class!

A few weeks ago, I warned students about the necessity of keeping their WordPress blog updated. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, it is updated. This warning is for self hosted blogs. The latest version, WordPress 2.8.4, closes a hole in previous versions that allowed hackers to create a backdoor administrator account on your blog.

Unfortunately, a lot of WordPress bloggers did NOT heed the warning to update that appeared at the top of their blog administration panel. A serious attack has been launched this weekend and hundreds of blogs have already been affected. Mashable it doing their part to spread the word about this attack and the need to upgrade immediately to WordPress 2.8.4.

How serious is this threat? Lorelle VanFossen tells her readers to stop reading her post until the reader is sure that their blog is updated. Don’t worry about finding out if your blog is affected first. She instructs WordPress bloggers to do the update first, then take a look to see if the blog was compromised. Lorelle offer two clues to look for:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account, but Journey Etc. has a possible solution.

What to do if your blog is affected?

These hacks are digging down deep into WordPress installations, even the database may be affected. The severity of the attack will determine how much work you have to do to eradicate it. Lorelle’s post details options and instructions on how to repair the damage. In addition, prevention is always the best route and Lorelle reviews some of the best measures to secure your blog. Even if you blog is not affected, it is well worth your time to review her advice on securing your blog.

Please note: I have seen a number of bogus registration attempts on blogs this past week. Even if your blog is up to date, you can help secure your blog by turning off the Anyone can register option. Go to Settings > Membership options to turn off this feature.

Fall is the season for going back to school (at least in the Northern hemisphere) and it the season for WordCamps!
WordCamps are informal conferences for WordPress users by WordPress users. Designed for the beginning blogger and the experienced professional, these WordCamps are community organized events created so WordPress users can learn and share together.  The topics covered range from everything imaginable about WordPress. This can include how to install WordPress, how to customize your themes,WordPress tips to make your post writing more efficient, using your WordPress installation as a Content Management System (CMS), writing plugins, setting up Multiple User networks like BuddyPress and more! WordCamps have been created the world over, from Alabama, to Mexico City to Romania to Nigeria to Texas.

The basic premise of WordCamp can be summed up as everyone has something to offer and something to learn, and that this about sharing not selling. WordCamps are inexpensive, so finances aren’t a barrier to participation. Attendees usually only pay a small portion of the actual cost of the conference, sponsors pay for the rest because they want to support community and blogging. Speakers usually speak for free, but in some cases their traveling expenses may be reimbursed. A loose set of rules have been established for WordCamps, but individual WordCamps may tweak them a little bit. This is the version of WordCamp ruled adopted by WordCamp Seattle.

1. All attendees must be treated equally. Everyone is a rock star.
2. All content created must be released under a Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or compatible license such as GPL.
3. All attendees must be allowed to participate. (subject to limitations of physical space, of course)
4. All sessions must obey the Law of 2 Feet – if you’re not getting what you want out of the session, you can and should walk out and do something else. There are usually other sessions to choose from so you can find what you are looking for.
5. The event must be WordPress focused – but may crossover to other aspects of new media, including podcasting, video, etc.
6. The financials of a WordCamp must be fully disclosed in an open ledger, except for any donor/sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, offers support and guidance to groups that want to start a WordCamp in their area. You can find out where WordCamps are happening at WordCamp Central.  There are several scheduled this fall and I will be involved in two of them. Last year, I attended my first WordCamp in Portland. I will be returning again on September 19-20th for my second WordCamp Portland. I was so excited about WordCamp that I became an organizer for the first ever WordCamp Seattle! Word Camp Seattle is 9/26/09 and I am very excited about it.

If you don’t have a WordCamp scheduled in your area, you have two options. The first is to do what I did and plan one! If you aren’t ready to take the plunge, you can participate in WordCamp virtually.  Most WordCamp websites will host slides and videos of the presentation. WordPress even added a special section to WordPressTV just for WordCamp videos. You can search online for blog posts about WordCamp. Last year, I live blogged from WordCamp Portland. You can read my posts about WordCamp Portland 08. I will be live blogging from WordCamp Portland and will try to live blog WordCamp Seattle as well. Stay tuned for posts from both of those WordCamps!

WordPress is constantly seeking to improve and better meet the needs of its users. This is your opportunity to vote on the improvements you would like to see in WordPress 2.8. Do you want faster performance? More built in plug-ins for self hosted blogs? More tools designed for multi-author blogs? Here is the chance to be heard.

WordPress 2.8 Features Survey

Two big announcements from WordPress today. Ryan unveiled the WordPress 2.7 Beta 1. Thats the good news, the bad news is that they are delaying the official release of WordPress 2.7 from November 10 to late November. ARRRGH! WordPress really should be more sensitive to the needs of MY students. I will have to readjust the lesson plans accordingly.  The Blogging Basics students will still learn how to set up their blogs in week 2 and the lesson will be ready for them Saturday morning. Once the new upgrade is released, they will get a supplemental lesson about the upgrade changes. The Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune students syllabus will change. I am still working it out and will announce it later this week.

The other good news is that overall, I do feel pretty good about this upgrade. It automates a lot of things that have been intimidating to some bloggers. I think it will make blogging even more accessible to more people. I appreciate the high level of customization that the new upgrade provides and I think the workflow is more intuitive.  You can see a screenshot of what the new post window can look like here.

I understand the reasons behind the delay on the release. I have been playing with the beta release a lot today and the browsers are not always playing nice. A lot of the delay is due to browser compatibility issues and the changes in the new Adobe Flash version 10. Basically that has meant that WordPress is having to make some sudden and serious tweaks to the flash image uploader in WP 2.7.

Good things come to those that wait, I hope In the meantime, if you want to try out the beta, it is available on the WordPress development blog. A release candidate, a not quite but almost ready for prime time version of WP 2.7, should be available on 11/10/08

The eagerly anticipated 2.7 WordPress is just around the corner. Ryan Boren announced that feature freeze is scheduled for today. That means that the new version will be ready for release in early to mid November. The last official release date I heard was during Jane Wall’s presentation at WordCamp Portland and it was 11/10/08.  She stated that release would be 30 days after feature freeze so maybe 11/13/08.  Then again WordPress 2.5 was a couple of weeks late and WordPress 2.6 was weeks early so if you are a gambler, join a WordPress release pool!

All kidding aside, there are a lot of of usabililty changes being made to WordPress administration panel. You can see a rough draft of the new admin panel via the Wireframes recently released by Automaticc. Wireframes are basically layout of a web site before the art is added. It shows the new layout of the new administration panel. It will require a lot less scrolling and gives you the opportunity to customize the admin panel to a greater degree. You can put the components that YOU use where they are handy for you and stow away the components that you don’t need.

I will start working with the daily test builds tomorrow and posting here to keep you updated.

Blogging Basics: Intro to Blogging class  

Learn the blogging basics or step up and discover the benefits of the blogosphere in the new blogging classes at LVS Online. Bean has modified her popular Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune classes into two distinct offerings. The first course Blogging Basics, covers the nuts and bolts of blogging. It is designed as an introductory blogging course and is suited for personal and professional blogs.  We be using the WordPress blogging platform for our examples and demos, but other platforms will be mentioned.

Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune: Promote your blog

The second course, the revised Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class will function as more of a blogging studio and is in response to students requesting a “lifetime membership”.  Although it is really easy to start blogging, once you begin you can see how how multi-faceted it is. You can take your blog in many differnt directions or choose from a wide assortment of goals. You can evolve and refine your blog posts from good to compelling.  You can gain an appeciative audience as you gain authority. You gain authority from participation. Although the core context of the course will remain the same from session, each session the students will have the opportunity to make choices about what type of template modification we will tackle or which social networking site we want to explore in detail. In November session we might devote time and attention to Blog Catalog and changing CSS styles in our templates. In January, we might focus on Weblog and modifying what appears with each post on our home page.

Blogger’s Studio to build content and community for you blog

This Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class is designed for those that really want to promote their Word Press blog for professional gain or personal satisfaction. Students can take it once or sign up repeatedly for their “lifetime membership”. Students will learn from the lessons, instructor examples and more importantly from each other as they support and offer each other feedback and information.

Register for the Blogging Basics course at LVS Online.

Register for the Blogging for Fun, Fame & Fortune course at LVS Online.

Tonight I will be attending a Un-conference with Jane Wells, one of the Usability Engineers at Automatic. She is working on making WordPress increasingly flexible and user friendly.  Her unConference is all about the best and worst of WordPress and what you want to see changed.  Add your comments here and I will have pass them on during the Unconference tonight. Be heard tonight in Portland whereever you are!  Even if you don’t get to this post before tonight, I will make sure that Jane has this link for future reference.

Plug-ins personalize your blog making it as unique as you are. Chris from CDCStudios has tested all of these and incorporates them into his blog as well as his clients.

DISQUS

Drop in replacement comment management system that allows threaded comments for more integrated discussions. It also has a ranking system and serves a frontline spam catcher to take a load off of Askimet. Out of all of the plug-ins that were new to me, these is by far the most intriguing to me.

Twitter Tools

Auto-tweet new blog posts, sidebar widget for your tweets, archive your tweets and tweet from your blog.

OpenID

A single digital identity for 30,000+ web sites. So if you use OpenID that is one less log in that your users have to remember if they are OpenID users. I HATE having a gazillion log ins. I do have an OpenID but only two of the sites that I use regularly have adopted this as of yet.

Clean Archives Reloaded

All of your posts in one place, shows number of comments and helps with SEO.

WP 2.5 Gallery Lightbox

No special short codes are needed to add this tnifty lightbox to your blog pages.

Super Cache

Creates cached version of your site that speeds up your site because there are less database queries. Logged in users don’t see cached pages, they will always see the current page. This is handy if you got comments pouring in. This is probably one of the most update plug-ins available to WordPress.

WP-Contact Form

Get your feedback securely and prevent spam to your email. It has drop down subject lists and prevents the need for a special email account. It is basically a secure php mailer that resides as it’s own page in your blog.

Mint

This is self hosted but it isn’t free. It does cost $30 per domain. It provides live stats tracking in a customizable dashboard. It has a number of plug-ins like an integration between feedburner and this. Stats update in about 3 minutes after visit. The high degree of customization and flexibility make this stats plug-in stand out among stats plug-ins.

YARPP

Uses a unique scoring system to automatically find relevant related posts. This can be added to each post or use it as a sidebar widget. You do need at least a handful of posts before this is going to show helpful information.

iPhone Webclip Manager

Simple custom bookmark icons for the iPhone. it doesn’t change even if your theme does so your readers keep the convention of your icon constant and easy to find on the iPhone.

WP-DBManager

Automatic backups and can backup to server or email. It will also do optimization to speed up your site. This is probably one of the easiest plugins to use and important. If you want to try a theme from a site other than WordPress, use this plug-in. Unfortunately some hackers are distributing themes that will delete your database tables!

WP Automatic Upgrade

Backs up all of your core files as it runs. Puts your site into maintenance mode while upgrade is progressing. It is all done with from the dashboard. If it is a security patch, it will do it automatically after a set amount of time to keep your site secure. Chris loves this, says it is the most important plugin he is presenting today. Others, including Lorelle, lament how it just plain does NOT work on some web servers and some others it is a bit buggy. This is especially true if the original install was a one button install versus a FTP install.

Sociable

This plugin allows you to choose from 67 different social media sites, try to keep the list under 10. More than that and the list is overwhelming to your users. This list is added to the end of your posts and make it easier for your users to promote your posts. Chris likes this better than Share This because the pop ups on Share this can be wonky on mobile devices.

Honorable Mention:

• Calais Autotagger - Help creating tags for your new posts
• Calais Archive Tagger - Help for creating tags on your archived posts
• Fluency Admin (theme) -Change the look of your admin panel
• iWphone (theme)-Optimize your blog for iPhones!
• Treasurelicious - What do you treasure?

The keynote address at WordCamp Portland is all about How WordPress has changed your life?

The Fairy Blog Mother aka Lorelle VanFossen, preached about the glories of WordPress.

WordPress lets you concentrate on expression, it allows you to actually blog without a ton of tweaking but  plenty of things to  tweak. Let’s talk themes and plug-ins! Crowd favorites here at WordCamp Portland included the DB backup, Askimet, Super cache, Related Posts, Maintenance mode.

In addition, WordPress helps the community by super fast blogs to address diasters such as Katrina and Gustav to a neighborhood responding to a catastrophic arson. The blog, in response to the arson, was up in less than an hour and raised money to aid the survivors.

Lorelle also gave lots of examples about the power of the WordPress community. Blogging community is not just about what you know but also who you know. This ranges from personal friendships to particpating in WordPress forums and networks, WordPress meetups and WordCamps like this one.

Matt’s WordPress philosophy is

• You give away your BEST work
• You  just give it away
• The universe will reward.

Well although Matt doesn’t sell the WordPress software it supports him quite well. How many others are making income as a side effect of providing free consulting, themes and plug-ins? Quite a few hands rose in the audience.

Many testamonials, presented here live or videotaped previously at BlogWorld, talked about how bloggers had found income, respect and a voice. The one that touched me the most was Glenda Watson Hyatt, a woman with cerebral palsy  who blogs with her left thumb. Practically non-verbal due to her disability, her life revolved around email. That changed when someone told her that WordPress was so easy that she could blog, even though she is limited to typing with just her left thumb. Known as the Left Thumb Blogger, she told her story about how people react to her so differently when they know her through her blog first. They already know that she is an intelligent woman with a lot to offer, who happens to have some disabilities. Her Do It Myself Blog and her story reminded me that I too can have a voice in the blogosphere even if I don’t have much of a physical voice any more.