Just wanted to drop a quick post and let you know that I was recently interviewed by Jean of Cats Who Code and that it is now available online for anyone to read.  If you’d like to learn more about me professionally or personally, click here to read the interview.

I’m not really sure if this is a trend or just coincidence, but over the past week I’ve noticed quite a few of the blogs that I stumble upon require you to setup an account before you can leave a comment.  Anyone know what is up with that?

This is obviously a very useful WordPress feature for blogs that have a strong community built around their website, but I think most people should consider the consequences before they require you to register to comment.  A choice like this could keep truly hinder a new blogs growth or discourage a blogger who isn’t seeing the reader interaction they were hoping for.

As with pretty much everything, there are some positives and some negatives to doing this.  Off the top of my head, here are a few positives and negatives of requiring registration to leave a comment on a blog:

Positives of Registration

• Spam Prevention - Requiring registration should stop spam completely.
• More Options - Requiring registration opens up some interesting opportunities to customize comment appearance, allow you to create profiles, etc.   I’ve seen a few high profile websites do this, but the registration usually is optional instead of being required.

Negatives of Registration

• Less Comments - Some people value comments more than others, but I think most bloggers would find less comments to be a negative as the whole concept of blogging was formed around the concept of reader interaction with the writer.

I personally do not leave comments on blogs that require registration because it just isn’t worth it to me.  I have enough accounts to manage without trying to remember my account information.   I also think things like spam can easily be avoided for WordPress users using tools like Akismet and Bad Behavior, Spam Karma 2, or Math Comment Spam Protection (which we use here).

I’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.   How do you feel about blogs that require registration to comment?   Do you take the time to register or do you just decide not to comment at all?

If you follow the underground world of domain names, you’ve probably noticed that this past week, a lot of coverage has been focusing on hackers who managed to take over a few domains owned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the company who regulates the world’s domain names.     What you may not have heard about, however, is that in what appears to be an unrelated incident, ICANN also had their WordPress blog hacked about the same time.

In another unrelated incident, ICANN’s official blog was attacked using a recent exploit in the blogging software Wordpress. This attack is believed to have been automated and not done with any motivation regarding ICANN itself. The effects were limited to the blog being taken offline for a short while while updates and repairs took place.

ICANN getting their blog hacked was a direct result of failing to upgrade their WordPress installation.  Now obviously ICANN has a fairly high profile blog, but this appeared to be a random attack and can truly happen to anyone.

I’ve actually written in the past a few times about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress installation, but what most of you probably don’t know is that I preach this out of personal experience.  About a year and a half ago my original WordPress blog was hacked simply because I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress installation.  WordPress had released a fix and I didn’t upgrade right away.

I was actually very fortunate that the person who gained access to my site seemed to have good intentions, as he simply warned me to upgrade my WordPress installation.   Unfortunately, though, it is something I will never forget.  Not only do you feel personally violated when this happens, but I was dumb and used similar passwords for many of my other accounts.  Someone with bad intentions could have easily guessed my similar password I used for my email account, then had access to all my accounts and other personal information.

Since that time, I have always upgraded my websites/blogs that use WordPress the day the upgrade is available, and I have always been outspoken to others about upgrading their WordPress installations.  The WordPress team has really been doing a great job of lately of testing their software, so we aren’t usually seeing more than 3-4 upgrades within each WordPress branch (2.3.x, 2.5.x, etc.).   For those new to WordPress, I remember it often going up to 7 or sometimes more in the WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 days.

In case you weren’t aware, you have a number of options when upgrading your WordPress installation.  Obviously there is the manual upgrade, which many people dread.  Other upgrade options include upgrading via Fantastico, or upgrading using a WordPress plugin such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

Would you say that you usually upgrade your WordPress installation right away?

Once again the fourth of July is upon us, and for those of us in the United States, this marks a paid vacation day the day we celebrate our independence and freedom!

Though I plan to take the day off, I did want to offer a quick note I ran across about WordPress.  I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a post by Planet Ozh about what WordPress plugin authors need to know about WordPress 2.6.  The post covers changes to both the wp-content directory and the wp-config.php files and will likely force many plugin authors to update their plugins for WordPress 2.6. If you are the author of a WordPress plugin, you should probably check this out.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!

I think it is safe to say that most (if not all) of our readers are big fans of WordPress.  The flexbility of WordPress is just incredible and still manages to impress me at times. What I didn’t realize is that many major corporations are starting to use WordPress to manage their blogs.

A recent post over at BloggingPro caught my attention because they cite a number of examples of WordPress being used by many online corporations, including:

• CNN
• Yahoo
• Sony
• The New York Times
• People
• eBay
• b5Media

That is quite the impressive list in my opinion and I think it goes to show just how easily WordPress can be integrated into all sorts of existing websites.  WordPress.org is definitely the most popular blogging software these days, but I think it is also competing well against CMS software like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

For those of you that have tried other software like Joomla or Drupal, how does WordPress stack up?

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t been talking a whole lot about WordPress 2.6 lately, it is because our friend John over at The WordPress Expert has been doing a great job keeping us updated on the latest features in the WordPress 2.6 branch.

A couple newly discovered WordPress 2.6 features:

• WordPress Auto-Upgrade
• Plugin Auto-Installation
• Theme preview

It is GREAT to see the WordPress auto-upgrade feature being built into the base WordPress install, and the other two are very useful features.  Click over to check out the other new features and descriptions for each.   Great work John!