WordPress

Who wouldn't want to blog for a living? Low pay, even lower esteem among your publishing peers, and the scorn of anonymous readers who aren't shy about telling you and the rest of the world what an idiot you are.

Yes, blogging is a career of the future, right up there with correctional officer and bankruptcy attorney.

Cynical? Moi? Actually, I've been blogging now for almost four years and I love it. Maybe somebody not named Arianna Huffington or Perez Hilton is making beaucoup dolares from a blog, but I haven't met that person. Still, money … Read more

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more

If you are looking to use your iPad as a blogging tool, WordPress is a likely starting point. After all, it's one of--if not the--most popular blog platform in the world. And the app is free. It's very easy to use, but in large part because it's very limited. In this brief tutorial, I will show you how to use WordPress on the iPad.

A favicon (short for "favorites icon") is the little graphic that Web browsers show next to the URL, bookmarks, and other places that help personalize and visually identify a Web site or blog. WordPress is a widely used blogging application that is available either as a service from WordPress.com or as an application you install and host, using your own hosting provider. I'll go over how to set a favicon for both types of WordPress blogs below.

WordPress.com users have the WordPress "W" logo as … Read more

The popular blogging-site hoster WordPress.com was hit with another distributed denial-of-service attack this morning, the second in two days.

"Unfortunately, the DDoS attack from yesterday returned in a different form this morning and affected sitewide performance," the company said in a notice on its Automattic site, which serves as a dashboard for the service. "The good news is that we were able to mitigate it quickly and performance returned to normal around 11:15 UTC. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely."

Stats on Automattic.com show that the site was affected for about … Read more

Blog host WordPress.com was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack earlier today described by the company as the largest in its history.

As a result, a number of blogs--including those that are a part of WordPress' VIP service--suffered connectivity issues. That includes the Financial Post, the National Post, TechCrunch, along with the service's nearly 18 million hosted blogs.

According to a post by Automattic employee Sara Rosso on the company's VIP Lobby (which had been down at the time of the attacks, though was archived by Graham Cluley over at Naked Security), the size … Read more

Hackers are increasingly hitting the Web sites of human rights and independent media groups in an attempt to silence them, says a new study released this week by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Based on a survey of 45 groups, the report "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites" found that a large percentage said they've been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from those who disagree with their viewpoints. The Web sites typically have been knocked offline for short periods of time but in some cases have … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft said today that it is scrapping its aging Windows Live Spaces blogging technology and will instead make WordPress the default blogging option for Windows Live.

It's the latest move by Microsoft to use Windows Live to connect to other leading Web services, rather than rely on its own, less popular options. For example, Microsoft has shuttered its not-so-widely-used Soapbox video-sharing site and now gives users of Windows Live Movie Maker the option of posting to Facebook or YouTube. Within Windows Live Photo Gallery, people can post to Windows Live, but can also share photos directly to Facebook … Read more

Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).

Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the … Read more