WordPress

WordPress passwords and brute force

From the man himself:

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).

One million views

It’s been a while since I posted any milestones for this blog, so here you go.

Yup, according to WordPress stats, my blog pages have been viewed a 1,000,000 times. Now, they were probably viewed way more than that in the full version of the history, but the plugin that counts them was only installed in 2007, if I remember correctly. Also, there used to be a period of time when this blog was served via an external cache, so only a few of the visitors triggered a real page request.

Still, it’s nice to see the number build up.

According the graph above, I’m getting significantly fewer visitors in the last year or so. That’s because I’ve been running between several jobs and side projects, and at some point nearly stopped blogging completely. But I am back now, so that should go up as well.

WordPress version check

With all the news of brute force attacks against WordPress, I thought I’d at least update the installations running on my servers. Since there are quite a few instances of WordPress on some of them, I was in need of some automated way to check the installed version, hence – the WordPress version check script.

I have some really old versions that I wouldn’t update automatically, so that functionality is not in the script yet (hopefully in the future). But as they say, knowing the problem is half of the solution or something like that.

If you don’t like mine, build your own, using WordPress.org API.

The biggest merge ever

I am having a really proud and exciting moment at work right now. We’ve just deployed the biggest merge ever. I can’t really share enough details to provide you with the context (NDA and all), but here is a GitHub screenshot that gives you an idea.

If you are not familiar with GitHub and don’t know how to read this, here is a summary:

1,633 individual commits
2,696 modified files
424,292 lines of code added
82 lines of code removed
work done by 4 people

And it all went so smooth, that we even deployed it on Friday, without a single second of downtime. Awesomeness!

Update (April 15, 2013): And just when I thought that that was the biggest merge ever, we did one more the next working day. Have a look!

Cool stuff in upcoming WordPress 3.6

WordPress 3.6 is not too far away, with the first beta already released last week. WordPress VIP blog did a very nice and very visual overview of the changes and new features in the release. For me personally, these are the highlights: log out notifications, better autosave, and a new look for post formats.

Things that I still hope to see one day in WordPress are: some sort of standard for post formats (cross-theme support, mobile app support, etc), and easier way of development and deployment across multiple environments (dev/test/live servers, etc). Regardless of my pending wishes, WordPress is still an awesome piece of software, which gets even more awesome with each release.