I’m almost at exactly the daily count that I need to hit if I’m going to be on track for NaNoWriMo, but I’m only about 1/3 of the way toward my Day One goal of 5,000 words. I figure that’ll be far enough in to tell whether this idea has some momentum and, if so, to give me a little buffer should things slow down as I’m told they do in week two.
UPDATE: Finished at 4,212 on the day. Not bad – more than double the average quota, though I know for certain I need to bank some excess because of the looming TedX Midatlantic, which looms in all its massive time-suckerness on Thursday.
This site has been quiet as I burned the midnight oil, along with new colleague Kiel McLaughlin to launch the new Johns Hopkins University web site.
I think it looks pretty good, but then, I’m biased.
Six weeks from start to finish, so there are still (many) rough edges to polish, but we wanted to get this live in time for the Inauguration of our new university president this past weekend.
I think I now understand how Windows partisans feel when people like me get all smug about how viruses just seem to like that particular operating system.
Because I’m in a similar sitch at the moment with WordPress. As you may have heard, all hell broke loose this weekend as a worm had its way with WordPress installations that were neither updated to the latest version nor hardened. All of my sites fared well, but not everyone was so lucky, from uber-blogger Robert Scoble to countless tiny sites scattered across the net.
As with OS X updates, I’m very bullish on WP updates, especially of the security-enhancement variety, as 2.8.3 and 2.8.4 were. I also believe that, if you really, really care about the sites you build (or, especially, build for people who hand you a paycheck on a regular basis), you should go even further in ensuring security by:
Nuking the “admin” named account as your second order of business, after creating a new admin-level account with a non-obvious name.
Requiring long, difficult passwords from all users above “contributor” level.
Renaming your database tables from the standard wp_
Putting server-level access rules in front of your admin dashboard.
Is all of this worth what you get from a self-hosted WordPress site? I still say yes, but if you’re not willing to take the minimal steps to guarantee the security of your site, then you will probably be happier in the long run with a hosted wordpress.com site or any of the many alternatives out there.
Apologies to the few legitimate commenters, but I had to turn on moderation. It seems this site has picked up a few new friends who really, really want to introduce you to the inexpensive pharmaceutical products they have to offer.
For some reason, Akismet is not working here in the same way it works beautifully on other WP sites I manage. Must investigate when I have the time. Until then, it’s moderation for the lot of you!
Now, maybe it’s because I drive a Honda Element with an Apple sticker on the back that I notice everyone else that goes by me in a Honda Element with an Apple sticker, but I think that somewhere at Apple or Honda there’s a Venn Diagram on the wall showing a high overlap of Element and Apple customers. Because Element drivers sure seem to over-index for Apple sticker use.
Then again, I could just be seeing patterns where there are none.
Healthy skepticism — in blogging and in Big Iron reporting for a metro daily — is a necessary tool to have at all times.
Take yesterday’s YouTube embed, allegedly from Baltimore’s tourism office, suggesting that Baltimore, the city, is safer than you’d think from watching The Wire on television.
My initial reaction was shock at the thought that someone in Visit Baltimore could make such a colossal mistake in judgment to sell the city on the stacked-up backs of the dead. But after a few minutes, and a second watching, my BS meter pegged. Nobody could possibly be that clueless, even in Baltimore.
Apparently, this makes me more skeptical than several reporters in town. The City Paper took the bait. And so did Peter Hermann of The Sun, who got snared by another piece of the same hoax, a fake Mayor’s site.
I hate to say it but this all happened simply because of a Reporting 101 failure: neither reporter bothered to verify it.
When I saw the YouTube video yesterday morning, my second action (after sputtering an some unprintables) was to DM both the Visit Baltimore office and the person who manages their Twitter account and ask whether they had actually created the video. I asked at 8:06 a.m. and had my emphatic answers — No! — a half-hour later.
I was able then to change my blog entry from “this can’t possibly be real, right?” to a note that it was, in fact, a hoax.
The old newsroom saying was “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
If she says it on YouTube or elsewhere on the internet, that goes double.
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