I’ve been taking a look at various things, like auto posting weekly links from from Diigo, and playing with the various possibilities with the If This Than That site, which at this point is mostly just blowing my mind with all the ways you might use it to automatically do various things across the web.

In short, on the site, the Twitter feed, and even the Facebook page, you might see a few new, odd things showing up in the next couple of weeks while I’m experimenting to see what works, what doesn’t, what I like, and what I’m just not thrilled with. I plan to, eventually, end up with a nice, permanent, workflow, but I’m sure there will be some trial and error to get there.

So please, excuse the dust while I’m playing around.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed here you may have noticed that the daily “links” posts haven’t been happening. There’s actually a reason for that. A while back, when Yahoo announced they were dropping Delicious, I went in search of an alternative. I starting using Diigo to save my links as I was perusing Google Reader, or checking links shared on Twitter. Diigo, it turned out, had a nice feature that allowed me to bookmark something there, and it would sycn up with Delicious, allowing me to continue using the Feedburner feature that lets me drop those posts into the RSS feed without having them take up all the space on the homepage of the site.

So that’s what I did, while the future of Delicious was in doubt, it worked as a temporary situation and bought me time to figure something else out.

Then, of course, Delicious got purchased, and was saved from the scrap heap. Great! What I was doing now with Diigo was still working, so no reason to change anything.

Last week, the new Delicious website rolled out, and the API that allowed Diigo to share my bookmarks with Delicious, went away. I’ve been saving bookmarks in Diigo, but they aren’t getting to Delicious, and thus aren’t being pushed to the blog. So, starting today, I’m back to using Delicious, and we shall see how this all works with their new version of the service. Hopefully I won’t have to spend too long getting things back the way I had before!

Anyone else using the new Delicious? Have any opinions on it?

So you want to have your own website and play around with different tools and technologies? Great, just don’t leave a project sitting too long, bad things happen.

Case in point, over on the Child Abuse Survivor site, I had created a sub-domain with it’s own WordPress Multi-User install (back when that was a separate version of WP), running Buddypress to act as a sort of community site. Over time the site saw some traffic, but eventually the community involvement started to fall off, around about the same time that I was changing jobs and moving,  so I really sort of stopped dedicating a bunch of time to it. Oh I left the community up, in case anyone wanted to continue to use it and communicate with each other, but I stopped checking in regularly.

That also means I stopped updating the WordPress install. A big no-no.

Sure enough, late last week, I noticed an issue with the RSS feeds on the main blog getting malformed text and becoming invalid. I didn’t see anything wrong on that WordPress install, but somehow the feeds weren’t publishing properly. A quick re-install of WP in place corrected the feeds issue, but I made a note to keep a closer eye on the feeds.

Sure enough, Monday evening, I saw the same problem with the feeds again. This time I decided this wasn’t a random occurrence, something was wrong. So I dug in to the site and the WordPress database to see if I could see what was causing this. As I dug around I came across a strange class.php file that had been dropped into the wp-content folder, and an .htaccess file that hadn’t been at that level of the install before, pointing to a random numeric php document in another folder, on the community site. Further digging led me to discover Google search results, mostly for pharmaceuticals, pointing to oddly named pages on my site.

Now my blog’s WordPress install was up to date, and there wasn’t any SQL injection into the database, but as I rolled over to the community WordPress install, boy what a mess. There were a number of malicious PHP files over there, and some SQL injected into the database. Since I haven’t updated that install in months, I assume it was compromised thanks to a known exploit that has since been fixed.

After nuking the community site completely, database included, and then cleaning the handful of PHP files running all over the rest of the site’s directories, it seems to be clean again, though Google hasn’t re-indexed things just yet so I’m still getting interesting search queries to say the least. (Sigh)

Those are two nights of my life I’m never getting back, thanks to leaving an old WP install laying around unused. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

There’s been a lot written about the upgrade to Pages that Facebook is rolling out. As with most things Facebook related, many people either love or hate the new layout. However, to me that’s not the interesting thing, though there is some interest there.

No, the interesting thing is the ability to “use Facebook as a page”. This opens up a whole world of opportunity to those of us who maybe have a professional outlet with a blog, and want to keep our facebook personal profile more, well, personal. Or, in my case, it opens up a great opportunity to interact with others interested in child abuse, without having to clutter my more professional/personal profile with that interaction. It’s still somewhat limited, but I’m very much looking forward to thinking about ways to put this to good use, once my mind is clear of cold medicine.

What do you think about the possibilities here?

With the success of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not unusual for some to wonder if there’s any need to have your own blog or website when it comes to personal networking. Isn’t it easy enough to have a profile on the leading social networks, and interact on those?

Last week, however, saw an example of why, sometimes, it’s good to have a space that is all yours. As rumors swirled, and doubt has crept in about the future of the social bookmarking site, Delicious, I was once again reminded that you can’t control what you don’t control.

Obviously, I’m a big fan of delicious, and have used it to augment features of this site as well as an educational site I’ve developed on our firm’s intranet. On the other hand, I now find myself somewhat at the whim of Yahoo! in terms of what the future will hold for Delicious. I’ve been testing out replacing some of the features using Diigo instead of Delicious, so I would still be able to have things like linkrolls, and maybe even weekly wrap-up link posts on the blog, if worse comes to worse and Delicious does wind up on the Web 2.0 scrap heap. That still leave me then at the mercy of Diigo being succesful and staying in business.

On the other hand, no matter what happens with social bookmarking sites, this blog remains. It’s mine. I pay for the domain, I pay for the hosting. I control every aspect of what is on this page. I can’t say that about my Tweetstream, or my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Sure, I feed this blog to those sites, as a courtesy to folks who want to interact with me there instead of coming to the blog, but no matter what those sites do in the future, (service disruptions, poor policies that drive users away, horrible commercialization, etc.), the blog remains.

No matter what future social network we all decide to jump on, the blog remains.

My writing isn’t subject to the vagaries of Web 2.0, or 3.0 tools. My writing will continue right here, where’s it’s always been. I may just be grabbing the RSS feed in different places, but the blog remains. Are you willing to bet your entire online presence that anything else will remain in the same way?

A couple of fellow Friends in Tech members, and the hosts of Technorama, Chuck Tomasi and Kreg Steppe, informed me the other day that the new version of their book about learning WordPress, Sams Teach Yourself WordPress 3 in 10 Minutes is now available.

For those of you looking to get started with WordPress, or as a gift to someone you know who is starting out with WordPress for their website platform of choice, this is a great little resource to get you started. Heck, I bet there’s even something new in there for many of us who’ve been using WordPress for awhile!

There’s only a week before Christmas, pick it up now!

I saw this post about backing up your WordPress blog to Dropbox earlier this month, but when it came time to update this site to the latest WP release, that was the first time I decided to take it for a ride.

Sure enough, I installed the wpTimeMachine plugin, and within a few minutes, I had a full backup of the blog safely stored over in my Dropbox account. I could then proceed with the WP update fully assured that I had a good backup in case something went wrong. It didn’t, but it’s nice to know I can get a new backup in just a matter of moments, or I can create a cron job to get one automatically at whatever time interval I want, and that it will be stored in a separate location than my site.

Nicely done.

I found this plugin the other day, and decided to try it out over the holiday weekend. My fear is that I’ll annoy the heck out of followers while I try and figure out the best configuration to have some older, but still recent, posts sent out to Twitter, without becoming a pain with constant links to old posts. I know far fewer people will be paying close attention to Twitter over a long holiday weekend, so I’m guessing that if I do make some error in configuration, it should tick off fewer people doing it now. That said, if you are paying close attention, please be patient while I figure this out.

On the flip side, since I normally write and post at night, and most of my twitter followers pay attention to Twitter during the day, I suspect that many never see when I post something new and it gets tweeted. This seems like a nice way to say “oh by the way, you might have missed this post I wrote a few nights ago”, but again, I want to see if I can do that without flooding twitter with links to my own blog. (I guess that also means I need to keep up with posting other things as well, so the stream doesn’t become just links!)

If you’ve been using this plugin, let me know what you think, and what configurations have been working the best for you?

Apparently, Ask.com got Merchant Circle to agree to take over the operations of Bloglines. Maybe they will actually invest in it and create a god Google Reader alternative.

Then again, I have no idea how Bloglines fits with what Merchant Circle does now, so we’ll see if this is a good thing for Bloglines users or not.

For that matter, I don’t even know what Merchant Circle does now.

Is anyone else seeing a handful of obvious spam comments get through Askimet on their WordPress blogs? Seems like every morning, I find myself deleting 5-6 comments that hit the blog overnight, with obvious spam links, that Askimet allowed to post. I hadn’t really had any difficulty like that in a long, long time, so it’s somewhat surprising to see it all of the sudden.

For the record, Askimet is still working, and blocking some of the spam comments as well, it’s just suddenly missing many more than it used to. I wonder if it’s just me.