Whew, the last couple of weeks have been crazy. I’m wrapping up on one major contract and trying to transition everything over to my replacement on that project and gearing up to start the next big project. In the past I’ve had 2-3 medium sized projects all the time, but for the next few months I’ll be working with one client on several bigger projects which should make communications easier and maybe be a little less stressful. It should also be interesting as at least half of the projects are new developments vs. cleaning up existing ones, though there are at least two of those as well.

Next Thursday I hop on a plane for SXSW and I can’t wait. I really need a break. Also, In the next day or so I’ll also be posting some articles on Affiliate Marketing including my first guest post here on this site, which I’m happy about. If anyone is ever interested, feel free to pitch me your idea.

Hopefully things are getting back to normal now and we’ll be back to our regularly schedule program.

I just got a comment by someone who’s link was to a BlogTalkRadio.com user page. At first that seems normal and I almost approved it without looking closely. Then I noticed the username in the blogtalkradio.com was Buy_Meridia. Red flag! So I check out the page and sure enough, it’s a real page on BTR, but it’s just chocked full of spam. After a few seconds it redirects you to another spammy site. The folks over at BTR need to make sure they remove meta refresh and those kinds of codes from user submitted content. Spammers can now hijack profile pages and direct people away. Very nasty bit of spammage.

I check my bloglines a few times per day and trust me, it suggests people are still blogging. Sure, people are still using WordPress and other blogging tools to update their sites, but are they blogging? I don’t think they are, I think they are writing. I’ve been pretty vocal about not really liking the whole “blogging” label in general because it doesn’t quite convey what we do, and for a long time it wreaked of someones online diary where they told you what they had for breakfast. Technology aside, semantics aside, I think blogging, or at least the blogs I read, have left the blogosphere and entered the realm of magazine quality publications.

More and more of the blogs I visit, and again, this may be a shift in my personal focus, are writing longer, well researched, higher quality articles. Sure, there’s still some opinion pieces, news bits and other odd items, but by and large I’m seeing more content that I would call “featured stories”, things you would lead a magazine or newspaper with. While there are plenty of personal blogs, product blogs, news blogs and every other kind of blog, some seem to be pulling away from the crowed. There have always been blogs like this but most were run by ex-main stream media writers and editors or managed and funded by them. What I’m seeing is a rise in production quality from your every day blogger and I, for one, like this shift. I hope it’s not just me noticing more, but rather the game being stepped up.

From the WordPress blog

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog.

Emphasis mine. This isn’t that urgent, if you ask me. If you don’t trust users on your blog then they shouldn’t be on your blog. This won’t effect too many people, but still, it’s always worth upgrading and fixing any potential threats no matter how small a risk they are. Grab WordPress 2.3.3 or the patched XML-RPC file if you don’t want to upgrade.

[Update]: This is more urgent than I thought for some people. I forgot that you can let people register on your blog to make comments! Those will be valid users as well and could exploit this bug. I don’t have user registration turned on, but I know a lot of people do so this is quite serious indeed. Upgrade ASAP.

A few weeks ago I posted about the High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook and how much I liked it. At the time it wasn’t available anymore. I was hoping Jeremy would start up an affiliate program because the ebook is one of the few that I feel provide quality information on a subject full of scammers. Jeremy has decided to release this ebook for free, all you have to do is sign up for the newsletter (nothing is free). It’s well worth it and the newsletter is pretty good too.

Grab High Performance Affiliate Marketing now, just in case he changes his mind!

[Update]: I was wrong, it’s completely free! You don’t even have to sign up to the newsletter. It’s still worth it, but not required. Very nice.

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