Alex Reid

After the election was official this past weekend, canada.votes2011.ca went live, gathering up steam on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a project that I’ve been somewhat busy with for the past ten weeks, in anticipation of the five provincial elections coming up this fall.

The site is built around using the new functionality of WordPress’ Multi-site network, and a subtle domain hack. I’m still adding to the site, and recruiting writers to add content over the next five weeks, and again closer to the five provincial elections in October.

WordPress.com was hit by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack which took down 30 million hosted blogs across the world. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second. This is certainly by far the largest DDOS attack on WordPress.com.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated:

“There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas — it’s currently been neutralized but it’s possible it could flare up again later, which we’re taking proactive steps to implement.

In the past week, WordPress has released two updates (3.0.2 & 3.0.3).

Unless you have additional contributors to your WordPress setup, I would suggest waiting until the next WordPress version upgrade which should be within the next week or two.

The new version will really improve the usability of WordPress, including a lot of great goodies such as:

• Theme search improvement, making the theme search within the dashboard act like it does on WordPress.org, which is more user friendly.

• Internal Linking. This is a most wanted feature for SEO gurus because it will allow users to search through their existing posts and pages, and add links within their content. A button would be included in the post/page panel, just like external link, you can include an internal link.

• New Admin Bar. If you’ve ever used a WordPress.com blog, you are already familiar with how this works and looks. This feature will greatly improve those using WordPress MU (now it’s called Multi-Sites) to manage several blogs within one site.

  There has been some resistance to this being included in the core, it’s still up for debate whether this will be an option or a hard coded feature.

• Updated Visual Editor – the Visual Editor will be updated to TinyMCE v3.3.9.2.

• Multi-taxonomy Queries – improves search requests within WordPress.

• Admin CSS Cleanup. The current CSS code is bloated and contains no comments or structure. Essentially this is a restructuring on the backend code.

• QuickPress update. Most people don’t use QuickPress, which allows for Quick Posting. This new template tag will allow it to be used on the front end of your site for faster posting.

• Improved Admin Dashboard which will provide a single endpoint for accessing profile information, cross site preferences and a launching point for multiple blogs.

• Password reset improvement. Right now, resetting a password takes too many steps. There are two e-mail verification steps, when one step should do.

• Post Templates & Styles. Because WordPress is being used as a CMS more and more, this is a much-needed feature. It would allow designers / developers to create custom post templates and styles. The goal of this feature is to allow denoting a post as a certain style/type/kind.

  Some example styles are aside, gallery, link, quote. This will allow themes to style these posts accordingly. This idea is similar to sticky posts, but taking it to a further level because now you can have numerous uniquely styled posts.

Look forward to these updates in the coming weeks here.

This past weekend, New Winnipeg Web Hosting updated the company web site which frankly I’m in love with.

The new site now allows clients to access their account management, cPanel and Webmail. A nice easy one-stop shop for all sorts of access. Plus the site is updated.