Weblog Tools Collection

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Vulnerable WordPress Blogs Not Being Indexed: Technorati has decided to not index vulnerable and exploited WordPress blogs. This comes after the recent spat of hacks that were discovered on various high profile blogs and websites. What was even more interesting was the fact that some of these hacks and exploitations might have come from covert and encrypted code hidden in various themes available for free over the web. The moral of this story is that you need to upgrade your WordPress blog now to WordPress 2.5.

Just so that everyone is aware, WordPress 2.5 is the latest stable version and this should be the version that everyone should upgrade to. Any older versions leaves you vulnerable. [EDIT] As mentioned on the legacy 2.0 page, WordPress 2.0.11 is the latest stable download with all the latest security fixes for the 2.0 branch. However, WordPress 2.5 is still the latest and the greatest and should be everyones upgrade target.

As for themes, if you feel that the theme you are using might be suspect of something strange, just disable it and get something else. I suggest you download themes from the original author’s website/blog and stay away from any theme that has an encrypted footer (though that would be hard to determine without looking at the code). At weblogtoolscollection.com we try our darnest to link directly to theme authors for the download.

Technorati is just the beginning. If your blog has spammy links, has covert hidden pages or links, is used for nefarious purposes, even without your knowledge, you are being penalized by the search engines. We are going to put together a post on how to figure out if your blog is hacked/exploited, clean up your blog if it is hacked, get your blog back to order, find spammy pages if they do exist and how to get your blog re-indexed. In the meantime, if you know of a good resource, please let us know and we will add it to the post.

Today is a good day to upgrade to WordPress 2.5

There are many guides out there (one in particular I won’t dare mention) about upgrading to 2.5, but I was curious how your experience was.

I’ve personally upgraded two of my blogs — one manually, and one using Keith’s awesome WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. In both cases, I ran into no issues aside from a few incompatible plugins (you did check the list, right?).

To get the ball rolling, here are several links to some upgrade experiences around the web. My hope is to make this post a resource with a list of upgrade guides and experiences. Please feel free to add your own in the comments below (only one link please).

• Alex Frison shares with us how to upgrade 2.5 in 5 minutes.
• Random View shares his experience with upgrading to 2.5.
• Christer Edwards discusses updating, not one, but multiple blogs to WP 2.5 with no issues.
• Jeffro2pt0 discusses his transition to 2.5.
• And of course Socialized Software provides us with an in-depth WordPress 2.5 Review (link removed for suspicion of XSS).

So what was your upgrade experience like?