WordPress 2.8.5: A Hardening Release

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Hardening release? Really?

Anyway, version 2.8.5 of popular blogging platform WordPress is available and it features code cleanup and addresses some potential issues. You should upgrade as always, either from within your WordPress install, or by downloading from wordpress.org.

In other WordPress news, the team is pimping the exploit scanner plugin which sounds like a good idea if you think your WordPress site might have been hit, and also urges you to participate in the 2.9 beta testing.

Pingdom Adds Twitter Support, Web Hosts Beware

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Uptime monitoring service Pingdom now supports alerts via Twitter, which means that you could get tweets when your site goes down. This is great since it offers realtime public information about downtime, and puts more pressure on the web hosts. After all, if you’re an open customer of Host X, then tweets about your site going up and down all the time will hurt their brand and hopefully force them to try harder.

People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.

Transparency, gotta love it! So now when tdhedengren.com or tdh.me fails, you know you can blame Media Temple, and when tdh.se is down you should bitch to Binero.

Get your own free Pingdom monitoring account to try it out. Just add Twitter in your site settings within the account.

Envato Launches ActiveDen – Oh Wait, That’s Not New After All!

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Envato’s Flash marketplace used to be known as FlashDen, but has now changed its name to ActiveDen. Why? Well, Adobe doesn’t want the good folks at Envato to use their trademark, being “Flash” obviously, in this fashion. Collis Ta’eed emailed the members and published a blog post on the matter, talking not so much of what he thought of Adobe’s demand but rather of the future, because obviously they complied and changed the name.

The new name amends the use of the word Flash, and it also opens up the marketplace for the future. In the last year we have added a budding Flex library and we now look forward to listing other interactive products like Adobe Air and maybe even Microsoft Silverlight!

Beware of using trademarks in your own brands and domains is the lesson here.