Cloaking Hack Puts Spam In Your WordPress Search Engine Results

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Since some days a rather nasty hack has been going round in the WordPress community. I actually noticed it myself not that long when I googled for ‘Chris Pearson‘ and what I saw in the results was… shall we say ‘interesting’?

Prozac, Levitra, Lexapro? Had Chris sold the ‘Best Damn Blog on the Planet’, AKA Pearsonified? I went to check out Chris’ blog but no. No Prozac, Levitra or anything else of suspicious nature to be found there. Just your regular well-tuned Pearson content. I even looked in the source code and a quick search for known brands ended empty. I left again, having long forgotten already why I googled Chris in the first place.

Now it seems though that this hack is making the rounds and becoming more and more popular. Leland Fiegel from Themelab first reported about it on first reported about it on the Themelab blog, more than a month ago already. Afterwards the issue was covered over at the WP Tavern forums but no solution has been found so far. Even the WordPress Lead Developer, Mark Jaquith, is left clueless and hopes to solve the issue ASAP. [Read more…]

Mark Jaquith on Merging WordPress Blogs

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The b5media WordPress mastermind, Mark Jaquith, has a great tip on merging multiple WordPress blogs.

Here’s my tip: do not select an existing blog user to “own” the imported content! Instead, create a new temporary user just for that content. Here is why: the imported posts may need some manual cleanup, like integration into the new blog’s category structure, or adding/removing tags.

Why? Check out his post for an answer to that. Wise words, take it from someone who’s merged 7 blogs into 1 successfully…

Mark Jaquith Launches Wordsplosion

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Mark Jaquith, of WordPress and b5media fame, launched Wordsplosion the other day, after seeing a stupid T-shirt while shopping with his wife. It is something of a promo story for WordPress, but still:

4 hours later, Wordsplosion was online. It’s pretty amazing that you can go from idea to execution in a matter of hours using WordPress. Wordsplosion showcases “the best of the worst of the wide world of words.” It contains (and will continue to contain) all manner of grammatical errors, punctuation gaffes, misspellings, horrible typography, etc. It’s LOL cats for smart people.

Check it out for stupid type.