On Thursday evening I was priviledged enough to be invited to do a presentation about WordPress, the development process and how it can be used as a source of income.  The presentation was part of an event organised by bloc called All Together Now which was organised to promote the benifits of open source software and social media to small businesses in North Wales. I have uploaded the presentation to slideshare and embedded it below for anyone that is interested in the slides.

In the presentation I also gave a demo of the current state of WordPress 2.7 including a live demo of new features like the core updater and plugin installer.

It’s great to see that the habari guys are committed to security as well as functionality and are providing security updates for there pre-1.0 software.  It is a pity to see that they don’t disclose much in there security announcements.

For me, responsible open security practises should mean that as well as providing a quick response to security issues you provide enough detail about the issue to your users to allow them to make a judgement call about how important the upgrade is to them.  Do they need to do the upgrade immediately because the issue is easy to exploit or can it wait till the weekend when they have more time to ensure they have a backup and a plan for when the upgrade goes wrong.
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Due to hardware issues this site has seen some unplanned downtime of late.  The server that was hosting this site (and providing smtp/imap/dns/ircbot services for ftwr.co.uk) started playing up and would randomly lockup hard.  After a few days of trying to resolve these hardware issues I decided that it was time for a two pronged response - build a new server to replace the current one and start to move some of the services off onto a VPS.

I had been planning for a while to get a slicehost vps server to move all the web properties onto so as to have more bandwidth available for visitors - this site was shifting 5G of traffic a month up my adsl connection on it’s own!

Hopefully all of this site should be running fine now I have got apache2/mysql tuned to run in the limited environment of my 256M slice and wp-super-cache up and running.

Please let me know if anything is broken!