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What Would You Do With WP-Hackers.com?

What Would You Do With WP-Hackers.com?

By Jeffro on July 21, 2010

WordPress community member Kris Young has registered the domain WP-Hackers.com which so far, points to a holding page. The question Kris asks on the WP-Hackers mailing list is what do to with it. His idea so far is to create a PasetBin like site where users could comment on code snippets until an agreed upon solution was met which would then lock the snippet and be used as a resource. This code snippet could then be linked to when someone asks a repeated question or one similar to it.

I’ve always thought about the idea of a website that just has code snippets where a user could copy and paste them into the appropriate location and it would work. Back in the days of editing archive.php, single.php, etc, I really thought the idea of some sort of code bank would have been awesome. Let’s say I was editing my theme and needed a code snippet that displayed comments in a certain way, I could look through the comments category and look for code snippets for the desired functionality I was looking for. Ideally though, this information would be better served as being within the Codex than on a seperate site.

If you were lucky enough to own WP-Hackers.com, what would you do with the domain to make it useful for the WordPress community?

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WordPress.Net.IN Taken Offline

WordPress.Net.IN Taken Offline

By Jeffro on June 7, 2010

Back on June 1st, Michael VanDeMar published a lengthy post explaining the process he goes through in order to clean up an infected website. One exploit that Michael points out is a bad index.php file which if ran as an include(), pulls bad information from the domain WordPress.Net.IN. This domain according to Michael has been in existence for at least three years, first being registered in 2007.

Not only is it being used as an exploit delivery mechanism, but it’s violating the WordPress trademark. According to comments made on the post by Matt Mullenweg, he had attempted to contact the domain registrar to have the domain taken offline.

Okay, well short story is I looked into this when the hack first came up, but haven’t noticed it since and haven’t thought about the domain since then. I’ll contact some friends in the domain business to see what we can do now. (We have a lot more resources than three years ago.)

A few days later, Matt has confirmed that the domain has been taken down due to some help from Justin at GoDaddy. However, there is a difference between taking a domain down and taking ownership of it due to the WordPress trademark. It’s not clear yet whether Matt has put in the effort to try and take ownership of the domain. If not, it’s possible that at some point down the road, the domain will continue to be used but on a different registrar/host which wouldn’t be good for anyone, especially if it were to continue being used as an exploit delivery tool.

I’m interested in how the WordPress trademark is being protected. Is it the sole work of Matt going after violators or is there a team of lawyers acting on Matt’s behalf? I’d also be interested to hear in how a typical trademark violator is dealt with. Everything from discovery to the process of getting it removed or taking over ownership. I think it would be something a lot of folks in the community would be interested to know about.

As for the other point in Michael’s post regarding priorities, meh.

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Andrew Rickmann Selling WP-Fun

Andrew Rickmann Selling WP-Fun

By Jeffro on July 3, 2009

funwithwplogoI’m bummed to see that Andrew Rickmann who runs the Fun With WordPress blog about WordPress is selling the site. Andrew Rickmann always approached topics involving WordPress with an interesting angle. I say interesting because anytime I visited the site, I ended up thinking about writing a response blog post with a link back to his site. One great example is when Andrew Rickmann put together a post that examined what is community. I still refer back to the image he created which shows the community segmented in groups which I agree with as well as his Question 5 part which asks a number of intriguing questions.

The site has around 950 RSS subscribers, receives 100-200 visitors per day with 80-90% of those visitors being new. No clue as to earning potential as the site was never really monetized.

If you’re interested, check out the forum thread and get in contact with him. Hope you get a successful sale Andrew.

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TalkPress bbPress Domain Dilemma

TalkPress bbPress Domain Dilemma

By Jeffro on May 28, 2009

LelandThe following guest was written by Leland Fiegel who operates ThemeLab.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out his free WordPress themes. You can catch him on the WP Tavern forums under the username Leland.

Quiz time: What is one thing that the following Automattic products/services have in common?

WordPress, Akismet, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy, Gravatar, BuddyPress, TalkPress

Answer: Each of their respective .com domains are each controlled by Automattic.

I’m sure you can guess which one is missing off the list, and that’s bbPress. The domain name bbpress.com has been registered since 1997 by a company called B&B Press, Inc. It has nothing to do with online forums.

I’ve been involved with domain names for a few years now, and there are a few general guidelines that are involved when buying domains. One of the more important guidelines is: always get the .com.

I realize most of you reading this are relatively web savvy but imagine this: you’ve never heard of bbPress, but you knew it was a free open-source forum software. You would probably simply type “bbPress” into Google, realize the first result is the one you were looking for, and click through.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the internet are not that savvy. I would imagine a lot of people mistakenly type in bbpress.com into their address bar, wind up on the wrong site, and give up.

At the time of this posting, it looks like Matt Mullenweg is the listed owner of TalkPress.com/net/org/info/biz/us. So why doesn’t Automattic just dump the “bbPress” name, and move everything over to talkpress.org?

There are a number of reasons that were outlined in this bbPress blog post.

  1. It avoids the sort of confusion users experience trying to distinguish between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
  2. bbPress is not a particularly good product name for that service
  3. The bbPress.com domain name is already registered to someone else

Okay, I can understand there is some confusion trying to distinguish between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, but wouldn’t it be even more confusing trying to distinguish between bbPress.org and bbPress.com, considering bbPress.com is a completely unrelated site? Could this “dilemma” be solved by simply switching from “bbPress” to “TalkPress” or do you think it’s fine the way it is?

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Gorilla Project To Change Name

Gorilla Project To Change Name

By Jeffro on May 2, 2009

wpgorillalogoA few days ago, I reported on something called the Gorilla Project, a project aimed at creating a collaborative effort in creating WordPress themes. In that post, it was brought up in the comments that the name of the project was eerily close to a premium theme company named Gorilla Themes. Ryan McCue who is working with the project recently raised the concerns brought up in the previous post to the Google group assigned to the project. Jeeremie agreed that a name change was needed and so, the suggestions started flying in.

Yes, people are really concerned about the name. Last night, we received a very polite email from Carlos Aguaron, owner of www.gorillathemes.com, asking us if we would mind changing the name to avoid confusion between his project and ours. I really didn’t know about gorillathemes.com before and that was just a (bad) coincidence.

We are still very early in development so it would be no problem to change now for a more unique name. Any suggestion? You can search on http://domai.nr to see if domain is available. We are looking for a .org domain, not a .com.

At first, I recommended WPHive.com but there is already a WordPress project that exists using WP-Hive.com so that won’t work. A number of other domains were suggested as well such as WP-Jungle, WPTeam, WPRockers, WPGuerilla, and a few others. At the last moment, I’ve suggested they use WPSynergy which reflects team work and just sounds cool. However, looks like they already have a vote in progress for the name change with WPJungle leading the pack at 4 votes. Place your vote in the poll and let these guys know what you think.

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Two WordPress Migration Tips

Two WordPress Migration Tips

By Jeffro on April 27, 2009

Over the course of this past weekend, I migrated content from one domain to another. My biggest concern regarding the migration was all of the backlinks that the site had received plus the Search Engine pointers which would exist for some time to come. Thankfully, I discovered two things which made the migration very easy.

First, I came across a plugin called Update URLs. This plugin created by Velvet Blues is really simple to use. Since I was moving my content from one domain to another and quite a few URLs within the content were hard coded to images, I needed a quick and easy way to simply replace the site URL. That’s exactly what Update URLs enables me to do as it provides a box for the OLD url and then the NEW url. Once I set that up, I click the button and like magic, all hardcoded site url links are changed.

My second tip is an htaccess modifcation that drove me bonkers until community member Mark McWilliams pointed me to an article which contained the exact bit of code I needed. What I wanted to do was make sure that if someone were to visit /articlename it would automatically redirect them to http://jeffc.me/articlename that way, all backlinks are kept in tact until the domain expires. While I’ll eventually lose some link love because not all backlinked sites will update the link, doing this provides me enough time to hopefully have Google change the URL in their search engine result pages

In the article, this is the bit of code which provided what I needed:

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This code works wonders and will buy the time I need to get my backlinks in order. Thanks Mark for helping me out and I hope this comes in handy for someone else down the road. Thanks to the WXR format or WordPress Extended RSS file which easily exports my comments, file attachments including images, posts, pages, etc, moving the actual content was the easiest part.

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Matt The Domain Guru Strikes Again

Matt The Domain Guru Strikes Again

By Jeffro on April 27, 2009

Near the end of episode 52 of WordPress Weekly, Ma.tt announced on the show that Automattic had finally acquired the awesome WP.com domain name from you guessed it, Yahoo!. Matt mentioned that he has been after this domain ever since the WordPress project started and Jane Wells was actually the one responsible for negotiating the deal. Rumors of the price come in at about eleventy billion dollars. People seem to believe this is a real number so I’ll keep saying it until people realize it’s a reference from a celebrity jeopardy skit on SNL.

Matt is now asking the community what it is they should do with the domain. I’ve come to the conclusion that I think they should scrap or retire the full WordPress.com domain and instead, use WP.com. So, a hosted blog would look like http://username.wp.com What a nice and short domain name. Other than doing that, I can’t think of anything they could use the domain for.

By the way, Matt mentioned in the comments that they are not pursuing the WP.org domain as they have no contact for whomever owns that domain.

As for suggestions brought up by other people, I’ve seen URL Shortening service for WordPress content, a WordPress.com only theme community, mobile version of WordPress.com blogs and a WordPress showcase. The blog post asking for suggestions has 411 responses as the comments have been closed. Most people seem to agree that it would be cool to use WP.com as a URL shortening service as well as the new domain for WordPress.com blogs. I wonder what the Automattic idea machine will crunch out.

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