Matt Mullenweg from the WordPress team has posted a message about the security of WordPress, which MarsEdit users who run WordPress should take a look at. It’s particularly timely because there are a number of attacks going around that impact older WordPress blogs that haven’t been updated to to the most recent version.

In my customer support for MarsEdit, I have been seeing these security problems pop up quite a bit lately. The so-called “spam injection” attacks often inject spam links at the oblivious expense of how these links might mess up the XMLRPC interface which blog clients such as MarsEdit use to interact with your blog. It’s gotten to the point where error messages from the blog such as “Parse error. Not well formed.” are almost certain to be symptoms of such a spam injection attack. Updating to the latest WordPress almost always fixes the problem immediately.

Matt’s advice is pretty basic: update to the latest WordPress, and check your posts for signs of tampering. But it’s nice to have advice “from the top,” so to speak. I will be glad to see this wave of blog-attacks pass us by as more and more users get updated to the latest release of WordPress.

I commented on the post, suggesting that what WordPress would really benefit from is some kind of automated updater, so that users can easily update without having to worry about whether they’re doing it right or whether they’ll mess up their blog. The great news is Matt replied saying that they are in fact working on such a feature for 2.6.

Looking forward to a built-in automatic updater for WordPress! But in the mean time, be sure to stay current so you avoid the nasty attacks that are going around.

Chuck Joiner has started a new Mac roundtable discussion podcast, called MacJury.

The format is pretty casual and similar in tone and structure to some other great Mac podcasts such as MacBreak Weekly.

I was honored to be invited for the second episode, which has just gone live. In this jury, Paul Kafasis, Chuck La Tournous, Steve Sande, and myself joined Chuck in discussing a number of things including the merits of the Mac Mini, the possible impact of the Yahoo/Microsoft merger, and of course, some talk of the iPhone and how its browser experience dominates the mobile market.

Check it out!

MarsEdit 2.1.3 is now available for direct download or update from within the app. This release is a potpourri of little fixes, including one that makes MarsEdit more reliable in preserving the “draft” status of posts from WordPress and Blogger.

• Fix detection of draft posts from WordPress 2.5 and Blogger.
• Added support for the #tags# placeholder in preview template
• Fix console errors when refreshing with main window closed
• Improve handling of localhost-based blog URLs.
• Markup item placeholder #askurl# now defaults to “Enter a URL:” instead of “Enter Text:”
• Avoid escaping characters in URLs pasted or entered in dialog.
• Fix a bug involving UI display for Blosxom-based weblog settings.

Please let me know if you run into any problems!

A few months ago Mike Lee, then of Delicious Monster, and now running his own show with United Lemur, decided to put his lemurs where his mouth was, so to speak, as part of a creative stunt to encourage other people to donate money to the Madagascar Fauna Group, an organization dedicated to saving the lemurs.

The way it worked was basically, anybody who donates $100 or more to the non-profit organization, would receive as a token of Mike’s thanks, a plush lemur toy. Mike has one of his own, and its name is Thievey. Anybody who took him up on the offer would be considered a part of Club Thievey, and would be encouraged to send in photos of their own plush animal, in a different habitat.

When Ringo arrived, the first thing I noticed was he was shivering from the cold Boston winter weather. Fortunately my wife is both talented and ambitious in the needle arts, so she went straight to work on an appropriate little jumper for our furry friend. He immediately perked up and seemed a lot happier all around. Not always shivering so much as he huddled on the corner of my desk.

The Red Sweater changed everything, even making it possible for Ringo to get his outdoor time. In this picture, it’s about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, yet Ringo is laughing it up in the trees while most other New England fauna are huddled up in their dens.

Even still, being an animal from rather warmer climes, Ringo does sometimes appreciate the radiators in our apartments, which are toasty even when the air outside is brisk.

You might get the impression from these photos that Ringo mostly sits around and does nothing. Well, that’s true. He has a rather luxurious life here in Somerville. But it’s not all play, he does have some responsibilities as “Chief Ringleader” at Red Sweater Software. Mainly, Ringo has an innate sense for when I’m working too hard, and has been known to put his, ahem, tail down about it.

OK, Ringo. You win! I’ll put down the computer for a while. Just as soon as I press “Send to Weblog.” Now we’re going to spend some quality time offline.