Congratulations to Justin Williams, who has just announced his new application, Today. This application is really nicely polished and is a good example of how an application can aim to solve something simple, yet solve it well.
This also marks Justin’s full embrace of the indie Mac development pursuit. Best of luck to you, Justin! Welcome to the party. Let’s hope Today is a success for you, and tomorrow as well!
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.
Please let me know if you run into any problems!
The Red Sweater Blog features updates about our apps and articles about related topics.
