Gawker’s Consumerist blog has been sold to nonprofit Consumers Union. Gawker Media’s Hollywood gossip blog Defamer is also up for sale. The Gawker blog network has been steadily shrinking since last year. There’s no official word on how much Consumerist was sold for but Peter Kafka at Media Memo says he’s been told mid-six figures.
Denton wouldn’t comment on the sale of Consumerist, an advocacy site with attitude that he put on the block last month. And he would only confirm that Defamer, his attempt to break into Hollywood coverage, is for sale.
But I’m told that Consumerist may have fetched something in the “mid-six figure range,” and that a logical buyer for Defamer would be BuzzNet, the pop culture blog network that picked up Denton’s Idolator music site earlier this year.
Consumerist never seemed like the kind of blog that could attract lots of advertising so it seems appropriate that it was sold to the company behind the subscription
Consumer Reports publication. Some commenting on a Consumerist
post about the sale sound concerned the Consumerist blog itself could go subscription but
Consumer Reports has a number of blogs on its website (see
here) that are available free to the public so Consumerist is probably safe from subscriber fees for now.
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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere
As the year ends, it’s time to see which plugin developers created the most sought-after WordPress plugins for 2008. Fortunately, W-Shadow.com has compiled a list of the top WordPress plugin developers using rankings from the number of downloads from the wordpress.org plugin directory.
And here are the top 10 Wordpress Plugin Developers for 2008:
- Michael Torbert
961 306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose).
- Matt Mullenweg
921 827 downloads. Everybody knows Matt, the main WP dev and author of Akismet.
- Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
775 220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls and other cool plugins.
- Arne Brachhold
628 350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
- Andy Skelton
449 345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats. Another dedicated hacker.
- Alex Rabe
429 705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery, etc.
- Oliver Seidel
361 918 downloads. Author of cforms II.
- Joost de Valk
328 036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP and numerous other tools.
- Donncha O Caoimh
246 752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache and other assorted plugins.
- Vladimir Prelovac
244 963 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube, various SEO plugins, and more.
Special Mentions
Check out the top 1000 as well!
Original post by Ade Magnaye
One of the most common ways your WordPress blog can be compromised would be by brute force attacks. A brute force attack is the most widely known password cracking method. This attack simply tries to use every possible character combination as a password. To recover a one-character password it is enough to attempt 26 combinations (‘a’ to ‘z’). Luckily, a WordPress plugin is there to guard your blog from such attacks.
Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected wilean a brief period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.
Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts wilean 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.
Installation instructions:
1. Extract loginlockdown-1.2.zip into your wp-content/plugins directory into its own folder (note: not the root plugins folder, as this may cause the activation routine to fail).
2. Activate the plugin in the Plugin options.
3. Customize the settings from the Options panel, if desired.
Requires at minimum WordPress 2.5, tested up to 2.5.1, however, I’m using it on my WordPress 2.7 blog with no problems at all.
Dowmload Login Lockdown here.
Original post by Ade Magnaye
As Paris Lemon points out there’s a bitchmeme on Techmeme right now started here by Loic Le Meur about using Twitter authority as a way to reduce the number of results in a Twitter search. Since it has been suggested it will likely soon be created by someone using the Twitter API if it hasn’t alalert been created. Technorati uses authority on its search to show only posts from blogs that have a certain number of inbound links.
Critics of a Twitter authority search say including only Twitterers that have large numbers of followers is unfair and that it will cause people to attempt and obtain more followers by following more people. It would also tend to favor people who have been on Twitter longer and tend to have more followers. There are a few of other ideas being suggested as alternatives - some can be found in the comments on TechCrunch’s post. They are:
Provide a way to limit search results to only tweets that have been responsed to or re-tweeted.
Allow people to search only tweets from people that they follow.
Twitter’s search tool alalert has a few ways (see also search operators) to reduce the number of tweets in a search. You can search a specific person’s tweets and you can return only tweets that contain a link. You can also limit searches to tweets by people near a specific place. You can limit the results to tweets only from certain dates. It’s clear these tools aren’t enough and the Twitter search engine needs more advanced filtering. The more ways available for users to search tweets the better.
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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere
