I just got an email from Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. The core development team found a major flaw in the code of release build 3.0.3.

First off, happy holidays. I hope this time of the year, chilly for many of you, has given you time to enjoy family, friends, and loved ones and reflect on the year before and the year to come.

My last message to you this year is an important but unfortunate one: we’ve fixed a pretty critical vulnerability in WordPress’ core HTML sanitation library, and because this library is used lots of places it’s important that everyone update as soon as possible.

I realize an update during the holidays is no fun, but this one is worth putting down the eggnog for. In the spirit of the holidays, consider helping your friends as well.

You can update in your dashboard, on the “updates” tab, or download the latest WordPress here:

http://wordpress.org/download/

The official release announcement is here:

http://wp.me/pZhYe-qt

Merry WordPressing in 2011,

If you’re on a maintenance contract with Goldstein Media you’re already updated. If not please update your sites or give us a call to arrange a time for us to upgrade your sites for a fee.

Happy New Year Everyone!

-Seth

Tim Ferris, author of the 4 hour work week, gave a talk at the Wordcamp San Francisco about blogging and how to do it without burning out. He gives great suggestions. A must watch.

Some key points:

• Find out when you do your best writing
• Print out your most important posts after you write them and edit them by hand
• Aim to remove 10% to 20% of the post everytime
• Ignore SEO, during the first draft
  • When you try and optimize right away it reads like you were trying to optimize it and not like there is value there for the reader
  • After the first draft you can use Google’s keyword tool to help optimize the article. Don’t over do it
• Try to make sure the post can only be catagorized by one topic. More than one topic in a post can split up your anchor text in link backs.
• There is no correlation to the amount of time you spend on a video to the success of the video
  • Often simpler and shorter is better
  • Not suggested to just post a video with no text. Standalone videos don’t do as well as videos that have text in the post as well.
  • Text spreads through the search engines much faster than video
  • At least summarize what you say in the video or what the video is about
• Most of all have fun with your posts. If you don’t appear to be having fun posting your readers are going to have fun reading it

On Wednesday, WordPress released its newest version 2.8 “Baker.” 2.8 improves the functionality beyond that of 2.7 “Coltrane.” So far after installing it looks great and functions nicely. Below is the official video from WordPress.org.

I am proud to announce a new blog project that I am involved in. Addicted To Social Media is a collaboration with a few other tech friends. Our focus is on the Social Web. Please check it out and if you’re interested in writing please get in touch.

Very interesting video from Google’s Matt Cutts:

Okay, now I am a fan of John C. Dvorak. I’m a big fan of Cranky Geeks and TWIT and his blog. But I do think he is a bit full of cow poop sometimes. Especially when he decides from one bad experience withe “SEO” that SEO and those practicing it are a bunch of crackpots. Now I respect his opinion, but I really think Dvorak is shooting from the hip here with no real aim. Now I have to admit that he is a bit of an aquired taste, and though many might think he’s a total jerk and crank, I feel that he’s just a bit off with this accusation. Mark Jackson over at Search Engine Watch has a great column responding to Dvorak‘s crankyness. Here’s a excerpt:

An article in a major publication last week disparaged SEO, calling it “snake oil” once again. How did the columnist decide SEO doesn’t work, and that its practitioners are a bunch of snake oil salesmen? Well, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (I hasten to give him any attention, as that’s what he and his editor are after) had rewritten his URLs to make them search engine friendly, but lost traffic in his efforts.

Here’s his exact quote:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO Experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Ugh. Here we go again.

First off, dear readers, I exchanged e-mails with his editor-in-chief, and even offered to rebuke this column in a column of my own on his Web site. I just can’t let false claims such as his stand uncontested. When people write columns like this, it affects our industry.

We, as an industry, accept that many people have jumped on the SEO bandwagon, calling themselves SEOs when they have a difficult time even writing compelling title tags. We know that some people will quickly respond to RFPs, get a prospect to cut a few checks, and deliver little in return. Then, there are those of us who have studied for years to understand what good SEO is and worked hours helping our clients achieve measurable results.

OK, time to respond to the column. Begrudgingly, I’ll link to it so you can read it for yourself. At least we can discuss something that works for SEO: good URL structure.

Optimizing URL Structure

The columnist refers to the “fact” that long URLs don’t work. Here’s what he wrote:

My blog had typical, efficient WordPress default URLs, such as http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100 or some such thing. Now on my current blog, that particular URL — which used the simple story ID number to access the post — has been supposedly SEO-optimized behind this URL: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie/.

From what I can tell, this guy did at least one thing wrong — and possibly two — with this one element of proper SEO. I wish I could speak with him directly to confirm my suspicions, and perhaps even teach him a thing or two about what real SEO involves (much more than just one thing).

First, there’s really nothing “wrong” with his original URL structure (/blog/?p=3100). There are only two trailing backslashes.

So what if the URL has a couple of dynamic characters in it (the question mark and equals sign are referred to as “dynamic” characters). Search engines nowadays do fine indexing and ranking these. So long as you’re keeping your content as close to the root as you can, you should be in good shape.

However, it’s not “optimal.” How do we make this optimal? We “optimize.”

via Ignorance: The Trouble with People Who Claim SEO is Snake Oil – Search Engine Watch (SEW).