Buck Lawrimore

We’ve moved our blog from one web host to another because of a malicious hacking that occurred on Labor Day. Every page on every website we had on that hosting company was hacked with an advertisement for Viagra, placed at the bottom of the page and technically not visible. However it caused each page to load slowly and we assume the intent was to steal our visitors. It is taking us many hours to purge the bad Viagra code from our pages, and we’re still not done.

We host other websites with this company, one of the web’s largest hosts, and none of them have been hacked. So we have to assume that the point of entry was our Wordpress blog, or perhaps the Studio Press theme we were using. Research online indicates that themes can be one of the biggest “hacker holes” on websites because they are not all vetted for tight security. By contrast the themes offered on wordpress.org, including this one, are supposedly checked out to be OK.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a  Wordpress blog or are thinking about it, don’t host it on a control panel or account shared with other websites, and be very careful about the themes you choose - stick with those on the Wordpress site to be safe.

Twitter is hot. No doubt about it. When CNN anchors give their Twitter address so you can follow them online, it has reached the high-level mainstream. Here are 10 top reasons why Twitter is hot:

1. It’s free. Anyone can enjoy it at no cost.
2. It’s easy. Anyone can sign up for their own account at twitter.com and be posting tweets in minutes.
3. It’s fun. You can follow other people - friends and strangers, nadas and gurus, to see what they’re saying and if you don’t like what someone is posting, with a click, you don’t follow them any more.
4. It’s new. Early adopters and social media lovers get a kick out of twitter because it’s new. Lots of people don’t even know what Twitter is all about and think it sounds silly.
5. It sounds silly. Yep somehow this puts it in the same category as Google and Yahoo. Names which start out sound silly seem to capture the public imagination and catch on faster. In time they become respected and admired if they’re good at what they do.
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