The original post is at http://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/passwords-reset/

“The WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavoury.

We’re still investigating what happened, but as a prophylactic measure we’ve decided to force-reset all passwords on WordPress.org. To use the forums, trac, or commit to a plugin or theme, you’ll need to reset your password to a new one. (Same for bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org.)”

Some people have interpreted this to mean that WordPress itself has security problems which has caused concern from some of our users.

Please note that this exploit does NOT impact individual WordPress installations that individuals have installed through their cPanel or had Net Solutions install for them.

If, in the last week or so, you have installed updates for the WPTouch, AddThis or W3TotalCache I would suggest you check your copy from the repository (or plugin search) ASAP. The particular exploit gained access to WordPress.org and the plugin repository.

There are always risks associated in hosting any CMS but many of these risks you can mitigate through good password management, security updates and choosing a great web host that offers WordPress maintenance.

You also must not forget to do frequent off-site backups to deal with any potential catastrophe.

Updates

The only constant thing is change, so as Operating Systems and Virus definitionas get updated, Softwares must also be updated. The Internet is made up of the good, the bad and the ugly. People will attempt to break into your website on an hourly basis and if you fail to secure your website, they will get in. You have to take proactive measures to check and update all software used on your website.

Check

Despite all your attaempts to keep a site perfect some site errors are just inevitable. Broken links, slow page loads, codes or pieces of software that suddenly stop working. All these things can affect the browsing experience for your users. Aside from these, and perhaps even more important, is to check for security loopholes or areas where a website is vulnerable for malicious attacks. This is critical especially if important transactions are being conducted through the website.

Repair and Clean Up

if errors and other defects are found, they must be addressed right away. Installing security patches, new tools and softwares, removing unnecessary programs or even re-writing code maybe needed to keep the website in optimal state.

Back Up

E-commerce and business websites often keep a database of sensitive information. Nobody wants to lose such a valuable asset that’s why having a backup is a must. Websites run on servers and servers are not immune to disk crashes and other faults leaving the webmaster powerless. For this reason proper backups should be performed on a regular basis regardless of maintenance schedule. This is to ensure that when the unwanted happens, a backup will come in handy to save the day.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is an activity that aims to keep a website maintained and running as expected. Regular maintenance is critical to the function of a website. Websites, like cars and computers, must be tuned-up and checked for errors to ensure that it will serve its purpose well. Ideally Website Maintenance should be performed on a regular basis.

What Goes On During Website Maintenance Period?

During website maintenance, any one or all of the following may be carried out:

• Check for errors and broken links
• Check for security holes
• Install new tools, plugins and functions
• Update contents
• Update back-end platfom and software patches
• Back up database and content

Because of this, a website may be required to temporarily shut down in order to facilitate these maintenance activities. If this is the case, a webmaster can send notifications to users and readers, put up a “maintenance page” whenever someone views the site, or redirect the visitors to another site or page providing them with limited but important functionalities to ensure that business or transactions will be not halted completely.

Why do websites need to be maintained?
The answer is obvious. A website needs regular website maintenance to function properly amidst update and changes on the internet, malicious attempts and attacks, data server crashes and other online issues.

Why aren’t I coming up first on Google?
We used to be ranked higher, now we are lower, why?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical process that optimizes Web pages to rank high in search engine returns. This is accomplished by optimizing certain sections of web pages so that when read by search engines and, depending on the level of optimization, can create a greater probability of free referral traffic.
Once an high degree of understanding of how search algorithms work, SEO becomes a powerful marketing tool. The end goal is to create pages that contains words for which people will likely search when looking for information such as that contained on your site.

Also, it important to note that when I say search engine, I mean Google. It appears as though the others don’t matter anymore, especially sensis.com.au.

SEO can be a 60-minute job or a recurring activity. For instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get good placement. But in most cases, you will need to pay special attention to keywords used in your pages, because in the eyes of Google, you are an individual just like everybody else.

Here is some free advice

Since SEO relies so heavily on these keywords, the most important keywords and key phrases should be used liberally in the first two paragraphs of the content of each page. They are then sprinkled throughout the body and once again be keyword rich in the last paragraph of every page.

A suggested rule of thumb is to reach for keyword density between 5-15%. Judgment must be used to invoke keywords liberally without getting too repetitive. It may also help to use bold or italics on a keyword or two, but avoid doing this to excess. Another important placement for keywords is in the H1 and H2 header fields of each page. The most important keywords or key phrases should be found here.

Other strategies include naming image files and anchors with keywords. Anchors, also called crosslinks, are references to other pages within the site. Finally providing links to and from external sites, called backlinks is also important, as search engine spider bots navigate by links.

Sounds really easy doesn’t it. Well thankfully there are many SEO companies that will provide this as a service. However, caution should be used in securing a contractor to make sure that what is being promised is feasible, realistic and cost-effective.

But even if you engage a contractor to do your SEO, don’t just expect to be ranked at the top Unless you have keywords that standout ahead of everyone else on the internet.

Firstly, the MU (multi-user) version is now merged into the mainstream product. WordPress MU enables you to install a single version of WordPress for multiple sites. The multiple sites would then have the features same plugins. This seems to be aimed at organisations that want to offer users/members/staff their own blogs.

Version 3 now has “Custom Post Types”. Previously this was restricted to Posts and Pages. For example, let’s say you want to have a Parts catalogue: in 3 it’ll be possible to create a new type of post called “Parts” that will contain the appropriate fields. This is a significant improvement in capability and also allows wordpress sites to resemble a CMS without the need for hacking the back end.

WordPress 2.9 has an option allowing you to create category templates using the slug, i.e category-slug.php. In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.

The menu system has been enhanced with Ajax so that you will be able to drag and drop pages, posts and categories in a similar way to the widget management screen.

The existing default theme, a study in boredom, is much smarter, easily customisable and a long overdue improvement. The theme has Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus and a lot more.

Version 3 includes a number of other more minor changes, including allowing you to change the default user from “Admin” to your choice and easier management of a theme’s background graphic.

I’m a huge fan of WordPress but I don’t believe that this update, useful though it is, does enough to open it up to non-technical users. There’s still a lot to be done to encourage users to customise their blogs more radically and effectively – it’s still all too easy to identify a WordPress site within moments because even simple design changes require knowledge of CSS.

Lets see what WordPress 4 promises!. To stay updated with WordPress Development follow: http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/

The existing geo-targeting practices for search and display media focus on targeting by country, state, region and city. This is all based on IP addresses many of which are dynamic or inaccurate.

You can however custom target by entering a street address and defining a radial boundary a mini Google Maps interface. Getting down to detail there is the option of using longitude/latitude coordinates which can be as accurate to within 100 meters.

So, how do you put in place an alternate solution bypassing the inherent limitations of IP targeting? In search, we often develop a second campaign, ideally with a larger targeting radius and implement geo-specific keywords. While the geo-targeted campaign may have the keyword “pizza” this may only hit a portion of the intended geo-targeted audience. To reach the remaining audience, we typically extend the geo-target radius within a completely new campaign with extended keywords such as “Fitzroy pizza”.

But let’s look at how this works when we use IP address location as the basis of location based targeting.

Google uses MaxMind’s database for mapping IP addresses to a geographical location. They claim it is 99% accurate. What is in the fine print, is that it is 99% accurate in determining the country. This figure will not improve, but drop dramatically with the rise in mobile devices, wireless connections.

Accuracy is also defined as being within 40km which means Melbourne and Frankston are local to each other. So searching for a local Pizza Hut while you are in Frankston might give you Universal Pizza in Lygon Street. Still, probably worth the drive as their pizzas are great.

But from an end user point of view, is this considered local? Well no, not to me, I consider local to be within 5km. Like the ads for local businesses in your local newspaper.

The real happening place for location-based targeted marketing is clearly in mobile and mobile applications; in particular, social media applications that emphasize check-ins and connect you to places and people nearby. There is a world of difference, opportunity, and data between marketing location to where a computer resides and marketing location to the person who self identifies, checks-in, and announces their preferences and next stops.

Google has emphasized that location is an immediate and important relevance enhancer. However as the technology continues to evolve it remains both a limiting factor and a promise. HTML5 can allow permission-based, location-targeted ad delivery to consumers browsing on the mobile Web. Currently, it is supported in Chrome and Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. The use of location-based data remains a point of debate, and just last week Apple posted a warning in its developer forums that if they use location-based data primarily for targeting ads the app will be rejected. Many apps already ask your permission to use your GPS location for app functionality, like the Google toolbar and Foursquare. You can even optionally geotag your tweets.

Likewise, the sharp increase in smartphone adoption all over the world raises both opportunities and challenges. Not only are more people using smartphones, but the devices now cover more of their needs and their day with a multitude of rich, engaging applications – many GPS driven.

Today the database at MaxMind states that it is 83% accurate for the USA and 62% for Australia. I believe this number is overstated and will only get worse which is why the data has not been updated since 2008.

All this makes geographical location services based on IP address unpractical and obsolete.

This factor you can control by choosing a hosting company with the fastest speeds available. Have you ever looked at the same video on 2 different websites and found 1 of them loaded much slower than the other? This is because the bandwidth speed was lower with the slower server. So if you have a website that will have photos, images or videos or other speed intensive items then it’s important to find a hosting company with high bandwidth speeds. If most of your viewers will be from Australia then choose a fast Australian hosting company, but be prepared to pay for it.

When in Australia your internet can access Australian hosting servers slightly faster. For many the difference is barely noticeable as we are talking about fractions of a second, but it can be annoying to have a website load too slowly. The cause may well be attributed to the site being hosted in another country, however well designed and optimized websites (without excessive pictures, videos etc) will often often be the major bottleneck.

There are a few things to take into consideration when choosing a website host.

Service:

I consider this more important than price. The service difference can be huge. If something goes wrong with your site you need to be able to contact your hosting company quickly and get it remedied fast. Things will go down from time to time as this is a fact of life. Your hosting company needs to treat downtime as a priority ahead of sales.

Disk Space

As a general rule, a single website page should not be more than about 100KB, including all images. Remember that most people who visit your site will be using a modem to connect to the Internet and if your pages take too long to load, they will simply leave and go to another site. Whilst there are, obviously, exceptions for sites aimed specifically at broadband users, most web sites do not fit into this niche category.

Working with 100KB as guide, a 10-page website would require approximately 1MB of disk space.

The cost of disk space does not vary on where your site is hosted. This is because hosting hardware costs are fairly similar around the world. Watch out for hosting providers that do not specify this and may charge you per web page. On the other hand, watch out for providers who offer unlimited disk space. They usually have acceptable usage policies that over-ride this, i.e if you use more disk space that is considered reasonable (whatever that is) your account will get suspended or terminated.

Bandwidth

In the most simple of terms an analogy using water flowing through pipes gives the easiest explanation of bandwidth, the wider the pipes (i.e. higher bandwidth) the more water can be moved per second (or data).

So Bandwidth is the amount of data passage per second and is generally measured in Gbps (Gigabits per second).

It is easy to confuse bandwidth, i.e. the speed of your connection with data allowance, which is the amount of data that can be transferred to and from your server or web site per month and is measured in Gb. Most web hosts actually incorrectly use the term bandwidth in place of data transfer allowance, and it is important when choosing a web host, or a web hosting plan that you have a rough idea of the amount data transfer you will require.

Put simply each time somebody looks at a page from your site they download that page from your server, using up some of your data transfer allowance, if your average page size is 100kb and each of your 100 visitors a day looks at say 4 pages then per day you are using 40Mb which equates to a data transfer of 1.2Gb per month. Unfortunately customers visiting your site are not the only ones to use up your data transfer, sending and receiving email, uploading new pages to your server, and believe it or not GoogleBot, MSN Bot and the Yahoo! Robot to name but a few of the countless spiders out there, all use up a portion of your data transfer depending on how many of your pages they spider. In-fact the various web spiders out there can use up a significant amount of your data transfer especially when it is in it’s infancy as they attempt to categorise it for production in organic search results sometimes spidering your web site up to 10 times a day. It is possible to tell these spiders not to crawl your site, not to crawl specific pages or not to follow specific links but that is beyond the scope of this discussion, and generally they are your friends because it is these spiders which will get you listed in the major search engines and ultimately drive customers to your site.

For really cheap hosting providers the trick of the trade here is called Over Selling. Think of it like providing a 1 inch thick water pipe to a small number of people in a town, lets say 10 people. Through this 1 inch thick water pipe a maximum flow 1 litre per second is possible determined by the bandwidth. When only 10 people are connected to your water pipe the water will be flowing fast most of the time. When you then sell this to another 100 people, imagine what happens during the morning shower rush. They get some water, but it will be flowing very slowly.

The same analogy can be used for ADSL in Australia. You may order an 1.5MB ADSL line from Telstra. Telstra describes this 1.5Mb ADSL as super fast, while the rest of the developed world uses around 24MB. Yet even on this super fast 1.5M ADSL you will get nowhere near this speed 99% of the time because they put many subscribers on the same circuit, known as overselling.

Bandwidth costs money for providers. And in Australia Bandwidth costs over 20 times more compared to USA. We largely have our monolpoly telecommunications provider Telstra to thank for this. Despite their huge profits, the investment in the network bandwidth has been minimal. The wholesale costs have beed steady over the last 10 years, while in the USA they fall substantially year on year.

This forces many hosting providers to limit bandwidth and data allowances.

The lower your Bandwidth provided by your web hosting provider, the slower your site will download to users’ computers, irrespective of how fast their internet connections are or whether they have their site hosted in Australia or USA. If multiple users are accessing your site at once, they may find that they experience extremely slow, or no, connectivity.

Data Allowance

Again a popular misconception among many people, as well as web hosting providers, is that bandwidth and data transfer are the same. This is probably because they are very closely linked, but for anyone who is subscribed to a web hosting service, knowing the difference can save both time and money.

Put simply, bandwidth is the quantity of data that can be transferred from a website at any one time, while data transfer is the amount transferred over a period of time. This is where the water and pipes come in. A pipe would be bandwidth—the bigger the pipe, the more water could pass through. However, data transfer would be the amount of water in the pipe in a month, for example. Essentially, data transfer is the use of bandwidth.

Data transfer allowances control how much data can be transferred from your site over a certain time. For example, a web hosting provider may impose a limit of 2 gigabytes of data per month. If your website exceeds this, it may be taken offline until the next month.

For customers who really want to make use of the Internet this allowance can dramatically increase.
In particular emails where the trend is for people to rely on email more and more including file attachments and on-line document storage.

Unfortunatelly Australia is way behind in this area. The value for money in USA in this area is in the order of 20 to 30 fold. If you want your site hosted in Australia be prepared to have very little Data Allowance, often less than 10GB.

In my opinion this overriding factor makes the choice to host in USA very simple based on value for money.

Price

It is important not to have to pay twice the going rate for the same disk space, speed and data allowance.
Choosing between a company offering $5.95 AUD per month for slower service, slower download speeds and loaded servers… or $19.95 AUD per month for faster service, fastest available download speeds and optimized servers and good software ?

In my opinion, you should host in Australia if value for money or budget is not a concern.