From the category archives:
I changed it so that anyone can follow me on Twitter or FriendFeed. The links to follow me are http://twitter.com/mattcutts and http://friendfeed.com/mattcutts .
And of course you can subscribe to my RSS feed if you want. You can subscribe by clicking any of the buttons below:
If aren’t a subscriber yet, let those RSS buttons call to you. 
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Read about WordPress 2.5.1 and download the new version here. It includes a security fix, so you’re going to want to upgrade. It’s well-known that older versions of WordPress get attacked by malicious bad guys, so I absolutely recommend upgrading as soon as you can to be safe.
By the way, if you subscribed to the WordPress development blog like I suggested, you’d already know about this security update.
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The title pretty much says it all. A while ago, someone saw my call for good summer vacation reading and the resulting pile of Amazon books that I bought, and they sent me a couple free books, maybe to get a review or a mention. I appreciate the creativity, but please don’t send me any books or other free stuff. If you’ve got a new book coming out, I’m happy to hear about it, but if I decide to read or review it I’ll buy my own copy.
A while ago, someone sent a big cookie with a “No spam” message like this:
I appreciate the thought, but please don’t send me any free stuff. Google has a gift policy to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Even if Google didn’t have such a policy, I wouldn’t want to accept any gifts of value, because it’s important to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Usually I just give away any unsolicited stuff that gets sent my way. Thanks.
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Unless you want registered users to be able to edit your blog posts, you should update your WordPress installation to version 2.3.3. It’s a small change, and if you want to you can just replace your xmlrpc.php file with a newer version.
By the way, if you followed the advice in my recent security tips for WordPress post, you wouldn’t have to read about the update on my blog. Instead, you would already be subscribed to the WordPress security/developers’ feed (Atom feed link) that is suitable for subscribing in Google Reader or your favorite feed reader. I highly recommend subscribing to that feed so that you’re less likely to be caught by surprise when there’s a security issue with WordPress.
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A while ago I was looking around for how to make my own comments a different color on my blog. Most of the advice was along the lines of “Add code to check if the commenter’s email is the same as the email address of the blog’s author.” Can you spot the flaw in that logic? If a commenter knows the email address of the blog author, she could use the blog owner’s email address in her comment and get her own comment highlighted. Worse yet, someone could try to discover the blog owner’s email address by trying lots of email addresses until they saw their comments change to a different color.
So I dug a little deeper and found a good answer on this support thread. The trick is simple: instead of checking the author’s email address, check their user id to see if it’s the user id of the blog owner. Pretty smart. After that, it was a simple matter of
1. Changing my theme to add an “authcomment” style
I edited style.css and near the bottom added these lines:
.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}
2. Editing my comments.php file to add a little code
My comments.php file had a line that looked like this:
<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment…
and I changed it to more or less look like this:
<li class=”<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = “authcomment”;
echo $oddcomment;
?>” id=”comment…
That’s about it. Now I have a distinctive color for my own comments, so you can quickly scan a thread to see when I circle back around to leave a comment.
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