Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Security pros completely bypass Vista’s now “useless” security
  About all those fancy security measures Microsoft put into Windows Vista… well, they’re now pretty much useless, according to security experts from IBM and VMware presenting a new attack methodology at this week’s Black Hat security conference.
• Reporters booted from conference for hacking
  With thousands of hackers milling around the Black Hat convention here, and widespread snooping on the public Wi-Fi network, one place was supposed to be off limits: the press room.
• Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
  The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both partie

A couple days ago I wrote about the plethora of plugins needed to create a secure family style blog.  Today I’m going to tell you about the 5 most essential plugins everyone needs to have installed and activated regardless of your blog style or niche.

Wordpress.com Stats
Wordpress.com Stats is a pretty powerful “real” time stats package that was built for Wordpress.com blogs.  It’s also been ported to a plugin for Wordpress self hosted blogs as well.  The Stats info sits in your Dashboard and gives you data for number of visits (by day, week, or month), top posts of the day, top searches of the day and most active posts all time.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also a traffic stats plugin but is much more powerful than Wordpress.com Stats, however, the data only updates once per day (at night) so you can’t view real time statistics which is why you should use both.  Analytics provides the same data as Stats but also includes map location of visitors, visitor information such as browser version, OS version, screen size, ISP info, detailed referrer stats and much more.  Also included in Analytics is report functionality where you can schedule reports to be emailed daily, weekly or monthly.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
FeedSmith is Feedburner’s own plugin designed for Wordpress.

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Postalicious
Postalicious is a great, recently updated, plugin for casual bloggers (like me) who want a quick way to keep their blog activity going even when they don’t have the time to create new original content.  Postalicious takes your Delicious, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes feeds and creates a blog post.  It’s very configurable and automatic.  I have Postalicious post my links daily (when there are at least two links).  You can choose what categories to assign to the post, have it auto published or saved as a draft, etc.  Delicious has their own tool , which they still refer to as “experimental”. Don’t waste your time, Postalicious is way more powerful.

Akismet
You have to have a comment spam killer if you have a blog.  Akismet, was built by Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress’ creator.  Generally installed automatically when you install your Wordpress self-hosted site, Akismet should be a no brainer.

Akismet is a spam-fighting service that is different from others such as Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior in that it checks the content of the comment anonymously with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not.

Here’s a hilarious video produced by CrunchGear. If you’ve used Twitter for more than 3 days chances are you’ve seen the “Fail Whale”… Twitter’s effective blue screen of death. If Twitter users jump ship to one of it’s competitors, horrid server response will be the reason. (slight subtitle language warning)

Not sure what Twitter is? Here’s the best explanation.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Hacker Claims Apple Can Spy On iPhone Users
  Apple may have opened up the iPhone to third-party applications, but it is keeping a very close eye on those apps. According to hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, the iPhone can “phone home” to tell Apple what apps are installed…
• RFID goes prime time in Beijing Olympics
  Radio frequency identification technology will be facing one of its first major tests during the Beijing Olympics, taking care of ticketing for the estimated 3 million athletes, journalists, and spectators. The chips embedded in Olympics tickets will…

Here are some interesting links from today:

• E-Passports Can Be Hacked and Cloned in Minutes
  Tests have concluded that new e-passports can be hacked within minutes. A researcher cloned the chips in 2 passports and then implanted images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. Both passports passed as genuine by UN approved passport readers.
• Google Search Provides Olympic Event Schedules Inline
  Find out when events in your favorite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
• SlingPlayer 2.0 beta goes public | Crave, the gadget blog – CNET
  The beta version of the SlingPlayer 2.0 software is now available for Windows users as a free download from Sling Media’s Web site. The software, which allows owners Slingbox products to access their TV programming via any broadband-connected PC…
• Watch the Olympics Online
  The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won’t miss any action is to take advantage of the many video outlets online.