Matt Mullenweg announced the early release of WordPress 2.6 on the WordPress blog one month ahead of schedule. Here is a video that runs us through the most noteable new features and improvements.

Update: Just a week ago I did a View Source of my blog webpage and discovered some editURI entries that redirected to a domain i did not know and when I tried to look it up with domaintools.com, my browser bombed out… So far from wanting to appear to be wearing a tinfoil-hat, I embarked on a quest to ‘harden’ my blog and searched around for Wordpress security related sites. The most relevant and in-depth as well as valuable articles, advice, links and plugins are found over at blogsecurity.net

The result of all this lockdown madness was that I went a bit overboard and couldn’t even log in to my blog because of editing .htaccess on the server. DO NOT mess with that unless you know what you’re doing, you can seriously disrupt the flow of your blogging posts with this kind of tweaking and fiddling. As if that was not enough, afterwards posts I edited did not save and the result was a post title of Blog Security!!! for nearly a week with no content being able to be saved. It took over a week of hard graft down in the trenches and we’re happy to report everything is up and running again.

There comes a time in every blogger’s life, actually just right after installation and setup, when issues of security need to be considered. Not just securing your Wordpress installation against spam attacks, but also checking code for editURI entries in page source for example. Then there comes the issue of keeping those with malicious intent at bay and here one sometimes get to deal with some tough cookies, indeed.

A very valuable resource in every Wordpress blogger’s arsenal is blogsecurity.net. They have excellent articles and posts and guest contributions by people at the forefront of blogging security on the Wordpress platform specifically. There is even an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the godfather of all things Wordpress-ey.
The blogger’s quest for security should start with installing the wp-scanner and loginlockdown as well as WPIDS (WordPress Intruder Detection System) plugins.
It’s as easy as right-clicking on the download link at blogsecurity.net and clicking on Save target as… or any variation on that and unzipping the plugin and uploading that folder into the wp-content/plugins directory.
From the WordPress dashboard go to plugins and activate them and click on options to further configure them if you so desire and it is A for away.
You are now secure against most of the most harmful things that can befall a WordPress blog; just bear in mind that we are in a fluid dynamic system with platform upgrades, plugin upgrades and the ingenuity of the bad guys out there constantly evovolving.

So it also just make good horse kind of sense to check your blog every day and view the source and check the plugins and your wordpress installation for updates etc etc