I’ve not blogged about WordPress patches and updates for a while - I’ve been just that busy.

This weekend another two patches - for 2.2.x and 2.0.x

 So far so good - easy and clean updates.

Worth an upgrade too - looking at the code changes there seems to be a lot of additional checking and url handling safety.

Shel Israel writes:

UK Microsoftie Darren Strange reports that Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers among its 71,000 employees.  Both numbers show significant growth.  As irecall, when Robert and I were writing our first chapter of naked Conversations there were 2500 bloggers among 56,000 employees.  By the time we finished the book in October 2005, the bloggers were topping the 3,000 mark. This would mean that the number of Microsoft bloggers has grown by over 50 percent in about a year and a half.
By percentage, I’m not sure whether Sun Microsystems or Microsoft has more bloggers, but both companies continue to grow and continue to extol the virtues of doing it.
One interesting aspect in Darren’s report is that there is no longer any controversy about it. When Joshua Allen, became Microsoft’s first blogger, the first call to fire him for blogging came just a few hours later, as we reported in Naked Conversations.
Now it is seems to me, blogging is normalizing at Microsoft and that is what should happen.

In contrast I think Novell has a couple of dozen prolific bloggers at most. That is way below par.

From the dev lists:

The target release date for WordPress 2.2 is less than a month away, April 23rd.

Phew. Patch and relax. Update and relax. Patch and relax.

When Matt and the others from Automattic said they’d be stepping up the frequency of updates - I didn’t expect this

It’s good though. Lots of new features promised for 2.2 and especially 2.3/2.4 and beyond.

I spend a few days catching up on posting video to my family and home blog instead No posts for a week or two.

WordPress 2.0.7 - security fixes.

Kinda instantly obsoleted WordPress 2.0.6 - which in itself was bug and security fixes.

WordPress 2.1 still moves forward; beta 2 via svn is looking pretty sweet.

Hot on the heels of WordPress 2.0.6 release candidate - is WordPress 2.1 beta 1.

I tried the alpha from subversion on this blog a while ago; it looked promising. Now we are at beta 1.

You can get the beta from here; knowing the test and release team - it will be live in weeks.

Update time again - this time for another security issue.

Here’s the mail from wp-testers:

http://wordpress.org/beta/wordpress-2.0.6-RC2.zip
http://wordpress.org/beta/wordpress-2.0.6-RC2.tar.gz

RC2 addresses the following vulnerability.

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2006/Dec/0463.html

We also changed how we escape HTML attributes. Escaping is done with a new
attribute_escape() function.

http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/4656

This touched a lot of files so we need to do some broad testing to make sure we didn’t fat finger anything.

Should be GA soon; advisable to upgrade.

I sent out birth announcements via email and blog on 28th October; the traffic spiked. It’s back to normal now - just family and friends.

Another milestone approaches; WP 2.0.5.

Release Candidate 1 is here  - it’s working so far for me.

How can we tell? Watch the orange dot - that’s someone in China visiting this website :)