MusTech.Net!

I was almost in a panic today when I got the following WordPress 403 Error:

Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures..

“Due to a real problem with a third party blacklist that Bad Behavior uses, users we’re sent a false positive and effectivley locked out of the WordPress account…”

THANKFULLY, the Bad Behavior people are on the ball and rectified this immediately.

You can download the patch and fine more about the issue here:

http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/2007/12/06/bad-behavior-2011/

To fix your problem follow the following steps:

1. Get the patch from above and unzip it to your computer
2. FTP into the site where you are hosting WordPress
3. Copy the files contained in the patch over-top of your other Bad Behavior files in the wp-content/plugins folder

That’s it!  Try logging on again!

Best regards fellow WordPressers, Press on!

Note: If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest news and information. Not Sure What RSS is or how to Subscribe? Click Here!

I’ve found a great new way to syndicate your blog and help drive targeted traffic to your site.  You can see it in action on the right side of my site http://www.mustech.net. It’s called Blog Rush.  Similiar to Sphere, which you can open by clicking on the Sphere link at the top of any my posts, it provides related information about topics that would be of interest to you readers.  Like Blogmad and BlogExplosion it builds upon the concept of link exchanges.  Blog Rush will list the name of your post and create a clickable link back to your site in a nice looking widget.

I am very excited about this free possibility as it builds upon people who link from your site or use your Blog Rush I.D. … the earlier you get this up and running the more effective it will be for you as it will target more traffic on those that join from your link.  It’s one of the easiest and potentially most effective tools I’ve seen in a while for syndicating your information and pulling in related posts from others.   I don’t have a complete picture of it yet (time will tell if it is effective) as it will not start tracking my stats for another 12 hours or so, but I wanted to let all of you bloggers know about it as early as possible in case it does provide to be a worthwhile endeavor.  This may turn out to be a “must have” for bloggers or it may turn out to be a lot of hype…  I’m thinking it will turn out to be of some help for bloggers, especially for those that have low to moderate traffic.

It is very hard to get the information on our blogs out to the “world” and this looks like it has great potential, especially if it targets similar blog postings to our sites.  It includes a tracker as well so you can see if it is working.  Blog Rush integrates well on WordPress and as it is java based, most likely will work on any blog or web platform.  My advice, if you have a blog, try it …the sooner the better.  If if it doesn’t pan out in a month or so… well, remove the widget! No harm, no foul.

If you are looking for more SEO articles to help your blog, check out these ones from our site here.

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RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.  One of it’s earlier standards also referred to it as Rich Site Summary; either description is now used interchangeably.  Syndication can be defined as sharing information or the distribution and extension of data.  So, in a nut shell, RSS is a standard that allows us to easily and quickly share frequently updated data to, literally, millions of people over the Internet.

There is another variant of this type of syndication known as the Atom Syndication Format -Atom for short, and is another very similar type of syndication standard.  For the purposes of this article, I will be referring to RSS feeds specifically, but the Atom Style Feed works very similarly and virtually everything that can be done with an RSS feed can also be done with an Atom Feed.

So what is an RSS FEED? An RSS Feed in it’s basic format is a “table of contents” for the information appearing on your website.  It contains a text list (formatted in XML) of the headlines and titles of your posts or articles and will contain either a brief or full summary of your writings.  The feed will contain direct clickable links to your articles or posts.  The RSS feed may also contain media elements such as pictures.

Many users of the Internet are not aware of the proliferation of the large amount of RSS feeds found scattered all over the Internet.  This is due in part to the nature of the RSS feed and, until recently, the inability of web browsers to interpret them properly.   A couple of common terms used in conjunction with RSS feeds are “subscribe” and “subscriptions”.  When you “subscribe” to an RSS feed you are making a connection to the RSS feed that will allow you to be notified and obtain updates of newly created postings almost as soon as they are published.  This is one of the reasons for the success and universal adoption of the RSS Feed phenomena.

Almost every new version of the various web browsers available today offer some way to subscribe to an RSS feed. To test if your browser can interpret (or read) an RSS feed correctly, click on the following link http://www.mustech.net/feed (will open a new window).  If your browser is able to interpret the RSS feed correctly, you will see a very nicely formatted window with clickable links.  If it is not able to correctly interpret the RSS Feed, you will see a mass of squashed together text usually with the words xml version at the front of it.  When you are able to view the XML RSS Feed correctly, you are using what is known as a FEED READER.

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Update:  I have finished the change over to Wordpress 2.2.  It did not go as smoothly as I wanted, nor as fast.  For those interested in Wordpress type things….  Wordpress 2.2 and the K2 theme do not play nicely together as of yet.  Wordpress incorporated the widgets plugin into their theme this time which destroys the ability to use the K2 sidebar modules without a code workaround.  I also found that my theme was not compatible with the new version of K2, so I had to tweak a bunch of things to get it back up and operating… Long story short -we’re back!

Please let me know if you experience any problems with the site or experience any similar problems with your upgrades…

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Hello,

Please standby as we upgrade to Wordpress Version 2.2.  
The K2 theme needs to be updated and is now giving me problems…
This may take a day or two before everything looks right!

[tags] wordpress 2.2, trueblue 1.4, k2, upgrade [/tags]