I’ve been spending a lot of time lately getting shit ready for WordCamp Montreal, Montreal’s instance of the user-generated WordPress conference that has already happened in cities literally across the entire planet (I’ve been to New York, San Francisco and Toronto in the past).

Today the tickets went on sale (25-30$) which is a huge relief. There’s still lots of work to do organizing the speakers/schedule, sponsors and all the other details, but we’re on our way to a really useful and fun event if I have anything to say about it.

I’ll be doing a talk about whatever is missing from the lineup of speakers who come forward, which reminds me: Would you like to become a speaker? We’re still looking for WP experts to share their wisdom and experience and hopefully some laughs, so get in touch if you think that might be you. Oh yeah, if you’ve got a pile of money and have been hoping for some visibility maybe you’d like to sponsor WordCamp Montreal? It’s the perfect way to make yourself known to an incredibly useful new subsection of the north american technocracy!

Zemanta, a Firefox extension that automatically suggests related tags, links, photos and articles for your blog posts and e-mails, is running a competition to encourage blogging for worthwhile causes. The five blogs that get the most votes will each win $3,000.

I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, the anti-censorship (and anti-blogger-imprisonment and pro-internet-awesomeness) wing of Global Voices. GV Advocacy is something made of pure good, a blog about bloggers getting shafted in countries where freedom of speech isn’t a cliche, its a dream that people can only hope for. Sami, our editorial lead for the project, is himself the victim of censorship in Tunisia, and his dedication to the project and the cause is astounding.

Obviously I’m biased as far as this contest goes, my paycheck comes from Global Voices and this money would be going into that pool, but I work for GV because I believe in it, so this post is my biased but sincere vote for my employers to get the funding and recognition they deserve (if only my coding/design was as good as the content our authors and editors produce…)

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

So this site was ironically hacked and hijacked by blackhat SEO spammers who inserted a ton of bullshit viagra/homeloan/sex links into my theme in the hopes that it would illegitimately raise their ranking in Google. Of course that’s not inherently ironic, what’s ironic is that it happened while I was at WordCamp Toronto, a mini-conference about all things WordPress, where I gave a talk that included a long section about how to avoid and deal with being hacked in just this way for just these reasons. Some part of me thinks that someone at WordCamp might have done it to show me who’s boss, but I doubt it, the pattern of spam links is just to depressing and business-like to assume anything but an impersonal bot did the damage.

This has happened to other sites I’ve been managing (specifically to Global Voices over the years, and I’ve learned a lot about hardening your server and WordPress installation to help solve the problem. The #1 piece of advice is of course KEEP YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION UP TO DATE, NO MATTER WHAT. In the case of this my personal site (as opposed to sites I manage professionally, which I deal with much more carefully, because they are more important) I was doing a halfway version of this by keeping my very old but theoretically still secure copy of WP 2.0.x up to date. This is the legacy branch (current actual branch is 2.7.x) that was supposed to offer long-term security support, but it seems that is no longer the case. I loved having the bragging rights of being the only person in a room with even 100 WordPress users who had such an old but still secure version (well, except David Peralty), but obviously staying secure is much more important.

If you’re still running 2.0.11 I strongly recommend you give up and get on the normal upgrade schedule now, it seems to have been compromised.

Full details of how to clean up a hacked site below:

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I nagged them early enough and got a slot to speak at WordCamp Toronto in May. I’ve had amazing times at the last two WordCamps I attended (San Francisco and New York, I missed the Toronto one last year) talking to people about my favorite web software and shooting the shit about all the little things the rest of the world doesn’t understand.

If you haven’t been and are a blogger/developper in the area you should check it out. If you’re in Montreal there will also be WordCamp Montreal in June but that’s pretty far off and we haven’t come up with many of the details yet. Not sure if I’ll be speaking in Montreal as well but it’s pretty likely ;)

Stumbled on this beautiful set of photos of different monkeys living in domestic situations with humans in the late 80’s. According to the artist’s statement she went out of her way to get to know each of the primates personally before taking the photographs, giving them an intensely personal feel.

See them all here. (via Fannie Laurence)

click image for full size

Ungrateful Biped archives.

Photo taken by Amira

I’m about to leave Sunny Miami Florida to return to frigid Montreal and am feeling particularly blessed to get to work and sometimes hang out with such wonderful people.

The WeMedia conference invited us and kindly sponsored some of our costs, but the real treasure has been sharing a house, food, drinks and stories with my coworkers. I’ve gushed about it in the past but its worth repeating: I couldn’t possibly do better in life than to have these people around me. That I get paid to spend time with them is a little miracle.

Shout outs to Eddie, Lova, Georgia, Solana, Jillian, Lokman, Rebekah, Ivan, Amira and Leonard. I fuckin’ love you guys.

click image for full size

Ungrateful Biped archives.

click image for full size

Ungrateful Biped archives.

Back when there weren’t a lot of easy ways to start blogging elegantly I’d give blogs to any of my friends who showed interest, setting up Movable Type/WordPress/Blogger for them and working out simple templates I thought they’d like. Some of them are still up and going ( Mira, Woo! Room206, Speaks the Gimp, Tom Makes Pictures, A Collection of Works, The Creative Act, St-Francis Jigger, ) while others were abandoned a long time ago in favor of social networking or other hobbies (Brian, Princess Camp and Poison Frogs, Girl Riot, No, You’re a Blogger Geek, Lyss). Just making that list took me so long, I don’t think I ever added it all up like that before.

Anyway, these days I usually just point people at WordPress.com, since they have great themes, the best software around and an easy way to take it to the next level.

So what’s left to do? The other half of giving someone a blog: Showing them how to use it!

Global Voices’ core mission, aside from reporting on what’s happening in blogs all over the world, is to get more blogs and bloggers going whenever possible. Writing is good for you, it helps you clarify your thoughts and hone your writing, and it also helps people find you and keep up with you online.

GV is having a drive to get people to teach someone else how much fun blogging can be, or alternately blogging’s little cousin, microblogging (which means services like Twitter or identi.ca similar to “status” on facebook but with more power and more fun. btw I’m almost always @jeremyclarke).

I signed the pledge to write about it and teach someone, but as the above list implies, my life is already pretty saturated with people I’ve taught to blog, so if you live in Montreal and want to learn how to blog (or want some advice about it too I guess) drop me a line and I can help you out sometime.

If you have someone in your life with problems getting their message out (or a business to promote, or any other problem that could be solved if they had a TV channel) then consider taking some time to show them how blogging could improve their life <3