Keeping up with Wordpress 2.6.5
Wordpress 2.6.5 was announced today — bypassing the 2.6.4 designator which was used for a fake version. The official advice is “There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.”.
This patches a minor security issue (always a worthwhile reason to upgrade) as well as 3 bugs. Personally, I’m waiting for 2.7.x for my next major site code update — preferably 2.7.1 or later, as I try and avoid a major “point” upgrade to avoid any coding bugs that slipped by. But in the meantime I’ll keep an eye on security updates — they’re often worth it!
After several years on FreeBSD/Apache, I can use SSH/Telnet nowadays to do my big upgrades — saves unzipping the files locally and updating files via FTP — that takes about four times as long! Took me a while to figure that one out!
Indexing At The Speed Of Google
It’s now 10:15am.
While I was sleeping last night — around 2:50am this morning — my website scored a visitor from Latvia (fresh stats are thanks to the WP-SlimStat-Ex plugin I use with WordPress, although I also run the awesome Google Analytics package).
Anyway, in the stats I can see the search term the visitor used to reach my site, and I often then put that back into Google (in this case, www.google.lv). And I can see that in the natural search results, I was ranked on the page in positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8 — and that’s even with my last name spelled as “Kenedy” instead of “Kennedy”!
But — I can see how quickly Google updates its indexes at times — only one HOUR ago (9:13am), I had made a post in the Warrior Forum, and this post was already in the Latvia Google rank at position number ONE!
It wouldn’t have been there at 2:50am … which shows just how quickly — less than one hour — a public forum post ended up in Google, and in the Number 1 natural rank position.
Is it just me, or is anyone else also blown away this lightning-fast “Google-speed” … how incredibly quickly Google keeps up with the online world?!
Facebook traffic turbo boost
Here’s the opening paragraphs of a recent article about Facebook in The Age:
To some, Facebook is a frivolous social forum, but Californian Lee Lorenzen regards it as “the lowest-cost customer acquisition vehicle on the planet”.
A partner with Altura Ventures, Mr Lorenzen appeared via video at last month’s Facebook Developers Garage meeting in Sydney. He told the gathering of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs that it took him nine years and “a lot of money” as CEO at Shop.com to get 500,000 registered users.
But then Facebook application iLike, from developer Rockyou, added 600,000 users in eight hours.
“Nine years versus eight hours - we knew there was something going on that was special inside the Facebook environment,” Mr Lorenzen says.
Wow, just 8 hours versus 9 years — that’s really showing the potential power of Facebook from a business sense — it’s time to take notice of Facebook when it is described as “the lowest-cost customer acquisition vehicle on the planet.”