Google Reader Has Slowed Down

I love using Google Reader. I think its one of the best RSS aggregator service out there and its got a pretty good interface. But lately I have seen it slow down quite a bit. Earlier I used Google Reader to get updates from my favourite websites, but now its as slow as 6 hrs to show the update. So, is better to go to my favourite site and get the update by manually looking through it.

And this slow down is not just experienced by me. I found out this blog, and he seems to have the same problem of slow updates to Google Reader. Before I read that blog, I was thinking that the feeds on the site wasn't updating itself as fast as Google Reader may be looking through them, but then I realized its not that. I also use Live Feeds in Mozilla or MyBlogLog or Techmeme and they seem to update it in a few minutes time. So, its a definite problem with Google Reader.

Something similar was experience a few months back with technorati.com which was not able to display the updates to a blog in time. They faced a lot of criticism from the blogosphere then. The developers from Wordpress even replaced their updates and incoming links on the dashboard from technorati to Google Blogsearch back then. Google's indexing through blogsearch is pretty fast and obviously they have the resources to fix this problem, but I think such things should not even happen at Google. And the biggest surprise to me is that even with so many tech bloggers using Google Reader as a service, not many people are talking about it!!

Wordpress 2.3.3 urgent release

Wordpress has released a quick security fix for its popular blogging platform. The new version Wordpress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. According to the release announcement, a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation due to which it could allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog. This is huge security issue and Wordpress has urgently requested everyone to do the upgrade to the newer version.

You can download the Wordpress 2.3.3 from here, and the upgrade instructions are here. The XML-RPC bug can be fixed by just replacing with the newer xmlrpc.php from the Wordpress 2.3.3 zip file. Other than the XML-RPC bug 3 more fixes have been done in the zip file:

• Trac 3780 gettext fails to determine byteorder on 64bit systems with php5.2.1
• Trac 5090 maybe_create_table call to config.php issue
• Trac 5273 some registration emails fail in 2.3.1 b/c of "callout verification"

Another flaw exists in the WP-Forum plugin which is very popular and is used to create forums on the Wordpress platform. The announcement advises users to remove the plugin and install a newer version whenever it is released. The developer for the plugin is working hard towards releasing a fix.

Wordpress 2.3 Can Leak Your Drafts

If you are one of those bloggers who use Wordpress for your blogs, then this ones for you to update. Wordpress 2.3.2 was released yesterday with fixes to the ver. 2.3.1. This update is an extremely important one since it fixes some data leak bugs.

According to this ticket, your blogs posts can be exposed by a simple query fired before it is even published. The update is also useful as it suppresses some error messages that were being shown without much reason. Get the updated Wordpress 2.3.2 here. You can read about the ChangeLog here.