On March 3, 2010, someone at MediaTemple found that a number of sites on their network were compromised for SEO proposes through a WordPress exploit that may have piggy-backed on some faults within the GridServer infrastructure. A full eight days later, the (MT) engineers finished testing and confirmed that all malicious material was removed from the system. The official (MT) support blog stated that around 400 websites were effected, and that “normal visitors” would not notice anything unusual from the exploit. As of Wednesday, March 10, (MT) has restored email services and are continuing to monitor the situation.

Unfortunately (MT) is not known for their reliability or speed – both in page loading times and in response to incidences like this.

Edit: It took 26 seconds just to publish this blog post. That is unacceptable, and please pardon the limited downtime as we switch hosts.

So which one of these office spaces look most like your current workplace? Let us know in the comments!

This weeks theme is based slightly on the official WordPress.org design. After comparing the background image and colors, go a bit deeper and look at the rounded corners, shaded gradients and clear, well-thought out lines. We’d be honored if you used this as your default theme on your blog, but as always, we encourage exploring a variety of templates which you can find on great sites like the WebBlog Tools Collection website.

Download the theme now (67.5KB), or check out a live demo.

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on last weeks theme, and will always consider all feedback and criticism, which will be used to make the next theme even better. During the summer, we plan to branch out into releasing WordPress plugins as well, but until then we will continue showcasing the innovative and time-saving plugins that are already available.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know what you think!

Flowers and Plants

Nothing says Spring like large, colorful, blooming flowers. From the basic hand-drawn elements to the most detailed vector art, these brushes make great website headers and logos.

Foliage and Grass

Green grass and empty meadows became a design trend a few years ago, and we’re starting to see signs of it returning once more – and for good reason. Putting grass art in your blog footer gives depth to the overall theme, by connecting the bottom of the page with ground, and the header with the sky. It may sound crazy, but check out some of the spring related themes and see for yourself.

Clouds, Sky and Sunlight

There’s not a cloud in the sky, unless you use one of these excellent cloud brushes found on DeviantArt. Imagine using the cartoon cloud brush on your business card.

Animals and Objects

Click on the screenshot for a static demonstration.

UnFocus Green is free of charge, and you can download it from us here. Once it becomes available on the other WordPress sites, we’ll update with a more complete set of download links.

The Corporate Shrill

These worthless accounts may project a real, human voice within a large, faceless corporation, but make no mistake: These types of Tweeters are being paid to promote their company on Twitter with little to no disclosure. They use Twitter search to catch any conversation taking place about the company that pays their wages, and have no disregard for regularly disrupting a conversation just because you’ve mentioned them. Follow them once, and you’re bound to see that the friendly customer service rep has quickly turned into the boring, obvious corporate shrill.

The Lazy Internet Marketer

Gain one-thousand new Twitter followers while simultaneously losing weight, overnight! Guaranteed! Bogus claims of tricks and guides to acquire internet wealth has plagued the internet since the age of dial-up, and since Google (and the other search engines) has made incredible progress on mitigating lots of scams through intelligent algorithmic exclusions, thousands of lazy internet marketers took their ‘business’ to Twitter in 2009. Until Twitter follows Google’s no-spam route by filtering these messages and user from the fire-hose stream, users like you can simple unfollow – and in extreme cases, block – these marketers from contacting you.

The Spammer

Spam and internet marketing seemingly go hand in hand, but the root of Twitter spam is the over usage of the trending topics and retweet feature. Is it OK to retweet Bill Gates, or NASA? Sure, but think twice about relaying Robert Scoble’s views on latest techno-gadget. The same reluctance to repost should follow over to the trending topic area; some users take to combining several of the days topics into one tweet, which offers no valuable insight into the very interesting sandwich Miley Cyrus had for lunch.

The LinkBot

The only human aspect of this type of Twitter is that, at one point, a human would eventually block them.

The Black Hole of Negativity

Blogs gave uninteresting people an outlet to express their thoughts on life, the universe, and everything else. Thankfully the truly insane will never figure out how to publish a blog post, give up and continue to use MySpace. However, for those who regularly use Twitter, we are likely to see the downward spiral of negative thoughts, broken relationships and people with nothing better to do but to bring others down. Nobody needs to read about things like this on a daily basis.

The Attention Hog

Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Rainn Wilson. Enough said.

The News and Media

Breaking news on Twitter will always be reported first by someone who experienced the event; not a journalist/anchor who heard about it over, well.. Twitter. Media outlets such as CNN and Fox show incredibly short snippets with a URL that links to the full story, which was entirely the point of creating RSS and feedreaders, but then again you do support your favorite news source by following them on Twitter.

Bonus!

The Clueless Twitter User

QuantCast reports that in December 2009, Twitter had roughly 23.6 million unique visitors hit the home page. That’s quite a bit of traffic, and while nobody outside of Twitter, Inc. know the amount of real users, you can’t spend a few minutes browsing around someones friendlist without finding a few who have tried the service and left. Possible reasons include getting overwhelmed by the above type of users, sprinkled with the occasional passerby who just wants to check out the hype, and then leave. Fortunately the Clueless Twitter User doesn’t directly impact your stream by themselves, but overall they have possibly degraded the quality of service noticed during peak usage times. Then again, it’s safe to place all the blame on Robert Scoble.

I’m going to try my hand at offering a weekly written critique of both comics that are primarily syndicated in newspapers, and some of the decent projects that are not. I will shy away from covering popular online comics such as XKCD, mostly because many people have already shared their thoughts, and those people are much smarter than I am.

So watch for that coming sometime soon. Also, since this is a news post: I am the single maintainer of Unfocus, and I know there are a few remaining 404 pages floating around. I am working on that but I’ve already posted a few filler articles, which I feel have dampened the spirit of the site. In other news, I’m a bit jaded that my letter to Bill has gone unanswered, and overthrown by various popular blogs which chose to simply rewrite the article, blend in some SEO and take the glory for originality. Stay classy, you SEO people.

On behalf of the Internet, I’d like to welcome you to the wonderful world of Twitter, and to be the first to tell you that every life saved by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one more reason to forgive you for Internet Explorer. Indeed, your ability to recognize that life’s very basic necessities have been overlooked for decades, and are key, long-term solutions to many of the worlds problems are both noble and a testament to your brilliance. However, you have not applied that same simplistic, but forward-thinking approach to your new online presence, and so I think it’s imperative that you and I quickly skim over a few of the widely known “gotchas” that some web-masters may overlook when erecting their first website.

WWW subdomain is fine, but honor de-facto standard with redirect

The use of any subdomain to arrive at your main site is clearly your call, but over the past few years it has become somewhat of a standard to simply let the ‘www’ subdomain fade out of the public eye. However, should you choose the opposite, it is friendly to simply redirect the non-www version of your domain to a record that actually returns the intended website.

With the WWW Subdomain

Without WWW Subdomain

Prevent duplicate content using a 301 redirect

Proving to the world that you haven’t exploited access to the SEO experts at Bing, you have chosen to allow two duplicate versions of a single website sit on different domains. One of Bing’s competitors – let’s call them Gogol – will quickly denote a scoring penalty for both domains unless you issue a 301 redirect correctly. This penalty applies to all websites, including yours.

If you have the money, buy the .org TLD

Before writing you this letter, I sent you a message through your new websites contact form informing your team that TheGatesNotes.org was available for purchase. I was surprised, as TheGatesNotes.com was in fact bought back in Summer of 2009, which is more than enough time for your domain guys to read about the dangers of domain squatters and scammy internet marketers, two types of people who would love nothing more than to acquire an alternative TLD and scam unsuspecting visitors under your brand and foundation’s image. In short: spend the $9.95 to buy the .org at the same registar you used to buy the .com: GoDaddy.

Never use GoDaddy to register domains

Unless you’re secretly in love with Danica Patrick or the SuperBowl, there is absolutely no sane reason to use GoDaddy to register domains in this day and age. There are simply too many other registrars that offer far superior prices and features and allow you to manage your domains without imposing incredibly difficult restrictions on your business and everyday life. GoDaddy sucks. Don’t believe me? Bing it.

Don’t register as a private domain owner

On the footer of your website(s) you imply that a governing limited-liability company was created to control your new web ventures, but on your domain registry record you chose to privatize yourself through DomainsByProxy, a GoDaddy property. This ‘feature’ is usually used by sketchy websites to conceal their identity and to prevent cease and desists, along with DMCA requests from being effective. Is this the image you want to project? That one of the world’s largest foundations is hiding behind the same protection used by eBay scammers and domain squatters? Fix this by displaying the contact information for your foundations PR agency, or some other registered agent who can speak on behalf of your website.

Those are the five main issues that are currently holding your new website back from it’s full potential. Please take all the above as kind, sincere advice given to you by a fellow web master who has endured his own embarrassment and ridicule many times over.

Sincerely,

Jeff Hood.

Tydlinka’s Set of Social Icons on DeviantArt

Tydlinka includes two dozen icons of the most popular social media sites, and an extended set for a number of social sites that rock, but nobody knows about. An extension to the extended set are grunge alternatives that go well with many of the ‘hand-drawn’ blog themes that became popular last year.

Paul Robert Lloyd’s Social Media Icons

Paul created and released this set of 36 icons in summer of 2009, with two later updates that bring the total number of icons to 60. Almost every popular social site is included, with icons for WikiPedia, OpenID and Nike+ rounding out the choices.

Komodo Media Mini Iconpack

Komodo Media created this set of 30 social media icons back in December of 2008. While they are a bit dated, all of the icons are pixel-perfect representation of logos and branding nicely squeezed into a 16×16 pixel icon.

Handycons

Twelve hand-drawn icons of popular sites created by Janko in four sizes, starting at 16×16 and ending with 48×48. An update was released in late Winter 2009 to include 20 more icons like Flickr, PayPal and Sphinn.

Dellifeed Icons

Mmm, smashingly tasty icons. SmashingMagazine worked with the fine folks at Dellustrations.com to create this artistic collection of 8 social media icons ranging from teeensy 16×16 all the way to huuuge 512×512. Show me a blog that uses a 512×512 icon and I’ll show you a winner in the game of life. BTW Smashing, want to buy my site?

Turbomilk Webset Icons

The beautiful people over at GraphicRiver asked the handsome pimps at Turbomilk to create this awesome set of gorgeous icons for your use in exchange for a link back to their site. Pretty cool, since it includes detailed icons for sites like FaceBook, Google, ThemeForest, Blogger and StumbleUpon.

Hearting Social Icon Set

I love you, and I love SmashingMagazine, which is why I’m loving the chance to write about the Hearting icon set created by non other than Aravind Ajith, the fun-loving lover behind TheDesignSuperHero. The set includes 22 icons and transparent PNGs and is cleared for use in both free and commercial projects. Share the love by linking back to the site, though.

Heart v2

Aravind Ajith shows that he loves his readers by updating the popular Hearting icon set to include more social sites like Reddit, Delicious and Twitter. The same hearty shape, and the same loving feel. Share the love with these social icon! (lame attempt, I know)

TheLeavesFall: Social Icon Set

Chalk another one up for Smashing! TheLeavesFall social icon set includes 11 fall/autumn shaped icons for most of the popular bookmarking sites. These would look great on a seasonal blog theme.

Social Bookmark Iconset

You spin me round, baby like a record, baby – something something, threes company too. Here’s a nice round set of two-billion icons, including Yahoo, Flickr and that one site that aggregates blogs.. some people call it Technorati.

Social Post Stamps

Marco.. Marco… Folio! Marcofolio’s portfolio website-o produced and released these thirteen postage stamp icons that include two sets of each: one with a border, and one without.

ProductiveDreams PagePeel Social Icons

Due to popular request, the kind spirits at ProductiveDreams published this set of sixteen ‘ripped-paper’ style PagePeel transparent PNGs. To see an example, look at the left side of any page on their site. Looks pretty snazzy, if I can say so myself. (Can I say that?)

WeFunction

WeFunction released their icon pack which includes more than just a few of the more popular social media sites. In fact, their collection includes 275 icons that can be used for web-apps, web templates or just about anything else that uses icons – including your desktop.

Sada Socialnich Ikon

I can’t tell you what the site actually says, and looking at the icons themselves put me at a loss for words even in my own native tongue. They are slightly slanted and have a thin, dashed border while an overall unique background pattern creates a nice seamless effect.

Location Set

The DesignWasHere Location icon set featured 10 glossy icons that you’re free to use in commercial projects or website. Redistribution carries the requirement of contacting them and getting permission to do so.