Archives February 2014

Facebook Giveth, Facebook Taketh Away

Fbook-IconThough in this case, I suppose, the order of the above should be reversed.  Facebook just announced that it has (once again) tweaked its News Feed algorithm.  The new change gives Business Pages more reach, by allowing posts tagging another Page to potentially appear in both Pages’ feeds.  According to this post over on Mashable.com, the new change “means brands will have greater reach than ever.”

Of course, this comes less than a year after Facebook devalued Business Page posts almost to the point of non-existance, in order to force more businesses to choose Facebook’s “Boost Post” monetary option.  Hence the title of this post.  And Business Pages have always been able to tag other Pages.  Though the potentiality of showing up in both News Feeds is something new, you’ll pardon me if I don’t go all gaga over the latest “upgrade”.

Still, any advance in potential eyes-on-posts is better than no advance at all.  A couple of notes about this change: It will not work for individuals tagging Pages (just as Pages cannot tag individuals), and don’t expect to start tagging Google’s (or Facebook’s) Facebook page and see your post views multiply astronomically.  The News Feed algorithm will still take account the relevancy of each post to both Pages to decide what to show.

In any case, we’ll certainly be giving it a shot. What are your opinions on this change?

WordPress Brute Force Attack Underway

One of the largest distributed brute force attacks on WordPress installations ever seen is currently going on, as reported by Mark Maunder of Wordfence Security on his blog. You can read the full post here. The attempts at hacking are running 30 times more frequently than average.

A brute force attack is when an attacker tries many times to guess your username password combination by repeatedly sending login attempts. A distributed brute force attack is when an attacker uses a large number of machines spread around the internet to do this in order to circumvent any blocking mechanisms you have in place.

If you have a WordPress-based site, I highly recommend that you pay close attention to it until these brute force attempts have waned.  If you suspect that you’ve been hacked, and need help recovering, you can always contact us here at Diamond Mind Web Design.