As you may have already noticed, Wordpress 2.5 is here! But did you know that you have to upgrade as soon as possible if you don’t want your blog to be hijacked by Wily JavaScript?

As I reported in the Antivirus blog Shoemoney.com reported that people had had their blogs “hacked”, but it was uncertain how. I just read in the TrendLabs blog how the haijacking actualy works.

In short your blog gets attacked and a small Javascript code is inserted. Then a directory called 1 (just the number one) is created in your wp-content directory. This script then populates the created folder with a list of various spammy Web page links that are mostly related to adult sites and gambling sites.

To find out if your Wordpress installation has been infected you need to check for a directory called 1 in your wp-content directory.  That’s all for today since I’m going to upgrade all my blogs already today

As we all know, the world of business is littered with once friendly partnerships which suddenly descend into chaos and fallout when the big bucks start to roll in, but are you better off working alone or with a business partner?

While there is no right or wrong answer, we hereby list a few of points for you to consider :-

Working Alone

Pros

You are your own boss! In essence, what you say goes and you have full control over the direction of your business.

You keep the profit.  While this is a very important part of any business, it needs to be balanced against what you can gain in the future from bringing in assistance.

Cons

Hard work! If you run a one person business then the likelihood is that much of the work will fall down to you – even if you employ staff for some areas of the business.  People who work on their own tend to do too much and are not keen to give any kind of control away.

Nobody to bounce ideas off.  There are always times when we may know the answer to a question or problem, but we night just need that confirmation from someone else – a seal of approval so to speak.

Working With A Partner

Pros

Discussions.  When there are two people involved in the business it allows each to bring their own particular strengths to the table, giving a different angle on many situations.  This can prove vital and may prompt questions which may normally have been missed.

Spreading the work load.  While even a business which has two affective owners will see each taking on more than their fair share, it is a whole lot better than working alone to impossible deadlines and a work load which keeps growing and growing.

Cons

Arguments! Even the best business partnerships have their fair share of arguments but it is how you handle these heated debates which will dictate the success of our business.   

Loss of lifetime friendships.  Working with a friend of family member is not a good idea, and can ruin what might have been a lifelong friendship.

These are just a few of the points which you need to consider when going into business, whether this is by yourself or with a partner.  While many of the downsides to working alone or with a colleague can be reduced by bringing in skilled advisers on an adhoc basis, there is still much to consider even if you go down this route. 

However the bottom line is that you need to spread the workload, take advice where required and listen to what is going on around you.  While business and pleasure do not often mix, there are cases where it can work so long as everyone knows the ground rules!

As I’ve written somewhere before Xavier Media is using Google Apps for email and sharing documents like spreadsheets internally. As administrator I got an email from Google today telling me about some new features and one feature I thin will be really helpful is the Google Talk badge.

It’s simply a badge you put on your web site so that your visitors can chat with you using Google Talk. The visitors to your site can also see when you’re online (at least when you’re logged in at Google Talk ).

As a test I’ve added the badge here in this blog so that you can contact me in case you want to .

According to the instructions you shouldn’t have to download the Google Talk application if you don’t want to, but I don’t know for sure.

One thing I didn’t know about Google Talk before is that you can have your chats saved in your Gmail account. That’s perfect! You get to keep all your communications in the same place (email + chats) so when you need to remember what you actually decided with a potential customer you just visit one place: your Gmail account .

If you see me online, please feel free to chat!

WebHostingChoice.com is another web hosting directory, but it’s much more nice and clean in the layout then any other hosting directory I’ve ever seen before . Most web hosting directories are packed with ads, usually so many ads that the content and the comparisons are hard to find, but not in this directory.

They got a nice resource center where you can learn a lot about dedicated server, scams, domains, cheap hosting, bandwidth, colocation and much more. The guide about dedicated servers is really useful since most people don’t realize the difference between managed and unmanaged dedicated servers but only look at the price tag on the server. As the guide is mentioning it can be expensive to go for managed but it’s really good for people with limited technical experience and for newbies until they’ve learned enough about servers . Here’s a short quote, but please read the full guide about dedicated server:

While more expensive, it will save you the headache of trying to get your server to work if there are any problems.

There’s also a good quick start guide where you can learn all the basic steps and facts about getting your own domain name and getting your site hosted. The quick start guide is also giving some advice on the design of your web site and you can read about some common scams in the web design business.

What I really like about the scam section is the explanation, or maybe I should say warning, about the “unlimited bandwidth” scam. A lot of newbies fall for the unlimited bandwidth scam thinking they can just pay $1.99 per month for unlimited bandwidth, but if that would be true then Yahoo!, Google and all the other big companies wouldn’t pay millions for their bandwidth.

Unlimited bandwidth/space - it is simply impossible for a company to offer unlimited space or bandwidth to use. As hosting companies and their associated technologies are themselves limited (i.e. bandwidth or hard disk space), unlimited offerings are usually just an advertising gimmick. Often you will find clauses embedded deep within the company’s terms of service contract that negate the unlimited offering. The clauses are usually arbitrary, such as excessive CPU usage will be grounds for account termination.

Check out WebHostingChoice.com today.

I guess you’ve all seen that sometimes when you visit a site or bookmark a new page their icon is not the usual standard icon. Have a look at the following examples if you haven’t noticed the icons before:

As you can see, www.sampleaddress.com got the boring standard icon while blog.xaviermedia.com got the Xavier Media logo as favicon.

This may seem like a kind of useless function, but this icon is actually really valuable. Since it’s not only used in the address bar of the browser, but it also shows up in the bookmark list making your site standout from the rest of the bookmarks. Why would all the big sites like Google and Yahoo use it otherwise?

There are several online favicon creators that are both free and easy to use. I created the Xavier Media favicon at www.favicon.cc for example. At favicon.cc you can design the icon from scratch or upload a picture (like your company or web site logo) and the creator is free to use:

When you’ve designed your new favicon.ico icon you simply upload it to the root of your web site like www.sampleaddress.com/favicon.ico. You also need to add this tag of HTML code between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags to make the favicon work on all your pages:

<link rel=’shortcut icon’ type=’image/ico’ href=’/favicon.ico’ />

For some reason I only got this to work in Firefox and not Internet Explorer, so I had to use a favicon validator I found using Google. The validator will check if you’ve done everything correct setting your favicon up, and according to it I did so I have no idea why I can’t see the favicon in IE .