I’ve been using WordPress for quite some time for my personal site and sites that I develop for my clients. I won’t get into the merits/virtues now, suffice it to say I find it extremely flexible and extensible. In my new job – more on this in a future post – I am lucky to work for a firm that feels similarly and we have used the platform to create a number of really great sites that extend well beyond what you may expect WordPress to be capable of. When combined we have 20+ years of experience with the platform and we have literally seen it all – at least so we thought – until last night.

As one of my many responsibilities I train and support our clients and make myself available around the clock to make sure that they are able to do what they need, when they need to do it. As onerous as it sounds, it’s actually a fun and fulfilling aspect of my job and helps me maintain a very customer-focused perspective. Last night I was watching Game 1 of the NLCS (go Phils) when I received two rather panicked email messages from one of our clients who is in the final stages of prepping her site for launch. She basically alluded to the fact that she was adding/editing some posts when she received a menacing message on her screen.

Danger!
Self-comparison detected.
Initiating infinite loop eschewal protocol.
Self destruct in… 3
2
1

Even for someone who has designed, developed and used the platform I had never heard of the problem prior to this. Not knowing exactly what was going on and suspecting the worst – a hack or some other type of breach – I was concerned. However, I was also a bit curious so I decided to try and replicate it myself on my own blog. All that I had to do was to create a post, allow a revision to be saved and then try to compare the older version against itself. Here were my results:

Now, I knew my own install was pretty secure – I keep up with patches and maintenance on a regular basis – and also host my sites on a different server from the affected client so I pretty quickly ruled out hacking. But I still wasn’t sure if it was a problem or something else. I turned to Google for some help. Turns-out that there is a documented, but very unknown “Easter Egg” for WordPress that has been present since version 2.6 (at least per Doncha – a source I really trust when it comes to WordPress).

Here’s what I learned because of this whole situation. First, even if you think you’ve seen it all you probably haven’t. Second, never underestimate the cleverness of a bunch of programmers with a little extra time on their hands. Finally, always, always, always (did I say always?) keep your WordPress installations updated. While it’s not a 100% full-proof way of keeping your site secure, it does go quite a long way toward that goal.

I’ve been doing a ton of freelance web and online learning work lately and this video struck a chord with me. It led me to think about how we work with and treat vendors/service providers. Thinking back to when I was working for an association and even before that when I was in corporate America, I was guilty of really pushing on my vendors and asking for the impossible. Now as a vendor I see it from a completely different perspective.

It begs the question: how do you work with your vendors? Do you treat them fairly or do you continuously try to drive a hard-bargain? Are your project budgets based on reality or just numbers that are either disconnected from reality or based on what you think is fair? Are you willing to give a little to get a little? Granted it’s a two-way street, but very often vendors lose out; especially if they are just starting out or are in tough markets.

I’m fortunate that most of my clients have a pretty good appreciation of the value of the work I do, but every now and again I run into one that I have to educate a bit. As a vendor I provide the highest quality service for the best price that I can, but I also add-in a lot of value and often go well above and beyond what is expected of me? Do I have to? Not at all, but I know my clients appreciate it. I view our relationship as a partnership and investing in the relationship tends to help it grow. Do all service providers act the same way? Sadly no, but I think when you are looking for someone to work with it’s one of the first things you try to determine.

Just think about it.

For the purposes of this post we’ll keep things short and simple. Set-up and installation of the app on my BB 8330 (Curve) was quite easy. The application is pretty polished and intuitive and I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.

There are one or two issues that I have note specific to adding categories to the post (e.g. I couldn’t move into the category field directly rather I had to access it via the BlackBerry menu key. And once I was in to the category selection dialogue it wasn’t really clear how to select the categories that I wanted to assign to the post – I did finally figure it out and you have to use the “Change Option” menu option to toggle the checkbox on or off – which seems a bit kludgy).

Other than those two usability issues, which aren’t really major, I am extremely impressed and am definitely going to continue to experiment with the app.

More to come…