I use several websites or online services to ping my blog and one of them is Ping-O-matic. For those of you who might not be familiar with what a blog ping is, here’s a little info from Wikipedia:

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.[1] An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

By using online ping services like Ping-O-matic, you notify different online services that keep track of weblogs that your blog’s content has been updated. Once notified, these services crawl and index your site and later on publish your blog content which increases your blog’s popularity.

Anyways, talking about Pingomatic, the site recently received a makeover or redesign as you can see from the screenshots below.

Previous Ping-O-Matic design

New Ping-O-Matic design

The new look is definitely better than the old one and even the new logo looks really nice.

However, since Ping-O-Matic got its new design, I’ve been having problems accessing it with Firefox (both Windows and Ubuntu). Some parts of the page mysteriously don’t show up. (See screenshot below)

Firefox

Firefox + IE Tab

I’ve tried opening Ping-O-Matic using Internet Explorer 7, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari 4 and had no problems whatsoever as they render the page well. I also tried accessing Ping-O-Matic with Internet Explorer on Firefox using the IE Tab plugin and I experience the same issue. So the problem is really with Firefox. I’m running the latest version – Firefox 3.0.6 and I have no clue as to what causes the problem. I don’t know if its a conflict with one of the plugins/extensions I’m using. The thing is, I’m also experiencing the same problem with Firefox on Ubuntu which only has a few extensions installed on it. I still have to figure out what’s causing this and how I could fix it.

Anyone else experiencing this issue when accessing Ping-O-Matic with Firefox? Any ideas what could cause this problem? If you know the solution please share it with us. Thanks!

Here’s a little bit of information regarding the security issue and the three bugs that version 2.6.5 fixes:

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x…

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests.

Btw, if you’ve noticed the WordPress development team skipped from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5. That is not an error and is done purposely to avoid confusion with the fake 2.6.4 version that the fake WordPress site tried to distribute early this month.

If you’re not interested in doing a full upgrade but still make your WordPress installation secure, all you need to do is download version 2.6.5, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php and upload (overwrite existing files) them to your wp-includes folder.

I’ve already upgraded mine and I advise that you do the same thing. It only takes a few minutes to do plus you’ll have peace of mind that your WordPress blog is more secure. Make sure you only download from the real WordPress site. Better safe than sorry!

Download WordPress 2.6.5