There is a lesson here about keeping one’s WordPress site updated faithfully, but for lack of doing that or perhaps some other reason, I saw this Monday when I tried to publish the November episode:
It was an awful week of waiting for the powers that be to unflag our domain as a vector for malware, even though my webmaster fixed the crack immediately as a good webmaster would.
I could have published the November episode and known that people who directly subscribe to the podcast feed would still get the show no problem, but I didn’t want listeners to attempt reading Rebecca’s fine show notes and see this scary warning page. And it’s embarrassing.
That being said, I’d like to say that that subscribing to the RSS feed for the show would have ensured you can still listen to it without any need for the designcritique.net domain to be involved. That feed is
https://designcritique.libsyn.com/rss
In conclusion, I want to communicate two very important things for listeners and for podcasters using WordPress.
- A direct connection between audience and content provider is ideal. For a website you enjoy, that means bookmarking that site’s web address in your browser. For a podcast, that means using a podcatcher application to directly subscribe to each show’s RSS feed.
- Don’t let your WordPress installation fall behind in versions. My complicated life in September/October made me lazy and if I’d updated to the new version of WordPress sooner, perhaps the site attack would not have been possible
November’s episode will be up shortly. Do you have a site run from WordPress? You might want to harden it with this plugin we found and wished we’d had installed sooner. Time will tell if it does its job for us. But really, I should have been updating the WordPress version more diligently to begin with.