Grab bag: Home stretch

While you’re patching: WordPress 2.6.3 is out

A quick heads up for the publication of WordPress 2.6.3, which I missed yesterday thanks to my site’s slowness. This is a straightforward patch release with an update for one PHP class, snoopy, which has a now-patched command injection vulnerability. Mercifully, the patch files are available directly from the blog post, making this the easiest WordPress upgrade yet.

The reports of this site’s death by entropy…

…are greatly exaggerated. However, I think I’ve fixed the inexplicable slowdowns that have plagued the site since sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. It looks like the issue was related to a plugin, Google XML Sitemaps. Although there had been a few posts since Tuesday, it hadn’t functioned correctly since Tuesday and I think it had gotten hosed up. Disabling the plugin seemed to fix the slowdown, and I’ve since reenabled it without incident. Hopefully there won’t be any additional slowdowns.