One might morph the popular real estate adage for applicability to marketing websites:  Security, security, security.

A recent posting by Roberta Murphy describes how her WordPress-based San Diego Real Estate blog was viciously attacked by unknown entities who tried to delete everything ever written at San Diego Previews, Luxury Homes Digest, and 18 or so other real estate blog sites.  Roberta is understandably angry about the incident which took her site down, leaving some wondering if she was still in the San Diego real estate business.  But more deeply, she was left wondering, Why someone would bother to hack her site since it did not contain credit card numbers or other sensitive data?

Having been responsible for the security side of the MyST Blogsite infrastructure almost five years now, I certainly sympathize with Roberta.  And while I also wonder why some people are driven to such such abusive acts, I have absolutely no doubt that there are lots of such people in the world.  Whether its so-called "script kiddies" doing the Internet equivalent of the joy riding, sophisticated criminals executing well-planned schemes, or well-intended (but not so skilled) programmers trying to address legitimate integration requirements, the Internet is teeming with nefarious activity.

Here's a simple rule of thumb:  If your site has any significant visibility at all, it will be attacked at some point.

As I described in my FAS Talk blog, last month I discovered that a federation of hacked WordPress servers—over a thousand servers to date—were (and still are) being used to try to hack into our company web site.  At the time I first noticed slower-than-normal server response times, that site was receiving over 50,000 requests per day attempting to gain authoring access.  Thankfully, our company web site, like every other advertorial marketing site powered by MyST Blogsite, is protected by multiple security layers and was never actually hacked.

MyST SlimeGate™ is one of the security layers that protect all commercial sites powered by MyST Blogsite.  (There are others; see, for example, Fighting Back Against Big, Hungry, Orange Alligators.)  This layer serves as a blogsite's immune system by killing nefarious requests before they ever reach the blogsite itself and by restricting subsequent access by offending machines through dynamic firewall technology.  Once this immune system layer "learned" to recognize requests from compromised WordPress servers, the 50,000 number quickly dropped to about 20 and response times returned to normal.

A blogsite (like a Lexus) is durable.

Very few people think about their blog content or blog architecture in the context of durability. When I mention it to people they say --

“What? How can you wear out your blog?”

Understanding blog and content durability requires a deeper understanding of the likelihood of future changes that would constrain or otherwise obsolete your content.

There’s no question there will be future innovations that will render the way blogs work today, as obsolete in a future context. Durable blogs will possess attributes that allow them to transform and reshape themselves with little effort. Non-durable blogs will require complete rethinking, rewrites and reformatting of large portions of content and application code bases; non-durable content will require significant reshaping to migrate into new use cases.

MyST Blogsite® was built on a platform of agile XML and XSLT services that are completely unrelated to blogging or blog architectures. We provide an advertorial platform based on sound information architecture design.

One example of content durability is how we meld Captyx components into your posts. My hunch is that not a single MyST Blogsite® customer has recognized that Captyx components (such as embedded videos) do not display in RSS feeds. This is intentional and done so for many reasons – far too complex to go into in this post. But the behavior is critical to creating and managing a durable content system because it makes it possible to create, manage, and integrate content items with (and without) embedded objects.

This agility is critical to future requirements that have not [yet] been invented. Imagine the day comes when you have 10,000 posts and you suddenly need to utilize your content in ways that heavy objects (such as video components) are not able to be included. Your competitors (who have embedded video code directly into their content) will not be able to participate in such a new use case without significant friction – they are busy creating non-durable content that assumes all objects in a post must be included in that post regardless of the use case.

Examples of durability abound in MyST Blogsite® - from the native MyST-ML [XML] markup language available universally across the platform, to the URL-based XML API from which a variety of XML formats can be accessed. In between we find filter patterns that allow you to scope RSS feeds and subsets of your content as HTML, Topic Cloud, which dissects all keywords into a relational map to your posts, and Link Properties that can exist as reference bibliographies in HTML or free-standing syndication feeds. MyST Blogsite® is designed with one assumption - change is coming. ;-)