Cenzic, the innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions launched their MyST Blogsite yesterday (blog.cenzic.com).

Aside from a very polished and clean design, this site has already begun to set the tone for high quality content.

Erin Swanson, Senior Director for Product and Strategic Marketing (and Blogsite expert), has created corporate blogsites before at two previous employers (Solid Core and Enviance); and it shows - she really has a clear understanding of marketing advertorials and how to create compelling content.

In just a few days effort, MyST was able to transform her vision into a thriving business advertorial presence that covers web vulnerability, security news, and web application security insights. If these subjects interest you, be sure to subscribe to their news feed.

See Also

• Cenzic
  Cenzic is the innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions.

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.

See Also

• Hacked and Attacked: Why?
  April 18, 2008: San Diego Real Estate Blog
• Compromised WordPress Blogs Become an Army of Hacker Zombies
  Somewhere in the shadowy underbelly of the Web, there is an intelligent, and slimy, hacker exploiting WordPress security holes.
• Fighting Back Against Big, Hungry, Orange Alligators
  Overly aggressive RSS feed aggregators can cause server performance problems; MyST Blogsite introduces new technology to detect (and reject) egregious offenders.

Microsoft Word is an extremely popular—and extremely capable—word processor. For many people, Word is their preferred content authoring tool. Thus, it is common practice for bloggers to compose new blog posts in Word and then simply paste the content into their blogsite.  Composing content in Word offers many advantages, e.g., powerful spelling and grammar checking tools, built-in thesaurus, automatic backups while writing, off-line authoring, and so on. However, Word also has a dark side.

When you paste content into an HTML editor (such as the MyST Blogsite editor), Word includes a great deal of unwanted content formatting.

The problem is Word follows the philosophy that pasted content should look exactly like it did in the Word document. While this philosophy is great when you are pasting content between various office documents, it is inappropriate for a blogsite. In a blogsite, we want pasted content to look exactly like it was authored in (and for) the blogsite. A MyST Blogsite is carefully branded and includes specific typefaces, colors, spacing, and so on.

So, when pasting content from Word, it is important to optimize the pasted content, removing the unwanted Word-supplied formatting codes, leaving the blogsite free to present the content according to the blogsite's design. Doing so ensures the pasted content looks right at home in the blogsite. In addition, should the blogsite ever be re-skinned using different styles, the pasted content will automatically adapt to the new styling. But manually removing Word styling is tedious and time-consuming. That's why the MyST Blogsite editor includes a tool that optimizes pasted content.

Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word

The MyST Blogsite editor includes a new Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word toolbar. This toolbar lets you specify your preferences about when MyST Blogsite should automatically optimize Word content. First, the "Optimize Now" button lets you request immediate content optimization. This button works in either rich text editing or raw HTML editing modes.

Two checkbox options let you request automatic content optimization upon pasting new content and/or upon saving an item. In most cases, its good to leave both of these checked.

QA Assurance Reporting

MyST Blogsite automatically analyzes all public content weekly and produces a Public Content Quality report that identifies specific content quality issues in the publicly visible portions of your blogsite. This report now identifies occurrences of content containing unwanted Microsoft Word formatting that should be optimized for the blogsite. Such items are indicated by the following QA notice:

content contains non-optimized Microsoft Word formatting

Using the content optimizer toolbar makes addressing such QA issues very easy. Simply click the icon to edit the offending content, ensure that the "Auto optimize on Save" check box is checked (you're preferences will be remembered), then click Save. Optionally, you may click the "Optimize Now" button before clicking Save to review the optimized content before actually saving the change.

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. ;-)

See Also

• Centralizing the creation and maintenance of an enterprise-wide information architecture
  I do not believe you can create a durable information architecture without knowing and understanding the content, the users' interaction with the content as both creators and seekers and the context(s) in which the content is used.
• "agility" Topic Cloud | MyST Blogsite®
  "agility" Topic Cloud for MyST Blogsite

Everyone agrees that relevant, high-quality links improve the overall value of a blog post.  But for a busy business person, it is easy to overlook nitty-gritty "blogging" details such as choosing the most effective title or synopsis text for a link property.  In fact, while trying to be diligent about such things in my own blogging, it finally dawned on me that most of the time, the MyST Blogsite editor could automate those details for me.  Not only would it save me time, it would often do a better job at it than I would do.

So, once again, necessity (or laziness) has become the mother of invention.

The MyST Blogsite editor now includes a "Smart Link Verify" tool that verifies a link URL and suggests meaningful title and synopsis text for that link.  To make the workflow even easier, simply hitting ENTER after entering a link URL automatically invokes the Smart Link tool for that link.  The short video here shows the tool in action adding the link properties to this post.

Since its earliest incarnation, MyST Blogsite has supported distinct link properties that allow authors to create an annotated bibliography of links related to each post.  These properties are leveraged in a variety of ways by the MyST Blogsite platform, and offer many distinct and unique advantages over personal blogging tools that support only embedded hyperlinks.  Now, with the new Smart Link feature, it has become even easier to take full advantage of link properties.

See Also

• SES NYC the value of authoritative links | Sally Falkow
  Good PR (public relations, not PageRank) can influence search ranking
• Don't Cut Corners on Technical or Content Quality | MyST Blogsite®
  Content quality has a significant impact on search and discoverability of your information - don't risk all your blogging effort with substandard publishing practices.

The MyST Blogsite^® Quality Assurance alerts and reports now include pie charts showing the number of clean versus QA issues in your blogsite for both aggregate issues and within each issue type.

The pie charts intuitively communicate how well you are doing overall, and within specific quality assurance categories. One great benefit of this is that we also include the overall chart in the weekly Quality Assurance Alerts delivered via email.

CEO and co-founder F. Andy Seidl comments -

"Our new graphically enhanced reports and alerts provide authors and administrators with a clear picture of content quality issues that should be addressed. The details within the QA reports are very helpful and the links are designed to make it easy to locate and fix issues. The addition of graphical charts helps our users zero in on areas that need the most attention."

Google and many other popular search engines make it clear that technical and content quality is a key factor in determining recommendation rankings; read more about this emerging business blogging requirement in Don't Cut Corners on Technical or Content Quality.

See Also

• Don't Cut Corners on Technical or Content Quality
  Content quality has a significant impact on search and discoverability of your information - don't risk all your blogging effort with substandard publishing practices.
• Increase Traffic By Fixing Broken Links
  One of the things I recommend you do once or twice a year is to run an audit of your blog. The purpose of this audit is to fix errors in your blog such as links to pages not found.