If you haven’t heard, AppSumo.com is like woot! for WebApps. The brainchild of Noah Kagan, AppSumo features limited-time sales on Software-as-a-Service products and more.

Today they’re promoting what they call the “Designer Awesomeness Bundle”. First up is a one-year TypeKit Personal subscription, worth $24.99 all by itself. TypeKit is an Open Type web font provider which you lets you easily spruce up the typography of your website, without worrying whether or not your viewers have your fonts installed. Toss in online scrapbooking tool Ember, design feedback software Notable, and a half-off coupon to site mockup software Balsamiq and you’ve got yourself a heck of a deal. w00t!

If you’re running WordPress on Media Temple’s Grid Service, there’s a good chance your blog has been compromised. I at first figured that my virus scanner was going haywire, but after looking at source code on a couple of sites I have hosted over on the Grid, I realized my database had been plagued with some script injection attacks.

http://ae.awaue.com/7

http://ie.eracou.com/3

If you’re finding the above references in an injected script in your source at the end of every post you have the exact same problem. The script has been appended to every post you have in your MySQL database. Luckily the fix is quick and easy. Here’s how to get rid of the WordPress hack:

1. Log In to your Media Temple Account Center

2. In the domain Admin Panel click ‘Manage Databases’

3. Log In To Admin which will take you to phpMyAdmin

4. Select the database of your WordPress installation from the left sidebar

5. Choose the SQL tab on the top

Copy in the following:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘<script src=”http://ae.awaue.com/7″></script>’, ”);

The command there basically replaces the script with nothing, but it assumes that your database tables have the default suffix wp_. You may need to edit the command or malicious script accordingly. Now hit go and phpMyAdmin should tell you the number of instances of the script it removed. You can also check by viewing any previously posts in phpMyAdmin.

The next steps are to figure out what to do if you’ve been hacked. There’s a great post on the WordPress Codex for that here. @mediatemple also sent me this link on twitter. (thanks for the quick reply mt support).

I only host a site or two, none of them client sites, on the Grid Server. These recent security issues are one of the reasons why I have moved away from the (mt) Grid. Unfortunately, the affected blogs were my Dad’s so I really do have to notify the “client” in this case. Good luck with your own site!

I stumbled upon Padmapper a few months ago just in time for my fiance to receive her rent renewal notice, accompanied with an 8% bump. BOOOO!

Padmapper is mostly a Craigslist and Google Maps mashup, with a few other online services added in for good measure. Every apartment hunter I’ve introduced Padmapper to has been unreasonably grateful. All I did was send a link! Enjoy.

At a recent HTML5 meetup, Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo held a vigil for Internet Exploder 6. IE6, long the bane of web designers everywhere is getting flipped upside down in the form of IE9. Turns out IE9 is kicking some major tail, specifically that of my Windows browser of choice, Chrome.

Sardo tells us that the IE team is working hard on hardware acceleration of web features. With today’s ever increasing computing specs, hardware acceleration certainly makes sense. For the daring among us, you can get the IE9 Developer Preview now.

Not to be left behind, the folks at Mozilla are really thinking through UX/UI for their next release of Firefox. Alex Faaborg walks us through the process of designing tabs in Firefox 4.

Via @besologic

As WordPress users already know by the trusty “please update now” link at the top of their admin dashboards, late last week, the WordPress team released WP 3.0. While the name suggests it’s the 3rd version of WordPress, WP 3.0 is actually the 13th version of WordPress.

There are a couple of key things to note about the latest major revision…

• WordPress Multisite – WP and WPMU have merged to allow multiple sites to be managed from just one installation of Wordpress. (‘Bout time you start that blog network you’ve been meaning to start.)

• Twenty Ten – WP 3.0 features a brand new default theme which shows off many of the new features. In fact, if you have installed the new version you may have found the original “default” theme strangely absent. If you’re building a theme, make sure you have all the types of theme pages covered.

• Selectable Username – WP 3.0 prompts you to enter a username and password on installation, whereas before you would be defaulted to the user: admin and an impossible to remember default password. This is a good chance to remind you to keep your passwords strong as you setup WP 3.0. The original created passwords were pretty complex, and thus secure. 1Password is a great tool to generate secure passwords and keep them all organized without having to remember them.

• “Blog” to “Site” – the options panel has changed the word “blog” in the general settings to the word “site”, indicating the WordPress team’s desire to push WP as more than just a blogging tool, but a bonafide CMS.

The full list of changes can be found in the WordPress Codex. In just 5 or so years, WordPress has attracted an 8-digit user base, and a micro-economy of designers and developers. Instead of getting straight to work on WP 3.1, as the WordPress team has done in the past, they’re moving to work on things for the WordPress community. As a designer, I’d say that’s a great decision and I’m looking forward to the forthcoming WP ecosystem updates.

Thanks to all the contributors to WordPress 3.0 and their excellent work!