WordPress.com

1. katemckinnon
   Member
   Mar 9, 2011, 1:50 AM

   I have been envious of a Blogger feature that my friend is using. He has his blogroll loaded into Blogger widgets that automatically move a link to the top of its category when the linked blog updates. That way people who update their blogs ride higher on the blogroll than those who don't.

   Since WordPress is about ten times as sophisticated as Blogger, I'm puzzled as to why we don't seem to have that feature. I'd be surprised if such a useful thing was theme-dependent.

   Anyone?

   The blog I need help with is katemckinnon.wordpress.com.

2. raincoaster
   Member
   Mar 9, 2011, 2:28 AM

   Dynamic widgets probably contain code which could be exploited by hackers, typically javascript. We have a bit of a tradeoff here: it's much more static, but also a great deal safer.

3. katemckinnon
   Member
   Mar 9, 2011, 2:35 AM

   Hackers who would do what?
   Hack my blogroll?

   I admit that I am a bit confused about the level of danger here. The blogrolls that show updates are tremendously useful. The static lists, well, you have to click on every link to see if anything new has happened. It's a huge waste of time.

   I wonder, are you guessing that this is a feature that we aren't going to get for security reasons, or are you quite certain?

4. raincoaster
   Member
   Mar 9, 2011, 2:44 AM

   I'm not staff, so by definition I'm guessing. If you want an answer from staff, contact them directly from your dashboard.

   The way WordPress.com blogs are structured, you share the "backbone" of all other people using that theme. This means that everyone using a particular theme is exposed to all the combined security risks of all of the other users. For that reason, we can't use javascript and until the gigya shortcode workaround, could not use flash. If it appears that workaround was part of the problems we experienced last weekend, you can rest assured staff will disable that as well.

5. katemckinnon
   Member
   Mar 9, 2011, 2:52 AM

   That's very interesting, thank you for the clarification.

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