If you have a Facebook account, you need to be aware that starting today, Wednesday, July 1, 2009, the default setting for Facebook Wall Posts and Status Updates will be public. This goes against everything Facebook has ever been about. The rollout will start with those FB users who already have their status updates, wall posts and photo albums set to “public.” But soon, it will affect you as well. The New York Times has already written a thorough article about it today.

What to do? If you value your privacy (such as it is on the Internet), then you will want to go in and change your FB Privacy Settings back to the way they were to make sure that only those people who you want to see your updates, status messages, wall posts and photos will see them. This means you might have a custom setting like I do (friends and friends of friends) or just friends, people in your network, or no one but you. If you do nothing, all your wall posts, status updates and photographs will become publicly accessible. Of course, FB will still give you an opportunity to change those settings when you create a new post or album or upload new photos. But most folks are myopic and won’t take the extra step to change those privacy settings. And as the NYT article pointed out, the new “status quo” might end up being “okay” for the majority of FB users. Only you can decide that for yourself.

So go ahead and modify those settings now so you aren’t caught with your virtual pants down later on. And if you are one of those FB users, like me, who does value their privacy, you’ll keep vigilant about those privacy settings. :)

One of the powers of WordPress has always been its custom Pages feature. It’s one of the least understood, most under-utilized, and most often misused feature WP has. In order to harness the power of WordPress, and to drive a non-blog site, understanding and exploiting custom Page templates is essential. I’ll show you here how to create a custom WordPress Page and show you some examples of how we’ve used custom Page templates in our clients’ web sites.

You can read more about WordPress Pages in the WordPress Codex, but in a nutshell, just remember that Pages aren’t generally meant to contain post information. They are used to contain static content on your web site. And since you can’t generally place live PHP code into the “content” area of a Page or Post without a plugin, if you have this type of code in your static content, the solution is to place that code into a special Page template. There are as many ways to use WP’s custom Page templates as your imagine allows. So let’s create a new Page template now, shall we?

Download the latest Pixelita whitepaper on Troublefree WordPress Installation and Upgrade here (255KB PDF)! The appendices contain a sample wp-config.php file and links to help you lock down your site from hackers.

I’m not against anyone learning new things. I think everyone should. But when you are a professional or small business, and you need a web site, think twice before you roll up your sleeves and attempt to do it yourself.

Our clients run the gamut from hard core geeks who maintain their own sites without incident once we hand them the keys to Internet neophytes who have us add every bit of new content. The secret is to know when you don’t know. If you haven’t a clue about web design, are colorblind, have no sense of style, no inkling about typography and the kind of messages that it and colors can send, if you think that PHP, HTML, CSS and SEO are all just so much alphabet soup, then think before you leap into web design. You might be able to save a few bucks in the beginning, but if you are counting on your shiny new web site to bring you business or income, then that could be a very costly mistake. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, anyone?