February 13, 2008 – 9:55 am
So, apparently my blog underwent a minor attack last night. I woke up this morning to an email saying that my new blog had been set up at shamuswrites.com. Now this sent a slight cold chill down my back, since I clearly already have a blog here. The email gave the typical administrative username, but what really made my blood run cold was the next part that read, “Password: Inherited.” I checked the site, and sure enough, what I saw was the initial setup screen that asks for the name of your new blog and an email address for the administrator. Not good. Not good at all.
My next step, then, was to log in to phpMyAdmin and double-check the database for my blog. All the tables were present and accounted for, and the sizes looked about like they should for 4.5 years of blogging. So, I backed up the database real quick and then repaired all tables (since I’ve had problems with a table breaking in the past and messing up my blog). After that, everything came back to working order again, which is a huge relief.
My theory is that someone tried to access the install.php file, probably by a roundabout means, in an attempt to either access my site or corrupt it irreparably. The attempt clearly failed, but it did nearly cause me a minor heart attack. I’ve since deleted both the install.php and upgrade.php files, just to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. In theory, not deleting them shouldn’t cause any harm, since accessing them after an install or an upgrade generally only returns a message saying you’ve already done that, but I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if hackers have found ways to exploit those files for their own amusement. I’ll likely make a point of backing up all my DBs on a more regular basis now (especially since SSH makes it so darn fast and easy to do), just to make sure that if I do get hacked at some point in the future, it will be an easy task to return things to a general state of order again.
February 8, 2008 – 3:18 pm
Well, at long last, I finally figured out the trick to installing Subversion on my server. As such, I’m working on switching most of my WordPress installations to Subversion in order to make it much easier and faster to upgrade in the future. I just switched this site to a Subversion-agreeable install, and I’m pretty sure that I copied all my custom files and directories over. But, I’ve been known to make mistakes, too, so if you notice something not working properly, do please let me know.
January 28, 2008 – 4:57 pm
WordPress and Twitter fans, rejoice! Now available: Prologue, a Twitterlike theme for WordPress that’s ideal for groups of 3-15 to post short updates to each other. Downside: if you don’t have access to SVN, you have to download each theme file separately, since the boys at Automattic neglected to bundle them in a tidy .zip file. (Source: Matt)
December 12, 2007 – 3:01 pm
With thanks to Rob for pointing me in the right direction, Shamus Writes is now sporting a modified, Web 2.0-ish look. I contacted Ant Eksiler, who is giving away free custom WordPress themes to folks who meet a certain set of criteria, and he took my Bluesands theme and tweaked it to give it a slightly cleaner, more glossy look. So, my thanks go to Ant for his hard work (and for sorting through my stylesheet) and putting the finishing touches on my theme. I’ve also added credits for him in both the theme’s footer and stylesheet.
So, what do you think?
October 31, 2007 – 9:14 am
I don’t know how many other people who’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1 are having this problem, but I’d noticed that none of my email comment notifications were coming in anymhttp://shamuswrites.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
Writeore. I sent a note about it to the wp-testers list, and found that the fix is pretty easy.
Go to wp-includes/pluggable.php and find and remove line 228:
$phpmailer->Sender = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );
Save and re-upload the file, and you should be back in business. I’ve submitted a new ticket for the issue, so hopefully the problem will be fixed in the next revision.
October 4, 2007 – 3:57 pm
I don’t track my blog stats quite as religiously as I did a year ago, so it was a couple of days after I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 before I realized that something very strange was happening with my stats. I switched to WP-Stats awhile back because it’s lightweight and takes some of the load off my own hosted account. The plugin worked very well there for awhile, but with the upgrade to WP2.3, a handful of plugins have exhibited some new behaviors, WP-Stats being one of them.
Everything with WP-Stats works as it should except for the traffic tracked to individual entries. As you can see from the screencapture, the traffic is no longer being logged correctly. Instead of seeing the title of the post in question, what generally shows up is the post ID, though I usually have one entry that shows the title for some reason. This wouldn’t even be so bad, since ordinarily you’d at least be able to click through to the post and check the title that way. Tedious, I know, but at least it’d be something. Instead when I mouse-over the link, here’s what I see:
A useless link that doesn’t actually take me where I want to go. Now, obviously something doesn’t work right, and I haven’t had a chance to jump into the code to see what’s happening. The WordPress support forums have seen a fair bit of traffic about the WP-Stats plugin being broken, though I don’t think I’ve seen my own specific problem appear yet (something which I’m about to remedy). Hopefully a new version will be released soon with a patch to address the various problems users have been reporting.
September 25, 2007 – 1:31 pm
My tumblelog is officially up and in working condition. I’m using the T1 theme, which is built on the wonderful Sandbox, much to my great joy. I did modify the theme somewhat, though, removing the default T1 image in the header and restoring the bloginfo(‘name’) and bloginfo(‘description’) fields to their proper places. I also brought the theme up to 2.3 compatibility with tags and added my webring navigation links to the navbar.
What I like about T1 is the custom styling for each category, giving each type of entry its own special look. I intend to take full advantage of this as this tumblelog will give me a good place to share any all neat videos, photos, links, etc. that I run across in the course of the typical day. Comments are open and welcome – just mouseover any entry for the comment link to appear on the right-hand side. Also feel free to subscribe to my feed, particularly if randomness is your cuppajoe.
September 24, 2007 – 11:02 pm
I’ve successfully migrated this blog to WordPress 2.3, and I was actually a little surprised at how painless it was. I did turn up a handful of duplication errors with regard to the wp_term_relationship tables, even though I’d made sure I deleted those tables beforehand, but in spite of that, I think everything migrated to 2.3 just fine. The UTW conversion went very smoothly, converting nearly 1200 tags and over 4100 tag-to-post relationships in about 3 seconds. Very slick.
I’ve also just spent the last 45 minutes upgrading plugins, thanks to the nifty little plugin update notifier that’s now built into WordPress, and I’ve also coded this theme to be compliant with WordPress 2.3 tags. I’ll rebundle it tomorrow and distribute it on the download page. All in all, I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.
This is the only one of my WordPress installations that I’ve run tags on, since UTW was, quite frankly, such a pain in the neck to implement. I’ll be converting a couple of my other installations over to tags soon, as well, and I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Tumblelog but was waiting for 2.3 to come out before doing so. I think I’ll be setting that up in the near future now, as well.
September 24, 2007 – 3:34 pm
Well, that was fun. I’ve been having some issues recently with a couple of my WordPress installations. In a nutshell, every form that has anything to with communication to the database was choking. Data wasn’t being saved to the database, screens weren’t loading properly, functions weren’t… functioning. It took me a little while of searching (and no little amount of stress and worry) but I finally stumbled across a solution that just felt right. I’ve been using Bad Behavior for awhile now in conjunction with Akismet to catch and filter out spam. Between the two, they’ve done a fabulous job, making it a rare occurrence when even a single spam item slips through the cracks.
Unfortunately, apparently Bad Behavior has failed before, prompting an upgrade from 2.0.7 to the current version of 2.0.10. Trouble is, now 2.0.10 is malfunctioning and it blocking all scripts that had anything to do with communicating with the database. My guess is that something has gone wrong with Bad Behavior servers, potentially causing some sort of “feedback” loop. I – and a couple of others – have left comments notifying the author of the problem, so hopefully we’ll see a new version released in the near future. In the meantime, problem solved and everything seems to be functioning properly again.
Full Feed
1,000
It’s only taken me four years to do it, but this is finally the 1000th post on this blog. Admittedly, my first two years of blogging were sporadic at best. There was something about the Xanga community that just never really inspired me to write much. I think it mostly had to do with the fact that it was so exclusive – you had to be registered there in order to interact – and most of my intended target audience were outside the Xanga community. Xanga also never really let me customize my site anywhere near as much as I wanted to. You were pretty much stuck with their chosen layout – and I’m pretty sure it’s still that way.
So, stumbling across WordPress was literally the best thing that ever happened to my writing. It took me a few weeks of playing with my new hosted blog to really get a feel for how things worked, and then it took me awhile to develop a readership of any kind (a readership which, I’m sad to say, I haven’t been able to put as much time an effort into fostering as I’d like lately). But since writing on WordPress, I’ve been much more focused on my blogging and becoming a part of an active, growing community that has been very satisfying and enjoyable.
I’m thrilled to be a WordPress blogger, and I’m looking forward to getting more actively and intimately involved with both the WordPress community and the WordPress code. I’m certain the next 1000 posts will be as enjoyable, if not more so, than the first 1000.
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