I just spent the last several hours recovering from the fact that for the last 2+ weeks, everything on this blog except for the homepage was returning a “500 Server Error”.

As best I can tell, on or around February 25th, something changed on the blog that did not play well with the .htaccess file on the server, which broke all the permalinks on the site. I’m not certain what — possibly the last WP patch, possibly something on our web host’s side. Possibly both.

A small edit to the main .htaccess eventually fixed it, but only after I had reinstalled a clean plugin-free version of WP, set up a new database & re-imported all the archived entries, scoured the web in search of solutions (none of which worked), and opened a trouble ticket with our web host.

Ultimately all I lost was some time, my Statpress archives of website traffic, and my old set of sidebar widgets. It wasn’t how I wanted to be spending this lovely Saturday but all’s well now.

Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has made some very interesting discoveries this Sunday night.

Here’s the high-level issue:

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Why is this bad for *you*?

Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.

It’s unclear right now what exactly is going on — for example, whether this is a possible WordPress exploit, or something at the webhost level — but if you have a WordPress blog, please click through to Tony’s article and do a little checking to make sure your blog is not one of the affected.

UPDATE April 8: More on this. Upgrade now!

…if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained.

I’ll probably upgrade sometime this weekend.

I’m listening to Matt Mullenweg talking about WordPress and blogging in front of a room full of bloggers. And this is only the first session of BlogWorld…..

You might notice that the blog looks a bit different tonight.

Scott decided that it would be fun to go to the WordPress Upgrade Party that the inimitable Matt M held Wednesday night. I figured, it was a good time to see if I actually could port the blog over from Movable Type to WordPress. With 1220+ entries in the database, I was more than a little worried that trying to move them all would be hell and result in me having one massively screwed-up blog.

Well, I was wrong. The process was unbelievable pain free. Absolutely everything just worked. Amazing. I’m so used to tech stuff almost-but-not-quite working; for something to NOT screw up or require weird hacking to get it right felt…. wrong.

At any rate, I got the data ported over last night; tonight was the fun stuff. Find a theme, customize the sidebar, add a few plug-ins. The move is about 98% done, but if you catch any weirdness or bad links, please let me know. I still need to re-add the comment policy and a link to my old travel blog, plus decide what kind of spam filtering I’ll be doing. Akismet is up and running, but that may or may not be enough.

So…. after 4+ years, it’s farewell to Movable Type. I feel a little sad about it, but it’s time for a change.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know!

Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.

After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we’ve got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home!

I’m waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.

A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to WordPress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.

Apparently, my ‘handle’ of Fiat Lux is classed as ‘definitely spam’ by one of the common WordPress spam filters (presumably Akismet).

That’s moderately annoying, since I’m rather fond of that phrase.

Lately, I’ve been having a real problem with some WordPress blogs. For reasons that I do not understand, comments I leave seem to vanish into the bit bucket as soon as I press the Submit button. This is getting very frustrating and makes me feel like not reading those blogs anymore, because I don’t want to waste my time writing up comments that just go ‘poof’. I suppose it just goes to show how much the ability to comment has — at least for me — become an embedded part of the blog experience.

The blogs in question are all run by different people on different servers, and possibly even with different versions of WordPress, although I haven’t checked to verify that last point.

I know about comment moderation, but I’ve been assured by some of the site owners in question that my comments were not moderated out. Apparently they’re not even making it into the moderation queue.So the question is, why? What else could be wrong?

It’s occurred to me that the problem could be on my end. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and it could be that this is some subtle browser glitch. Scott has told me to try using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox to see if that’s the problem, but frankly, if it is, that’s not going to be a helpful solution; I don’t want to go back to IE just so I can leave comments on some blogs.

A quick search of the WordPress FAQ and Forums doesn’t provide any easy answers, and I haven’t done an in-depth dig into other possible sources of answers yet. I’ll be looking at this question a bit more over the weekend. If I come up with a good answer, I’ll update this post.