Tag: wordpress

Sick Blog: Cured

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.

Possible Massive Blog Hacking Scheme Unearthed?

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.

What Happened?

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!

SkawtBlog

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.