Ed Smiley's Blog

As you might be able to tell, I have a new site design.  Why, because it was time for a change and because of a slight problem with my previous host.  So here is the whole story.

Late last week I decided to try MacJournal from the MacHeist Bundle to see how it well it works for doing blog posts.  While setting it up, I kept getting an error.  After trying to go to my site, I saw that it was suspended.  Hmm, I know that my last hosting bill was due on March 1, so I figured that something was up with the payment.  I sent off an email to the hosting service, AxisHost, and received the reply back that my site was suspended for “an exploited WordPress”.  Hmm, I know that WordPress has its issues and figured maybe I missed an update.  So I inquired about what to do to un-suspend it and being a Security Professional, wanted some information on what happened.

Received a reply back basically saying back up the database, install a fresh WordPress, then restore the database.  However, as far as what happened, I was told that’ no viruses were found, but I had to rebuild’.  Again, I pressed for more details and was told there was ‘nothing further in the log’.

I guess two things bother me about this.  First, the site was taken down and no alert was made to me.  Second, if you detect a site was ‘exploited’, I don’t think it is too much to ask for some more specific details of what you detected.

Anyhow, long story short, I moved away from AxisHost over to DreamHost.  So far, so good.  Let me know what you think of the new layout…

I noticed that WordPress 2.7.1 was released today so I installed it via the Automatic Upgrade function, pretty nice.� The bad part, my K2 theme had some issues with centering.� Kevin Riggins also reported that his theme was borked after the update.� So heed that warning given on the update page to backup.

After a quick hunt on the K2 groups, I found a post that stated that the nightly update of K2 R7 fixes things right up.� So if you are running K2 on WordPress, update your theme before you do the update.� Also found out K2 dumped sidebar modules for widgets.�

Edit: Front page looks Ok, pages are messed up.� Back to the drawing board

First off, I would like hope that everyone had a happy holiday and a fantastic new year. Going to try to hit the ground running this year by forming some good habits. Actually, I purchased Leo’s book, The Power of Less, from Amazon and will hopefully be commenting on it more as I read. Actually, the price has recently dropped over a dollar so go check it out!

Happy New Year everyone!

Just downloaded the WordPress app for the Iphone. Looks pretty nice and it allows you to post photos straight from the camera or phone library. Good stuff!

Well, I was getting ready to move over to a Google Blogger blog and dump WordPress. �I changed the cname of edsmiley.com to point to google and I was all set. �However, for some reason it never updated. �So when I typed edsmiley.com, it ended up back to my busted WordPress site. �

So, I did a little investigating. �When I logged into my site via ssh, I noticed that the ssh key changed. �So I wondered if there was some sort of hosting issues. �I wrote my webhost, AxisHost, and found this out.

�…However, the new servers are running PHP5 and mySQL5 at this time. If, after the migration, you find that you need us to adjust the server settings – please don’t hesitate to contact us…

So I contacted them and they reimported my database and boom, we are back in business! So I decided since I have all my posts back, I might as well remain with WordPress.

The only problem I had is that my theme, K2 1.0-RC6, did not seem to be compatible with the wonderful TrueBlue style. My sidebar displayed in the sidebar, but at the bottom of the page. So I found on the google code site an SVN version of TrueBlue and it now looks even better.

More posts to come now that I am back!

I was watching a screencast over at the WordPress Blog by Matt (via Uneasysilence) There is a pretty cool feature that allows you to create a gallery in your post. This looks quite useful. I was always looking for an easy way to add pictures to a post. Looks like it is going to take a while to go through all the new features.

Well, bit the bullet and updated to WordPress 2.5. I feel WordPress is something you want to keep very updated as it seems to be prone to being hacked. Well, ran into a few problems, but looks like a lot of other people did too. I guess none of these problems were really related to WordPress, but the K2 theme.

When I did the database update and loaded the site, everything was fine. However, when I logged into the dashboard, I was presented with:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget()…

I was able to fix this by taking the advice from Brad at Chaotictech, I was able to get into the Dashboard. However, I was faced with another issue. None of the sidebar widgets were working. So I downloaded the newest version (RC5) of the K2 theme and now everything else seems to be back to normal.

The dashboard interface is quite different and will probably take a bit to get used to. I am using the visual editor to see how that works. If it still sucks like it used to, then back to Ecto for me.

Cool concept from Google! (surprising!) Google Chatback is a badge you can add to your site that will let visitors to your website chat with you. So I added one to my sidebar, feel free to chat it up!

I have been experimenting with posting photos to the blog via my Iphone. I first started out with WordPress’s Post via email. This allows you to set up an email address and every email sent to that address will be posted to the blog. A great concept, but never worked for me. I was able to get the emails posted, but subject only. Doing numerous searches lead me to this fix for Version 2.2. However, running the most current version already takes into effect this patch and it still does not work. Another let down was that it did not automatically check for the mail, you had to do it manually or your could set up a cron job to update automatically, but yet another plugin to install.

I gave up on that and looked to Flickr. They also have an email address that you can send to and it is posted to your blog. Kinda nice that you do not have to set up your own email and you can easily change the address if someone happens upon it and starts sending to your blog. If you go to your Flickr account you can set this all up by clicking on Your Account->Email. If you use the default setup for the blog postings, you will get some extra tags that looks like this:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Thanks to this post, I found that I had to edit the blog post settings and take that code out. Now it seems to be working fine, now just to figure out how to email more than one photo from my Iphone.

Working on getting the site back up