Another Opinion Among Many

Its been eleven months since I changed the design of this site.  Anyone who has persisted with my drivel over the years can attest that this is probably the longest period that this Wordpress installation has looked the same.  That is when I hacked Srinivasan G’s excellent Evanescence theme into what its become here.  I chose it because of the clean and clear code in the theme.  It allowed me to expand upon it and build something that I liked.  I can’t say that I won’t change again, but i still like what I came up with after all this time.  I may change it a bit here and there to either “tweak” what I have or to change the color a bit to reflect the season.  But, then again, I may not.

I checked out the websites of the commenters on the theme’s page and it looks like over 1/2 of them have kept the theme in use in its original design (which is quite classy, I must say).  I think that Srini should consider that a success.  And, although it really didn’t ever end up on my site in its original incarnation (especially since I snagged some code from another of his themes, which Ray uses), I am still content to use it as well.

So, have you kept the same theme? Are you happy with what you present to the world? Does it even matter to you?

Many thanks to Friendlier.com for a fast restore of my user account.  After uploading a backup from the 5th and recreating the posts since (from Feedburner, ironically), I'm back where things were, with this week's comments missing.

I have added the Subscribe2 plugin to my site as a measure to ensure that anyone who really wants to try and keep up with my fast paced writing will be able to do so.  After reading RT Cunningham’s convincing article on Untwisted Vortex, I decided that this was a good idea.  See the link to the right? Plop your email address in there and you should get an email notification every time I post something new.  If I published more often, I’d provide a digest.  But, since its rare for me to post more than once a day, I’ll send every time that something new comes up.  AFAIK, this doesn’t work for comments, though.

My original solution was to follow Feedburner’s suggestion of providing email subscriptions their way.  I tried desperately to get Feedburner to work with my site, but they just don’t want to wait for my feed.  For some reason, I feed my posts in a manner that is just a tad too slow for Feedburner’s impatient timeout and there doesn’t seem to be any trick that works to get Feedburner to accept my post feed.  The comments feed shows up in a split second, though.  The Feedburner help documentation had suggested that I could use SendMeRSS to send the posts via email and, after creating their widget, I was supposedly in business.

I got to thinking that there must be a way that I can do this myself, rather than rely on yet another external service to do my work for me.  I know that the philosophy is to delegate your work, but this is different.  This is why I decided to continue feeding through my own link (http://coreythompson.com/feed/ and http://coreythompson.com/comments/feed/).  The RSS feed links are still embedded in the sidebar as well.  I’ve moved them all to the top so that they’re easier to see quickly.

Consider this post the first test of the new way (I get an email every time, as my email address is in the TO: field and everyone else will be in the BCC:, which means no email marketing lists will be collected by anyone this way).  As usual, I will use your email address only for its intended purpose and never give it out.

I just wiped my website’s directory (on purpose) and replaced the whole thing, to what I think is, with just the files I want.  Perhaps that will satisfy the nagging bug that came from the hole in pre-2.5.1.  Let me know if anything doesn’t function as expected.  Thanks.

If you don’t see anything here, don’t dispair.  I’m just cleaning up after that nasty “visitor” I mentioned a few posts ago.  I don’t know when I will do this.  It depends on a bit of help from my host, the most awesome Friendlier.com.  But, if its necessary that all goes dark, I’ll be back shortly.

I tried something interesting to see what would result.  For one day, I turned off the Simple Spam Filter plugin, written by the most excellent Tan Tan Noodles coder, Joe Tan.  I wanted to see how much SPAM it was actually prefiltering.  Now, my site gets pretty low traffic, as far as sites go.  Depending on the stats program I use, either 160ish or 700ish visitors came to see me per day on the highest traffic months.  My total bandwidth usage has grown to about 3.5GB per month (thanks in part to the low number of videos and pictures that I host).

After entering some new keywords into the “banned words” list, I stopped having to moderate any comments at all through the Akismet moderation panel.  Anybody who has commented has probably been stopped by SSF and asked if they are indeed human at least once, as there are some pretty common words that show up in spammers comments as well as normal ones done by humans that care to engage in a REAL conversation.  I hope that you’ve enjoyed my attempt at humourously presenting the verification button to you.

What I was worried about was that legitimate commenters weren’t getting their point accross, as no spam to moderate is a bit strange.  Hopefully all you real, live commenters realize by now that you just have to click the button to have your comment appear without any further moderation.

So, what was the result? Of the comments that came through that Akismet hasn’t learned yet and auto-deleted, I got 48 comments in my spam moderation queue.  There were no false positives.  I turned SSF back on and the spam comments stopped getting through.  Thank you, TanTan Noodles!

Well, I found a directory on my Wordpress install that I didn’t install the contents of.  My wp-content/uploads/ folder had a directory /2007/12 in it, which, in itself, wouldn’t be much to raise concern, but it wasn’t “owned” by me.  My web host confirmed that all files should be owned by me.  I couldn’t delete the folder, it seems.  I sure wanted to, because it contained 100s of html pages that were all redirects to scummy splogger sites.  So, I guess that I got hacked.  Folks, upgrade your Wordpress as soon as you’re advised of a security release.

When I changed my cPanel password, some wierdness occurred.  If you were browsing my site this afternoon, you might have caught the moment where there was no database connection.  You see, when you change your cPanel password, it changes your mail, ftp, and mySql passwords as well.  It took a minute for the system to all get working again.  When I was checking the mail to ensure that it still worked, I noticed that I had almost 8,000 emails sitting in my default mail account.  I’ve not actually configured an email account, as I use Google’s Gmail redirect service, where I can forward mails received by corey@ to my Gmail email and send as corey@.  Why not use their spam filtering, rather than manage my own?  So, these were the emails that were being sent to any whatever @coreythompson dot com since October.  I am sure that all of it was SPAM, so I set up squirrelmail to show 1000 mails per page and used “toggle all” and sent them to my trash folder and then purged the folder.  I then set up my mail settings to bounce all email to addresses without forwarding with a “no such recipient” message.  Hopefully, this will keep the unwanted emails off my server.

What a sucky happenstance.