Some evil spammer managed to hack my blog and add some stuff that injects spam into the RSS feed (but only visible in Google Reader and a number of other RSS readers, not visible when viewed directly)
Thankfully Anwyn’s Notes had the tips to get me on the trail although in my case the evil code was in a different but similarly named file.
Hopefully when I view this post in Google Reader the problem will have been resolved.
Update: Hooray! Google Reader has refreshed and spam is banished.
Uncategorized
spam, wordpress
Has flickr always had a limit on the number of photos you can have on the site? I’ve noticed recently that I’m limited to 200 photos (as well as the monthly upload limit). I’m sure that never used to be the case. I had a pro account last year so it wasn’t a problem but I don’t use the site that much so I let it lapse. I like flickr’s ajaxy interface but with this limitation, I’m wondering if there are other free photo sharing sites that are more permanent? I’ll probably just upload images into my blog posts from now on since WordPress seems to handle the resizing stuff itself now. My hosting arrangement here gives me plenty of storage and I doubt my photos will be so popular as to cause my bandwidth to go over the limit. So if you find dead images in this blog when reading through the incredibly engaging archives, it’s probably because they were hosted on flickr.
Uncategorized
wordpress
Just some housekeeping. I’ve upgraded Smithology to WordPress 2.7 and moved it from Slicehost to Dreamhost. A few little bells and whistles have stopped working – I will need to upgrade the template and plugins some time or other.
The move from Slicehost is just a finance thing. Awhile back a friend and I had a plan to host some stuff on a slice with the idea of building our empire into a glorious conquest of the internet but I severely underestimated the way having kids would affect my motivation when it comes to after work computer hacking. So I’ve moved (almost) all my little blogs and sites onto Dreamhost which is a lot cheaper than Slicehost for what I’m doing now which is nothing much. My opinion of Slicehost remains very high: you get a virtual linux server that you can do with as you please right from the OS up and for a decent price. Dreamhost is fine for blogs and mucking about with an online shop or whatever where as Slicehost is where you go when you’ve got real traffic and real uptime requirements with a plan for expansion.
As far as moving blogs, the process went as follows:
- export the DB in phpmyadmin
- tar up the web root
- turn off all the plugins
- untar the new wordress and copy it over the top of the old blog
- surf to the admin and do the upgrade
- check that things kind of work. I had to delete some old plugins that made wordpress die
- tar.gz up the webroot again
- export the db again
- copy the tarballs of the upgraded blog to dreamhost
- setup the domain in dreamhost and install wordpress in advanced mode (but don’t click the install link in the email it sends you)
- wait until you get the email that it’s done (takes a minute or two)
- untar and copy the blog onto the domain under your home dir
- do a
mysql -u username -p -h mysql.server.whateveryousetup blogdbname < db_bak.sql where db_bak.sql is the dump from your blog db
- manually override the dns in your /etc/hosts file and test the new install.
- While doing that, turn on the plugins and see what happens
- change the dns settings to use ns1.dreamhost.com etc…
simple ;-) It took me a couple of hours of mucking about but I reckon you could get it down to half an hour with practice.
Uncategorized
dreamhost, slicehost, upgrade, wordpress
