I’ve completed the site theme update as I mentioned yesterday. It isn’t completely finished: some things are still broken (sorry, macOS Safari users), and I’m not happy yet with some elements of the appearance.
But I did accomplish the main objectives I had. Ubergeek Kelly’s World is now using a more ‘modern’ theme that works with the plugins that were causing problems with the Twenty Fourteen theme I was using previously. And as part of the change I implemented the permalinks change (wth redirects from the old structure) I wanted to make. There are some additional details below for the ‘tech-curious’.
No one has liked any of my posts or comments in months. Actually, that isn’t really true- the actual truth is that a small number of people who visit my site without using a browser have liked some of my posts. Nope, that still isn’t completely true: people may like my posts, but they can’t push a button recording the idea that they like them.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that the ‘like’ button that is supposed to appear on posts and comments has been broken. So badly broken, in fact, that I turned the feature off. Well, you can now rejoice! The Like button is back (although as always you need to log in…), and boy is that a story…
How did I get started blogging and why? And why do I continue to periodically ‘shout into the endless void’ that modern blogging seems to have become?
I suppose it started out of a sort of arrogance. I have thoughts and ideas that I sometimes believe others might like to hear. There is also a more generous aspect of my reasoning that imagines my experiences might help someone else in some way.
This post assembles a bit of my blogging history and includes my attempt to explain what drives me to share my weird thoughts on the internet.
I upgraded this site from PHPNuke to WordPress in 2005. The cut over was rather abrupt and poorly thought out by yours truly. At the time, I believed I had successfully migrated all of my old content to the new environment. But several years later (!!), I realized the migration had left any article from my old site with a ‘read more’ tag without more to read in my WordPress configuration. This bothered me, and today I decided to see what I could do to ‘fix’ it.
My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time. The most common is the seemingly random appearance of  characters in the midst of some of my posts.
I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch. I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted. Until today… I hope
You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
I’ve been using Facebook (or “Bookface”, as my nephew Shane calls it) fairly regularly lately. Today I decided to see what could be done to integrate my blog and Facebook a bit. I read the “how to” guide by Thiemo Fetzer, and now I have Yet Another WordPress Widget in the left nav of my site.
Nothing has changed for “normal” users of my site. For folks who regularly use Facebook, however, you now have an option. You can click on the “Login using Facebook” option, and your authentication will be handled via Facebook (i.e.: you log in using your Facebook credentials). KellysWorldBlog will be added to your application list once you’ve logged in once. Assuming I understand the application correctly, you won’t automatically receive anything from my site simply by using your Facebook login. I (or any visitor) can, however, click the “facebook share” icon to share individual blog posts on my wall.
What benefits does this give? Well, I guess you don’t need to remember your ID on my blog any more, and your Facebook icon will now appear next to the comments you post. But the main thing this does is allow for easy sharing of my blog posts with your friends.
I was doing some work on my server today and noticed some errors in my logs of the following form: Feb 23 16:04:45 kgadams httpd: PHP Fatal error: Call to…
If you are running a WordPress based blog like I am and suddenly notice your post URLs have something “extra” appended (see the subject line), your blog has been hacked.
I have BadBehavior installed on my blog, and so it was rejecting the URLs with this addition which I *think* would be thwarting the hackers involved: they hadn’t been able to create an administrative user. Unfortunately, it also meant none of my blog posts were working properly until I noticed the problem and corrected it.
Hopefully WordPress will issue a fix for this soon- in the mean time, keep an eye on your URLs, WordPress bloggers!
UPDATE: Another link to a lengthy thread regarding this hack on the WordPress.org site. What is interesting here is the apparent vector: a weakness in the WordPress code, apparently up to and including the most recent release, that permits an ordinary subscriber (i.e.: not an administrative user) to run some administrator features e.g.: changing the permalinks.
UPDATE #2: it appears that updating to the most recent version of WordPress (2.8.4) removes the “double slash” vector for running some admin commands (notably permalink.php). This fix was apparently added somewhere between WordPress version 2.8 and 2.8.4.
I’ve included some extracts from my server logs and further thoughts below…
