Category: Blogging

Hacked, Again

My blog had been breached once before with the same attack. But it’s happened again even though the WordPress version being attacked the 2nd time was definitely newer than that previous attack. I hadn’t been on my own blog for weeks. And the only reason I found out was because I installed Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Grace’s machine, and the new Firefox (working with Google) has this new feature that can detect “bad ware” like that.

wiredatom attacked

Basically someone “somehow” inserted a line of Javascript code into a couple of my blog entries and pretended to be “statistics” code. But in reality, it’s a script that behaves as trojans, presumably for Internet Explorers…

After some troubleshooting and searching, I removed all the codes and requested my site to be reviewed by Google in order to be considered safe again in its database…

Upgrading to WordPress 2.3

I spent sometime upgrading this blog to the latest and greatest… Unfortunately I spent way too much time on this biatch than I’d like to. But at least now I am in full compliance to the latest WordPress specs in terms of how things should be done instead of me hacking around the code base. There are still some quirks to work out, but at least they aren’t invisible to visitors (well, unless you are extremely sharp-eyed).

One thing I was surprised is broken in 2.3 is some small parts of the WP Tiger Admin plugin — one of my absolute favorite. Fortunately it’s nothing serious that’d stop me from using the theme, merely some interface quirks that just look annoying. I am a little disappointed that the author hasn’t fixed them yet… But no big deal.

So that’s one less thing I have to think about from now on…

WordPress Upgrade, Finally

I finally have some spare time to upgrade my aging WordPress 1.5.x to 2.1. Good thing I waited till I really had the time to do it… because the upgrade literally punched a hole in time and sucked all that time out… The upgrade wasn’t terrible at all. The more tedious part was to get all the newer versions of plug-ins I use, test them and make sure none of them break anything. So far everything looks decent in Firefox.

I tried upgrading to 2.0 when it first came out. But it just blew up. So I figure anything with a “.1” in its version name should worth the time.

Now back to more urgent matters — Java and other stuff.

Cool Parenting Sites

Blogging rocks.

I accidentally discovered two parenting sites…

Parenting Ideas
Parent Hacks

Brian’s mom is right about information being so readily accessible nowadays. There’s so much to read with so little time! One day I am going to get one of those bio-chips implanted and become 1000x smarter and 1000x more memory-efficient.

WordPress “Anti-Spam Image” Plugin

After having installed a couple of blog spam quarantine solutions, I finally decided it’s time to stop the spam bots to even have a chance to waste the server resource. So I went ahead and installed Anti-Spam Image plugin. Don’t get me wrong, I think Sebastian’s advise to install Spam Karma was an excellet idea (I only wished I’d listened sooner), but I hate the fact that those spam messages even got a chance to live in the database and waste my server’s resource to process them… Hopefully Anti-Spam Image will at least cut down on the spams from spam bots so that I can just deal with the less annoying spams manually…

Growth of WiredAtom

It just so happened that exactly three months ago today, I took a snapshot of the stats of this blog at the time. WiredAtom just broke 10,000 unique visitors since I installed the stat tracker. Three months later, it seems like the site has been consistently getting 10,000 hits a month.

Page stats as of March 15, 2006

I also found it odd that my arbitrary post on using the WordPress Random Header plugin is ranked higher than the official WordPress site! What the hell? My entry on insurance fraud is also ranked among top 5 results when “unethical doctor” is Googled! I am convinced that Google takes into account the “freshness” of a topic relevant to the keyword. I mean, there’s no fricking way I should be out ranking WordPress on a plugin that it provides!

Bloggers the Tech World’s New Elite?

A “Slashdotter” commented:

“Wall Street Journal tech columnist Lee Gomes says that the top tech blogs ‘aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite (WiredAtom Editor’s note: Here’s a PDF version in case WSJ decides to make the article unavailable). Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'”

Suckas!

via [Slashdot]

A Blog from Malaysia

It seemed like Alicia’s found some cool sites by clicking the “Next blog” button on the top right hand corner of Jason’s blog. I tried a couple of times and found a blog written in Chinese by a Malaysian Chinese guy… He’s actually got some pretty interesting entries…

I am sure Grace will be proud of her fellow Malaysian national…

Sweet.

Hit Me Again and Again and Again…

WiredAtom has been a runaway success… It’s beyond my wildest dreams having started blogging just six months ago. I credit most of this popularity to my lucky break. That speech, a direct result of my camcorder’s break down, single handedly put this blog on the map. Steve Jobs, once again, changed my life (ok, that sounded lame….) demonstrated his reality distortion field in the cyberspace.

As a quick update from my last statistics monitoring, here’s what happened a month later… 27,000 hits and 8,000 unique visitors and counting…

Site statistics for 12/2005

Most visited countries for 12/2005