April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

wordpress

Attention Self Hosted WordPress Bloggers

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Many bloggers are busy or just don’t feel the need to upgrade on a regular basis. However, many upgrades are for or at least include, security features.

When a security breach is found hackers are more than aware of these breaches and know which blogs to attack. Currently there are numerous blogs being attacked. Do yourself a favour and upgrade before you are one of them.

Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked:

First, there are strange additions to permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/05/security-threat-wordpress-under-attack/

If you have already been hacked see this thread for fixes.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/307660?replies=1

WordPress Plugins and Tools

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Ever embed a YouTube only to have it break your validation? There are plugins that will help with this, but they are for the most part only for posts or pages, for sidebar videos you were on your own.

Never fear intrepid WordPress/YouTube user there is a tool that will solve this problem, “Valid XHTML YouTube embed code generator” will generate a valid code and resize the video to your specifications.

Two comment plugins that make things easier for you and your commenters

Comment Remix Adds both front and admin end functionality

and

WP Ajax Edit Comments Because everyone should have the opportunity to correct their mistakes. 😉

and if you want to show off how many of those stellar comments you’ve received (or like me lack thereof ) try Liz Strauss Comment Counter

Tip of the Week

Are you having trouble with your end of post plugins and your posts running into each other? our your photos overhanging your postmeta?

Try adding this between them [sourcecode language=’php’]

[/sourcecode]

For more WordPress help or design contact: Fat Cat Designs.

WordPress themes and other things

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I’ve been lax on my political blogging, though much of what I’m reading makes you wonder if the human race has jumped the shark.

What I have been doing is building WordPress themes Serenity was my first one. I had thought about calling it “it’s my first day”(Simpsons fans will get that)

The second and third are a wide and narrow version of the same theme. It’s called Dark Room (920px version here)

I’ve also built a theme for a contest so can’t show it here. Probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of living in the land of plugins both WordPress and Firefox. Plugin developers are truly unsung heroes of the web.

I think I’m going to work on a theme for Canadian political blogging next. Anyone have any ideas they would like to see incorporated into something like that?

Shameless Promotion

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April Reign is now the proud owner of two new blogs.

Fat Cat Designs: Building and designing on wordpress.

Fat Cat Designs does everything from full site design to adding some graphics or tweaking code.

Mousetales: Is a place to discuss all things tech. Blogging platforms to the latest games.

New so short on content but new content will be added constantly and we are accepting authors or articles if you are interested. (at this point just for the glory,not for pay. 😉 )

Hope you will stop by and check us out!

WordPress 2.5 and so on

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alternate title “Sunday Self Indulgence”

The last few weeks have been very busy, not so much with front end blogging but with back end tweaking (file that under things that sound dirty but aren’t)

After the very busy and lengthy Bread and Roses forum overhaul, I did the forums over again completely using Brian Gardner’s beautiful forum templates. They are much smaller, easier on download and well built. Brian also designed the Revolution template that AR runs on. Again a well designed, well coded template makes all the difference. How could a leftist not love a template called Revolution?

I’ve been trying the various trial versions of 2.5 and I’m quite impressed. The image handling might prove interesting for those on older computers, but it is certainly an improvement on the old style. For anyone who likes to show off their digital pics the gallery abilities will be welcome. Spent yesterday uploading the new version to all the Bread and Roses sites and updating and fixing plugins to make sure they were compatible.

I added this theme Massive News Mobile and a theme switcher. Don’t know how much use it will be but it seemed interesting.

I redid a site for a client on a template that seemed simple enough but was a PITA, came out well though. Sadly this was strictly gratis. Sigh.

Coding skills and graphic abilities are getting a workout.

pogge posted this great video over at BnR the other day. Enjoy!

WordPress themes..Or, Oh NO not another sponsorship scandal!

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wordpress logoIn the past few months, a proliferation of “sponsored” themes has arisen. This seemed to me out of keeping with the open source intent of WordPress, and I wouldn’t download one out of principal even if there was one I thought worth it. (which most aren’t)

At the very least though, most of these themes require little editing to take out the “sponsorship”.

While reading the WordPress forums, I saw this thread wherein a poster finds an unintelligible code in his theme footer.

Turns out this code allows the theme “sponsor” to track stats on YOUR blog. This is an invasion of your blog privacy as well as a potential security risk.

For some time there has been discussion as to whether or not these types of themes should be allowed on the “official” theme site. Hopefully, this will put a higher priority on the subject and it will be ruled that they are not to be hosted at the ThemeViewer site

For more detailed information, read here.

Remember to check your theme files!

Here are some of the themes involved

http://themes.wordpress.net/other/right-sidebar/3954/mobilemagic-10/


http://themes.wordpress.net/other/widget-ready/4090/portable-magic-10/

http://themes.wordpress.net/other/widget-ready/4057/classical-1-10/