Broadband’s Back

In other news, now that the main PC has moved homes to be back with me, we’re now sorted for broadband etc. Well, technically speaking it’s semi-broadband, a 300Kbps service, but for what we need, that’ll do fine.

I find that I’m less and less interested in downloading music and films etc. – the 300Kbps will be purely for data, email, web-browsing and the like, and quite honestly the “slower” speed will do just fine for that kind of thing.

Now I’m off to sort out new email accounts, new mail server names and the like. You can tell I’m not a pure techie by the fact I’m not actually running my own mail server.

Oh, and next step is to put it all back to going through the router/firewall box. That’ll be fun, but it’s a job for the morning. In the meantime, it’s all getting turned off again. Can’t think why…

Under Attack

WordPress has recently been under attack by a worm. For more information about it, look here. In the meantime, if you are running WordPress, add the following code at the top of your index.php page, just after the < ?php line.

if (strpos($REQUEST_URI, 'visualcoders.net') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_USER_AGENT, 'wp-trivial') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_REFERER, 'myhost.gb.com') > 0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($HTTP_REFERER, 'mall.uk.net') > 0) {h
exit;
};

Apparently, it stops the attacks dead. Sounds good to me.

Upgrading

In general, I must say I’ve been pretty impressed with how WordPress works. The log-in thing is a pain in the arse, and still no-one seems to have figured out what’s going wrong with it. Still, once I’m sorted today, I’ll simply sort out new admin passwords for the two home PCs, and then leave any other hassles with it ’til the new year.

Over the festering season™ I’m probably going to do some work on getting some more of the d4d™ sections into the new stylesheet. Now, should I have the colour-switcher section on every page? Or should I just leave the others to get the information out of the cookie from the blog page? That little lot likely won’t be uploaded until either sometime between Christmas and New Year, or alternatively in early January. We’ll see.

I’ve been pleased with the way the colour-switcher works too – it was one of those things I knew I wanted to do, and I figured it all out myself. In fact I think the only time I needed the reference books at all was in how to write the cookie to the browser, which was something I’d never done in PHP anyway. But I do love the things that challenge me, and getting the idea and writing the solution was definitely a high-point.

In fact, WordPress is kind of cool on that score – I like the fact that if something annoys me, I can write/edit one of the files, and get it to do things how I want them done. But sometimes it’s a complete pain in the arse, and things that should be obvious somehow aren’t.

One example is the sweary/non-sweary filter. I know how it should work, but it’s not quite there yet, because of the way WP handles things. Again, I’m probably going to spend some time geeking around when I get the chance, and see what I can figure out. And yes, that does mean I’ll have a PHP book with me over Christmas. Pathetic, isn’t it?

In general though I’ve been pretty pleased with the way it’s all worked out so far. We’ll see how I feel about it after a few more weeks.

WordPress Problems

There’s one thing where I’m currently getting really pissed off with WordPress. The login section seems to be – frankly – utterly fucked.

Currently, ’til I get something figured out and/or fixed, I’m having to reinstall it every day, so that it gets a new admin log-on. That means that I’m needing to backup the database, delete it, and start from scratch before installing the DB again. The WP forums have been – frankly – fuck all use, despite posting the problem, and keeping on following up with new stuff I’m figuring out.

I’m almost at a point where I’m considering going back to Blogger ’til WP is more sorted.

Does anyone else have this problem with WordPress?

Still To Do – WordPress Migration

1. move other sections to new CSS styling and PHP
2. figure out some of the font issues (Firefox, for example, seems to have some issues)
3. sort out sweary/non-sweary styling
4. put some of the other stuff back into the right-hand side-bar
5. redesign that “navigation image” – it’s shit, but it’ll do for now
6. sort out a script for putting in the titles on posts that don’t have ’em
7. upgrade to 1.2.2 from 1.2.1 – please god it’s painless (it was!)

Still Chuffed

Bloody IE.

I thought I’d got the column problem sorted out, with the menu and links not over-writing the other stuff. And I had, in everything except I-fucking-E.

Rethink is needed. In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn off the side-bar. It’s more hassle than it’s worth.

UPDATED : Hmm, interesting. I think I’ve now fixed all the spacing problems cross-browser (including fucking IE). How did I do it? By letting the browser work out more stuff instead of using defined widths for a couple of the columns.

Now I just need to sort out this letter-spacing issue. (and probably loads of other things too, I know)