It’s amazing what a trickle down effect this whole hacking and emergency upgrade with the resulting posts lost has had. I tell you that I have learned my lesson. I will keep my wordpress installation up to date! Of course, if wordpress had been created with more security in mind in the first place I wouldn’t have this mess to clean up.

My SERPS have plummeted for a lot of my best keyphrases off this. I know they’ll eventually come back if I work my butt off, but sheesh, if I had kept my installation up to date I wouldn’t have to go through this nonsense, though, come to think of it, some people went through it even with an up to date installation. But yes, I did increase my odds of getting hacked by not keeping after things. This has definitely been a learning experience. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, I have more work than I can handle right now anyway. So if there aren’t new people coming in because of it, that’s sort of okay. But it also means I have much less time to handle this crap. When I’m snowed under the last thing I want to be doing is restoring my own dang site.

I also have some issues with the lost posts 404ing, which will be fixed in a day or so, but until then google webmaster tools is reporting lots of stuff that’s problematical. Understandably. Two or three of my most linked to posts were in that 2 and a half month stretch that disappeared. Luckily I did have an old database backup that for sure has those posts in it, and my php guy, who is a DB whiz, is going to help me restore them. Hopefully tomorrow.

Moral of the story is that keeping your wordpress installation up to date is part of your Search Engine Optimization simply because a hacked site isn’t doing you any favors. It is guaranteed to cause you some sort of havoc in your Search Engine returns.

Technorati Tags: WordPress Security, Wordpress SEO Issues

How frustrating!!!

Especially since one of them is one of my most linked to articles! I’m hoping I can find an old version of the database and somehow figure out a way to restore them. Wish me luck.

Technorati Tags: Lost Posts in Wordpress Upgrade

Yeah, I was hacked. My own fault for not keeping this installation up to date.

I’ll be hopefully getting client sites upgraded soon too. This was not fun.

More info here and here. On this site it took the form of links added into the template files, and with a display: none; div surrounding them. Luckily the hacker was such a bad coder that I noticed pretty quickly that my blog didn’t validate, so I looked at source code and there they were. I think I caught things pretty quickly. I hope I did. I don’t want outbound links to vicod*n and v*agra.

** Update! **

These hacks are apparently very widespread. If you aren’t running the latest version of wordpress, I urge you to UPGRADE NOW.

More info here:
I was hacked (Wordpress)

Patching the Wordpress AnyResults.net Hack

And some Security Goodies you can install to avoid this in future. I’ve linked to the first one in the series, the others are linked from that post:

WordPress Security Plugins

Technorati Tags: Upgrade Wordpress now, WordPress Hacked, WordPress Security

There may be some weirdness, and some angst. There usually is. Hopefully the blog won’t be down for long.

This is not my favorite thing to do . . . *sigh*

I finally got FireFox 3 installed this morning, and I’m giving it a good workout.

There were a couple minor annoyances in plugin installations. I had to manually find some of my fave plugins (with one exception noted below) on the mozilla.com site, and upgrade them one by one, since the updater doesn’t seem to be working properly for all plugins (though maybe it’s just the jump from 2.x to 3 that makes that happen on some.) The ones I’m specifically talking about are Colorzilla, and Firebug. This was especially irksome since the mozilla.com site search doesn’t seem to recognize the search strings “colorzilla” or “ColorZilla” or “Colorzilla” or “Color” or “Color Picker” or “color picker” as having anything to do with this plugin, which is located here. I had to use “site:addons.mozilla.org ColorZilla” in google to find it. Is that an irony or what?

Aardvark, which is one of my favorite web dev debugger plugins has been updated but requires a trip to Rob’s site to download it, since the powers that be at mozilla.com have yet to review it. I had written to him on download day, and he very sweetly notified me when the plugin was updated this morning (Thank you, Rob!)

My initial impressions are that firefox 3 is a lot faster at loading pages. That’s wonderful. Even more wonderful is it’s so significantly faster that I can notice it on my already fast broadband connection.

I am less than thrilled with the changes in the bookmark interface though. It now takes me three clicks to do what I used to do with only one or two clicks. So file this one under “Why did you fix something that wasn’t broken?”

The “Awesome Bar” is not. It’s a bit annoying, but not so much that I want to download the plugin to revert to the oldbar, at least not yet. It’s been mentioned by a few people on the dev lists that this is a “trainable” bar and becomes significantly more useful after it learns your habits. So I’ll give it a go for awhile. If it still annoys me in a week or so, I’ll revert it.

In looking to see if there was an add-on to revert the bookmarks interface it took me a lot longer to find the link within the add-on interface to the Mozilla webpage that has add-ons listed. Seems to me a couple versions ago it was right on the bottom of the add-on window and could be clicked immediately after opening tools/add-ons. Now they show me lame “suggestions” first, which are so far from my reality that it’s ludicrous, then they make me poke around for the damn link, which is buried at the bottom of a scrolling menu. Stupid and unfriendly. If anyone knows of a skin or something that solves that issue, please let me know.

In general FF3 is good, no slowdowns with my max number of windows open, no surprises yet (though I have yet to get TOO crazy with it!) But those few changes in the GUI are not what I would call optimal, though they weren’t nasty major changes like the ones that pissed me off in IE7. The bookmarks thing is pissy though. I wish I could revert that.

The upgrade/installation went very smoothly, with the exception of the plugin thing noted above, and some of them did upgrade fine.

So I’m reserving judgment until after I’ve made the rounds of the fiddle sites and gotten a lot of flash and quicktime animations and scripty things running and see if I get the crashes I used to get while doing all this in many multiple windows.

I do think that Mozilla Firefox’s GUI Design team should keep in mind that making people click three times to get to something they used to be able to do with one click is a STEP BACKWARDS, not forwards. And there are two places that I’ve found so far that do that. We’ll see if I find others as I use this more.

Technorati Tags: FireFox 3, FireFox Add-Ons, Aardvark, Mozilla GUI design