Rantings of a Lunatic

Apparently I have been running one of the most insecure versions of Wordpress for a long time. I had done a manual install before I had been exposed to fantastico, and the version of WP I was running predated the auto-update features that are present today, and it was still working, so I had neglected to update it. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it right? Well, anyway, I got a call the other day from Matt, who proceeded to let me in on a little secret. I was apparently being link farmed out to Carnegie Mellon’s CS department’s DB Wiki, which must have been trashed because they have thousands of casino pages up. I won’t provide a link, mostly because I deleted it with extreme prejudice. What had caught me with this was that I had seen those links about a month ago, and had cleaned them out then, expecting that they were embedded in the theme I was using, and I had just never noticed them.
So, after he told me that, (he had been hit on two of his sites as well), I also found a nifty little javascript in the header that was a function that just did character substitution to do a meta redirect to a windowze-antivirus-2008 like dot com site if the referrer was from a search engine, and had an enumerated list in it. Needless to say I eradicated that as well.

So, I have upgraded to the fancy new 2.6 version, and I am not sure if I am entirely happy. Like anything else, its got the shiny new features, and lots of glitz, but there are some things that have frustrated me, and some things that I am sure I will miss. One of the features of the old version that I will definately miss was the in page preview of the post you were working on. It meant I didn’t have to keep opening new windows or tabs to preview what I was doing, I could save and continue editing and it would refresh the embedded page below for a quick scroll down, does that look right, or work.
In addition, the upgrade completely destroyed my category structure. I tried to fix it, but the database just added them on to the end, so I had about 18 blank categories, and then the 18 after it, and somehow all of the posts that had been assigned into multiple categories were now repeated. I think I have taken care of most of these issues, but I am sure there will still be some not so great opportunities out there for me to find, so please bear with me in that respect.

In addition, I am looking at a couple of new themes, so don’t be surprised if the site undergoes a face-lift in the near future. I average a new theme about every 6 months, so that should not be a surprise, but I got into a discussion with SPA the other day about some CSS tweaks that he felt would make the site a little more readable. I am not sure I agree 100%, but thats ok, I can see where he is coming from, and constructive criticism from a professional should always be accepted.
I have enjoyed this news-paper like theme, but I feel I want something else. I have recently made the switch from Gnome to KDE4, and while I am still a little frustrated with KDE, I am enjoying it, and so some of the Plastic/Oxygen design cues might make their way into the blog.