Strangely Perfect

Introduction A few days ago I got hacked.  I quickly ripped out a heap of dodgy files left by the hackers but for some days now, Firefox, my browser, while viewing pages on this website, has been saying that it’s “downloading data from tructuyenso.vn… “. .htaccess This, of course, was not actually happening, as I’ve put [...]

# protect wpconfig.php <files wp-config.php> order allow,deny deny from all </files> The <files> tag is necessary and this post is placed here as some WordPress comment systems strip them out rendering the code meaningless. the .htaccess file itself can be similarly protected.

Introduction to the Problem and .htaccess Usage I’ve had a few weird hits over time from “normal” websites containing “abnormal” content.  Take today, for instance…. According to my Wassup log and the stats that appear on the main screen widget, I got reffered by: http://www.space.com/common/community/profile.php?u=1078916 Click this if you will.  It’s an ad for male [...]

I moved this website over to Site5 hosting last night.  Mostly, it went okay! I’ve spent the last few days copying the various media, plugins, themes and WordPress code files, and then last night I set the Nameserver pointers and waited for the propogation to start.  As far as I can tell, it’s working in [...]

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

Introduction An unfortunate consequence of posting stuff online is that you enable your ‘work’, ‘your words of wisdom’, your ‘copyright’ or your petty scrawlings (choose which you think is the most appropriate), to the world as as such, it’s freely copyable. My website is proudly running on WordPress sat on a standard shared hosting LAMP [...]

Use .htaccess!!! *Ebook Admin/Secure Apache I’ve mentioned it before – and the technique I used to use a lot with a huge list of blocked IP addresses.  I then decided that the list was too time consuming to maintain and stopped using it except in extreme cases about the end of last year.  Such a [...]

Last night I had a bit of a technical splurge on the Crawling Chaos website.  It’s got a new theme and stripped out a lot of extraneous plugin widgetty things.  I also redid the pages menus in a (hopefully) more logical construct.  I re-jigged page dependencies and set up some 301 redirects in .htacccess to [...]

Pre-Script Comments are now closed on this posting as Google Treasure Chest is dead. However, the problem has not gone away – the menace continues. For further information, all chat on this and subsequent scams is now here: Google Revolution, Different Name, Same Scam! and here: More on Google Profits and Pacific Webworks/ Introduction This [...]

Introduction While fishing around for some chords I came across azchords.com – as you do.  They’ve a shedload of Google ads and I accidentally hit the banner ad while trying to get rid of pesky popups (why do sites still do this now?)  I was taken to the website of someone called Kevin Hoeffer and [...]

Following on from my previous little post about DB Cache, I’ve been using it since that time and it seems to be faster to me from little old Blighty.  I use a USA based host so anything I see has to cross the pond anyway, but in a non-logged-in state, page loading is definitely faster [...]

Problem With Pretty Permalinks. Following on from the recent WordPress update to 2.7, I’ve had the weird effect of first a single post losing the pretty permalinks, then two, then all of them, then I had a big twiddle, (this involved a lot of forum work.  This question from Storax I thought nearly had it [...]

Well it’s hard to say, actually.  I run this site on WordPress which dynamically uses a backend database and various plugins.  The thing is that I chop and change the various blocking systems for testing, failures, experiments and even because I like the name!  There a host of reasons. But my website has had millions [...]

I hope everyone is fully aware by now about my opinions on anonymous commentary and spammers.  Er.. yes… they’re shit.  And what I do is fully explained in my site privacy policy, here. Anyway, my Russian friend left a little note, which I’ll leave, here, because in itself, it’s pretty innocuous.  However, visitors to my [...]