Strangely Perfect

A Cracking Week Off? I had a week’s holiday of sorts last week.  On returning I found that this website had been cracked. (I already had intimations that something was wrong because of site stat failures and an email from @Justin Asking, sometime commenter to this website and others).  Anyway, so it was.  Unfortunately, I [...]

WordPress Comment Spam The plague of all blogs is spam, mainly comment spam, by sheer numerical superiority. Q.  Why Do They Do It? A. As a minimum, they do it to open a back-door into your blog that allows the perpetrator to place reverse linkages to another website to increase that website’s visibility in search [...]

Weird Comment Spam I don’t know if it’s linked, or not, but since the WP upgrade a few days ago I’ve had an extra type of comment spam fall into my spam filters. Thankfully the spam filters worked, but still filled up the “spam comment” area for further perusal. Maybe it’s a plugin?  Whatever. Dodgy [...]

Introduction Readers of these pages will need no introduction to Jesse Willms, self-proclaimed philanthropist and former purveyor of counterfeit software. But in the interests of traceability into the continuing insidious nature of the on-line marketplace, here’s a run-through of how to get from Facebook or MSNBC to Jesse Willms’ SwipeAuction (formerly SwipeBids), including a few [...]

[pacman] This guy has made a WordPress Plugin that’s a fully working PacMan game to celebrate 30 years of Pacman….  (link here).  So happy birthday, Pacmen!  I remember it and Space Invaders very well, and the loathing I had for their incessant racket in waiting rooms and taxi booking offices all over the North-East. (I [...]

I’ve just upgraded WP Super Cache. I use WordPress to generate and manage the webpages on this website.  Useful features are that it is flexible with plugins and themes.  You can do what you want. Today came the time to upgrade WP Super Cache. After a niggly start where it popped up a red message [...]

Problem As a follow up to this post, Disabled my blogtrafficexchange.com Plugin, I trawled through some likely plugin candidates for the symptoms mentioned by @Not Kevin.  These are obviously anything related to “web searching” in all it’s guises. Problem Solved The problem plugin is Psychic Search from MaxBlogPress.  In two browsers at least (Chrome & [...]

blogtrafficexchange.com I’ve recently had a few web-outages, slow loading pages (especially the admin pages) and a very recent drop in hits to this website.  Being short of time, I’ve let things continue. However, having a longer moment, after disabling the Related Websites plugin from blogtrafficexchange.com, things have speeded up remarkably!  Not surprising really since I [...]

For no reason …other than a try-out and also the current anti-spam plugins miss the odd bit of comment spam, I’ve now switched off TanTanNoodles’ Spam filter and am giving WP-SpamFree another try plus another plugin, AVH.  I’ve left Akismet running regardless. WP-SpamFree This now promises a lot, so it’s worth another shot.  Two years [...]

Introduction I got a ping this morning from a website called cleanup-registry.net   It arrived because I’d been referenced as a website in the network setup using the plugin, “Related Websites” by the Blog Traffic Exchange (actually, it may be time to knock this experiment on the head as generally, the sites are only loosely related [...]

Firefox Add-ons: What is an Add-on? First things first.  It’s now well known among the more savvy internet users, that the Firefox web browser is a fine piece of kit; secure, innovative and with a burgeoning user base that has seen Microsoft rise from it’s slumbers and put some serious damage control development into it’s [...]

Windows 7 Ultimate Install To say that I’m seriously impressed is an understatement! Having an MSDN subscription confers certain benefits, but for most Microsoft stuff that I have to use, it’s usually an exercise in teeth-gritting somewhere from the banal to the infuriating as I plod on through. My personal experience of Vista comes into [...]

Introduction I knew there was something really, really dodgy about that MyBookFace.net crap highlighted in this post the other day. Not only are they connected to some serious malware (as detailed in the posting), but they’ve an interesting line in popups!!! Google Treasure Chest Rises Yet Again! Here’s what to do… Go to http://mybookface.net making [...]

WordPress Upgrade Error I had messages from one of my managed sites that it went invisible and chucked out weird messages….  Well  that’s certainly up to the normal standard of feedback I get as a tech person! However, I too when doing this website got an annoying message on the recently introduced WordPress auto-update feature [...]