February 2008 – Page 2

Bad Monday

Monday seems to be the day that I will have to put out website fires.Usually it’s innocuous stuff but today –no such luck.

I opened my email and there was a message from someone I’d set up a website for stating the that his site was considered by Google to be a site that could harm computers.
I went into the site and after a lot of file examining I saw that in 2 places was this strange block of code*.
It might not print properly because my code plugin seems to have stopped working since I upgraded to 2.3.3

Hmm, so the plugin is working again.But so far that’s the only thing that has gone right today.
Other things that make it a Bad Monday:

There was no coffee in the house for me when I woke up today.I have to have some coffee when I wake up or I will get a headache.
It’s subzero weather.Technically it’s 23 degrees but to me anything under 36 is subzero as far as I am concerned.
Someone left a mug of water in the microwave,which I didn’t see when I tried to make some popcorn…so the it couldn’t pop.I kept trying until the whole bag burned before I saw the mug.I had to pour water on the smoking,stinking, blackened mess I threw out or the trash might have caught fire.
Ever since my dad’s host troubles for his site and the blog migration and etc to a new host,many of his post’s tags were converted to numbers (a hangover from his last host disabling pretty permalinks).I’ve just spent more than an hour looking through all of his posts and changing number based tags back to word based tags.

In an ongoing fight to improve all of my site’s SEO and Google rankings I constantly check in with Google Webmaster Tools. But not all the sites I managed are added to that dashboard, so the one site triggering Google to list it as a site containing Badware slipped by me until the site owner let me know about it.

One more lesson learned in my education as a webmaster:list every site you are responsible for or chance losing your client’s confidence in you.
And about that nasty little chunk of code:how did it get in there in the 1st place?
The website for stopping badware suggested it could be a hack job.I find this frightening to say the least.If it is a hack job, why was that code only put in 2 places? Why wasn’t it put into the theme template or core files instead of directly into 1 post and 1 page? You’d think a hacker, if they had access to the site’s internal files,would hide the evil snippet more deeply.The way it was added suggests the hacker had access to posts and pages and could edit them,and to do so one has to be an admin user,which means they had access to those template files.

Or perhaps it was just a nasty attack that occurs if you use a bad theme? Something pre embedded? For the site in question I created the theme myself but I did reference a downloaded theme so I could get some template tag questions solved,before I switched the site to my home made theme…and at one point the site was using this downloaded free theme.
Beware free themes even if downloaded from the WordPress ThemeViewer because even though WP ThemeViewer does a lot to weed the baddies out,they can’t catch every one. I’m not saying to avoid all free themes – just be cautious when doing so.

Note* Upgrade WordPress NOW

Turns out it’s none of the above.WordPress version 2.2 has a vulnerability that allows access xmlrpc.php which makes it possible for someone to access your posts.The warning in your dashboard telling you to upgrade and the news from WP about it isn’t just a tempest in a teapot. Google is treating the site that was infected like the plague,every single indexed page has the warning that it will harm your computer.Not worth it not to upgrade if you ask me.

What to do when you can’t work on your webproject?

I had to decide this for myself last night because Dreamhost(those lovely bastards) had taken everyone down during a cluster migration.That’s technical talk for you’re screwed until it’s over.
Hopping on over to the forum for Dreamhost I saw many fruitless bitch and moan comments that followed the announcement.This is the web equivilant to honking one’s horn in a traffic jam.You can’t do anything about it so you lean on your horn so everyone else around you will hate you.
Apparently Dreamhost had warned everyone 2 weeks earlier that this downtime would take place….but no one read the email and now they were pissed. I hadn’t read the email,either because I am not this account’s exec admin and I’ve asked several times to have the login for the web panel but so far no luck.
Continue reading What to do when you can’t work on your webproject?

unexpected t_string in plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php

Ahh the old unexpected T_STRING error message.I’m familiar with causing this error, not fixing it.So I headed over to the Exec PHP plugin home page to sniff out some way of making it go away.
Keeping in mind that in one Page where I’d used the plugin to display a list of pages it worked just fine I read the terse explanation of why I might be getting this error:

If you experience a PHP error message like ‘Some error in /home/minime/htdocs/blog/wp-content
/plugins/exec-php/runtime.php(41) : eval()’d code on line 4′ then it’s time to repair your PHP code. If you are unsure where your code breaks, first run it in a separate file to punch out all bugs and afterwards copy the code into your article or widget. To reduce the noise in the comments section of the plugin homepage I will delete all entries refering to this topic.

Yikes.It’s totally my fault,then.So what did I do to cause the error? I used an apostrophe
in an array or string or whatever the kids like to call it.
I was using the wp list pages template tag I got from the WP Codex
[php]<ul>
<?php
wp_list_pages(‘include=5,9,23&title_li=<h2>’ . __(‘Poetry’) . ‘</h2>’ ); ?>
</ul>
[/php]
Except instead of (‘Poetry’) I’d written (‘Men‘s’) and the punctuation mark was what caused the error.

I re-worded the title and the error message went away and the code executed.
Oftentimes I’ve gotten errors for something as easy to fix as my last mistake.
The first assumption one might make is that it’s the plugin causing this error.But since it worked elsewhere I knew it couldn’t be the plugin’s fault.
So I deduced that it was code I’d altered (see above) — the other code I used I hadn’t altered.
I hope this helps someone else who gets the same error and hopefully it is as simple to mend.

Is being a designer like being a contractor?

Well, no because one still doesn’t need to have a license in order to be a working web designer.
But the comparison came to me while I was watching a home improvement show called Holmes on Homes where Mr.Holmes comes in and repairs the shoddy work of contractors who have basically skipped town with the money.
He usually has to tear down walls and rip up floors to get to the problem and he always seems to find bad plumbing,insulation and wiring.This particular episode showed a beautiful home,beautiful in every way cosmetically but underneath the gorgeous framework was a total nightmare.
Of course a home is a much more important thing than a website.
Bad/faulty wiring can kill,which is why contractors must have permits and licenses and their work must be inspected and pass code.
Your badly/outdated coded website will not kill you and may look great on the surface and depending on what you need it to do it might not need to be coded to standards anyway.
But when I’m asked to work on a website that wasn’t built to my standards I sort of feel like that exacting contractor who has nothing but contempt for the other worker and empathy for the ripped off client. In my case however, the client has no idea they’ve been ripped off and I have to be tactful when I explain how I’d like to proceed.I don’t always succeed in being tactful.

There are rules and standards and ethics involved in designing a website for me even though apparently there needen’t be any at all,I’m not held to any work ethic other than the one I make for myself.
Continue reading Is being a designer like being a contractor?