Jul 24
2010
NOTE: Be sure to read through the comments, there’s a lot of additional and very useful information in there. I’ll compile the notes as soon as I’m able and add them to the main post.
First, the hack described here is not MediaTemple’s fault, nor an exploit of their security system. It’s a reminder to all of us that checking permissions and updating software are the bare minimum we can do to avoid a lot of headache and potential security issues. MediaTemple was apparently just targeted because of their size, the responsibility for the hacked sites lies with the site’s owner/webmaster.[^mediatemple]
Second, it do
Jul 01
2010
I have an admin username (it’s not admin) which I use to manage my WordPress blog, and an editor user with which I write posts and leave comments. Sometimes, though, I get confused, lazy or both, and end up leaving comments as my admin user. This rather defeats the purpose of using a non-default admin username, which is generally done for security purposes (if they can’t guess the admin’s username, it makes it that much harder to hack the admin account).
More out of laziness than anything else (we can call it efficiency, right?), I dropped the functions below into my […] file…
May 26
2010
I ran into a problem recently. I wanted to have links to images be “lightboxed,” but I also wanted to blog in Markdown and not have to write out link tags with “rel” attributes for every image link. There are several existing plugins for WordPress that will do this automatically, but I’ve been sticking with the jQuery Lightbox plugin, which handles WordPress galleries in this manner, but requires the “rel=lightbox” attribute to handle single image links.
I’m not a big fan of directly modifying plugins, primarily because it means that my changes will be scrapped if I ever automatically update the plugin…
Apr 17
2010
I was working on a quick website for my wife, and trying to make things as simple as possible for both of us. For me, I just wanted to give her a flexible template that I didn’t have to hack much on (I went with Thesis), and for her, I wanted her to be able to start posting with a minimal learning curve. She just got a Flip, and wanted to start posting video. Since she was already posting to YouTube, I just wrote a quick shortcode in Thesis’ custom functions file that would take a YouTube id and turn it into a link that the Shadowbox plugin could pick up and make into a “lightboxed” video player. It worked great.