ianmjones

Always developing

Month: September 2009

  • Reboot

    Recently I was able to buy ianmjones.com, a slight upgrade to my existing ianmjones.net domain.

    On re-appraisal of the old ianmjones.net as was, I felt that the site did not reflect who I am now, so I made the decision to start from scratch, to reboot if you will.

    You are now reading the first post on that clean slate.

    Some might say starting again with a clean slate is not in the spirit of blogging, surely a blog should morph and transform over time as you do, and still others might comment that at the very least I will be losing valuable search ranking.

    I’m in the process of cleaning out and simplifying many aspects of my life, and this site is most definitely needing my attention, along with all my other web sites.

    The majority of traffic to this site over the last couple of years has been to “off topic” posts about matters that have no long-term interest for me from people who in general won’t have any reason to ever return. That’s not very useful, to me, or to those visitors arriving by searches that I would never have occasion to try myself.

    As the last post on the old site notes, my old site succumbed to the WordPress worm that has attacked older versions of WordPress and laid dormant until just recently. It's a good time to clean house.

    Also, you may or may not have noticed, but this site does not have any form of commenting mechanism. This is not an over-sight, it is intentional. If you would like to comment on anything I should put up on this site, please feel free to send me an email, tweet, IM or even a dead tree letter, or better still write something thought-provoking on your own site.

    Often, when this site has been re-born I've made some promises or shared some hopes as to what I expected to do with it, this time I make no such promises or declarations of intent.

    Previous versions of this site can be found at:

    old.ianmjones.com (covering dates 2004-09-30 to 2009-09-16)

    old.ianmjones.net (covering dates 2002-02-11 to 2004-09-30)

    ianmjones

  • Yikes, I’ve Been Hacked!

    Guess who got hit by the WordPress worm that’s been doing the rounds?!

    Ironically, it all kicked off as I started to work on the site in preparation for moving to a brand new format.

    While Integrity was doing it’s thing, checking that I’d converted a load of fully qualified links to relative ones before doing a wget archive for posterity, I started to notice a lot of bad requests for pages that really should be fine.

    When I hopped over to my site it was blank. Uh oh.

    Luckily I still had another tab with the WordPress console open from where I’d been updating a few posts, and that seemed fine. As I browsed around I noticed a few strange things though.

    First I noticed that I was getting some weird text in the upper right of the admin console, that later turned out to be the “Hello Dolly” plugin, which had been activated (not by me).

    I then noticed the most scary thing, my post count was less than I expected. Instead of 173, it was 145, where had all the rest gone? Within a minute the count was down to 133, someone/thing was deleting all my posts.

    I quickly killed Integrity, which stopped the deletes, and continued looking around the WordPress console. I found that all my themes bar the one I had had active were gone, and the one remaining was inactive. That’ll be why the site was blank then, there was no theme to render the site with.

    Having remembered that Andy Ihnatko had been hit by the worm I went to his site and gathered as much info as possible about what the problem was and how to recover from it.

    Luckily, I’d done an export from WordPress just the day before, so I was able to simply drop the infected database and create a clean one, download WordPress 2.8.4, install and configure from scratch, import the WXR file and copy across my unaffected images.

    If you’re running anything less than WordPress 2.8.4 do yourself a favour and go directly to your WordPress console / Tools / Export and get yourself an export without looking at your own site. Get a copy of your wp-content folder quick smart. Then upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4.

    You don’t want to waste approx 4 hours of your life to this mess, and you definitely don’t want to lose all your posts.

    Tomorrow (actually, that’ll be later today considering the time) I’ll be going ahead with the move to a simpler site setup I had planned and was gearing up for already.

    See you when the dust settles.

    ianmjones
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