Web Consulting Washington DC » Bug Killer

Wordpress worms, and the importance of maintenance

Mickey Panayiotakis — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:43:36 +0000

wordpress

I am picky. I like substance rather than sensationalistic drivel. I get irritated by bad prose. I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar. And I actually spell out “you” and “our” when I text. As thus, I rarely find a blog post I’m willing to pass on. (Oh, the foreshadowing!) голова болит секс

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Of course, now I’m going to tell you that I did find a blog post worth passing on. It’s from Matt, over at wordpress.org, on how to keep wordpress secure. But don’t just stay on the first paragraph. This is more about wordpress. If you’ve ever been online, if you are now online, or if you intend to be online ever, you owe it to yourself to read that, and take it to heart. This applies to car maintenance as much as it applies to wordpress or to any other online thing you do. Matt doesn’t sew (I dabble at it), but the premise is ageless: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I’ve expounded on this before. Coincidentally, I just read some examples in a magazine that continue to car analogy. Tales of a forgotten oil change costing the owner the price tag of a new engine; ignored brake pads that ended up ruining the rotors; ruined transmissions; the list goes on.

This post brings it down to earth: regular maintenance is a known cost. Budget for it. Lack of regular maintenance (leading to a hacked site, for example) can cost many thousands of dollars. I was looking at a hacked site just this week: Over eight hours at emergency rates just to investigate. The site may require tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to make sure that all vulnerabilities are closed.

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I guess routine maintenance is your “business decision”. Just call me when you get hacked. I may even be nice and not add the “I told you so” tax.

Spam? Bah! We got it undercontrol.

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:50:53 +0000

Longtime ‘Spam King’ Charged With Fraud – washingtonpost.com colchicines

Today’s article in the post featured the high profile arrest of spammer Robert A. Soloway. This is good sign that legislatively some are trying to criminalize spam.

A couple of facts are needed to put this in context:

1) His arrest is in no way going to stop spam, it’s a drop in a bucket, oh size of Lake Michigan

2) We don’t sweat spam.

We recently launched a hosted email Outlook/Exchange solution that brings the glorious benefit of seriously curbing spam, so your Inbox doesn’t flood with messages.

Have a personal email address for over 8 years, so trust that I get a lot of spam. Approximately 300+ spam messages a day. Ever since switching over to our new email system, I have seen perhaps one or two sneak into my inbox, the rest junked into a folder to be trashed a couple of weeks later. This is one of the several nice benefits of this hosted Outlook/Exchange service (i.e. my Blackberry, which wirelessly synches to with my Outlook/Exchange hasn’t downloaded one spam message).

Here’s a screenshot of my Junk folder where all my spam gets thrown in with no problem.

Google Analytics: What is this /NaN thing?

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:04:35 +0000

Recently we started setting up our clients with Google Analytics. After Google’s recent upgrades to a more Ajax styled reporting GUI, we found it to be quiet the upgrade. There’s tremendous improvements in layout and flexibility, along with simplified explanations. Very easy for our customers to get in there and get around.

For one of our clients, we started to see the characters “/NaN” as one fo the pages of significant traffic, located in the Content reports. There’s no page called /NaN, it is actually a JavaScript error that means “Not a Number”.

Well, it turns out that this is usually an indication that there’s some other JavaScript on the web page that interfering with the JavaScript that is download from Google. The way to fix this, is to move Google’s code up into the tag of your web page.

We usually add the Google Urchin code at the bottom as indicated by Google, but in this case, the second recommendation it above all other JavaScripts.

Once we did that, Google Urchin code was run first and that fixed our odd /NaN problem.

Outlook 2007 Quirk: Say No to Double Left Click Appending that Trailing Space

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Mon, 14 May 2007 14:44:11 +0000

You found an interesting Web 2.0 looking website that promises you hours amusing entertainment but before you can go any further, you have to sign up for an account. You know the routine, and by now you have it down to mere clicks of your tab key thanks to AutoComplete that practically fills these suckers out for you. You click submit and just when you expect the doors to open, you get the following message…

You verification code has been sent to your email address. Please check your email and copy the verification number exactly a you see it. If it doesn’t arrive within a few minutes, check your junkmail folder… then bother us if its not there either, we’ll resend you another one.

What? Great, already your starting to have doubts about this website… its bad enough they don’t trust new users, they can’t even email you a link based verification, you actually have to TYPE the code in by hand? Groan. But you’ve too vested in the process, all those Tabs and AutoCompletes are going to be good for nothing if you don’t go through this right of passage.

So you open Outlook, your hand already on the mouse, and Outlook already downloading your new messages, bam, there it is, the verification code containing email. You open the email, you see the code, it’s a long ugly one with numbers, characters, mixed case. No worries. You double left click on it, and with your left hand you do a stealthy CNTRL-C to copy (you’re not some newbie, you know how to roll with the Cut ‘n’ Paste) and move the mouse back to the browser over the verification input bar… CNTRL-V to paste your left hand and last you click submit.

Your verification code you entered does not match the one we have recently sent you. Please try again.

What?! What is it talking about? You just did it perfectly. Your not wrong, it’s wrong! Ok, calm down. You do it again, double left click

with the mouse, left hand CNTRL-C to copy, you move the point over, select the verification input field, CNTRL-P to paste, and this time RETURN for good measure.

Your verification code you entered does not match the one we have recently sent you. Too many attempts have been made, you may contact support and we may response at our earliest convenience.

Great. What happened?

Well… looks like your Outlook 2007 is picking up a trailing space. When double clicking, the highlight surrounds not just the word, but an extra trailing space. The reason for is that Word or Outlook is trying to help you by not leaving a space when editing text. But if you do a lot of single word copying from Outlook to your browser (in the case of verification codes or forgotten passwords), it can be a pain because it means you have to remember to remove the trailing space.

To change this quirky behavior, it’s very easy to do:

Step 1 differin
Click Tools and select Options

Step 2
Select Mail Format tab

Step 3
Click on Editor Options

Step 4

Select Advanced

Step 5

Near the bottom of the page, next to “Use smart cut and paste” click on Settings

Step 6
Uncheck Adjust paragraph space on paste

Why this works?

Most verification codes come in their own line without anything else after it. So by disabling paragraph space, it doesn’t grab the last space into your browser. You can still edit your emails just fine, using “smart” cut and paste, your just make sure it doesn’t try anything too smart ass.

There’s 97 checkbox options in Outlook that you have to go through with until you found how disable this, but aren’t you glad I just told you? Your welcome.