Archives for December 2008

Mysterious Truncated WP Files

December 31, 2008 by

Early today, I noticed that one of my sites that gets 600-1000 hits a day had barely gotten to 20.  I didn’t think too much of it as most of the traffic is from search engines (read: The Great Googely-Moogely.) and the site has been de-indexed before.  It happens.

However, tonight, I tried to go to the site to check a few things and all I got was a nice WP PHP error.  If you run WP, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  So, being the amateur coder that I am, I did a quick FTP download of the file that was spitting out the error and went a looking.

I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but the file had been truncated.  The file, in this case, was the wp-load.php file.  Normally, it has about 50 lines.  The copy that I downloaded from my site had only 48.  The last couple of lines weren’t there.  I know they were there yesterday, because the site got about 600 hits.  But, all of a sudden, they just up and disappeared in the middle of the night.

I’m hoping it isn’t some perverted way of hacking the site, but I didn’t see anything funny once I got the site back up.  Which I did by just re-uploading all of the files except the wp-config.php file back into the index directory.

Has anyone experienced this?  It’s quite strange.  How about a good explanation of what might have happened?  I’m scratching my head here.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , ,

IE Security Risk Prompts Calls to Switch Browsers

December 16, 2008 by

My first question would have been, Why haven’t you switched already?  ;)  Seriously, for all my readers who use Internet Explorer, there was a major security flaw exposed recently.  A security advisor at Trend Micro suggests that, until it is fixed, you switch to another browser.  I would suggest you give Firefox a try, but there are others such as Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

Richard Cox, chief information officer of anti-spam body The Spamhaus Project and an expert on privacy and cyber security, echoed Trend Micro’s warning.

“It won’t be long before someone reverse engineers this exploit for more fraudulent purposes. Trend Mico’s advice [of switching to an alternative web browser] is very sensible,” he said.

Microsoft is working on an emergency patch to fix the vulnerability, but until then, it is suggested that you don’t use the IE browser at all.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Win a Google Android G1 from Chitika

December 12, 2008 by

Chitika is having a contest to see who is making the best use of their Chitika Premium ad blocks in tandem with Adsense.

Since one of the best ways to earn the most revenue is by using AdSense and Chitika | Premium together on the same page, we thought we would hold a contest to see who has the best AdSense + Chitika | Premium setup.

All you’ve got to do is get them the URL of the site where you’ve got both Chitika Premium and Adsense set up. You can submit it in the comments of the announcement post or via email (listed on that post).  Best placement combo wins.

The grand prize winner gets their choice of a Google/T-Mobile Android G1, Blackberry Storm, or an Apple iPhone 3G 8GB.  Also, two runners up will get a cash prize of $200.  That’s nearly enough to buy your own phone.

I must admit that I had abandoned the Chitika program for quite some time due to lack of performance, but I was convinced to give it another try and it’s paid great dividends since.  What used to be a $3-4 a month payout, is now coming in at $50-$70!

Now, go and submit your winning placement!


Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Help Out an Animal in Need

December 10, 2008 by

One of the soft spots that I have is for animals.  And a subset of those hold an even dearer spot.  (besides my pets that is.)  And that would be the animals in shelters.  Unlike a homeless human, there is nothing that they can do (besides look cute) to better their situation.  They can’t go out and get a job to pay for an apartment or food.  They depend upon their guardians (Workers at the shelters in this case) to supply them for both food and a roof.  Without those guardians, it’s impossible to say what might become of them, but I’d venture to guess it wouldn’t be very good.

All that being said, there’s something extremely simple that you can do to help those animals.  Join me and others (like Logan) in visiting this voting site and vote.  Of course, I’d like you to vote for the James River Humane Society of Jamestown, ND, but I’ll understand if you decide to vote for something a little more local to you.  Either way, you’re taking part in something that will make a difference for a lot of animals.  It could mean that a shelter is able to afford to keep a dog from being euthanized for a little bit longer and given one last chance to find a happy home.

Please vote.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , ,
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