Just checking to see if the automagical migration of posts from my blog (The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach) to my Facebook page actually works.

Regular readers of this blog, were there any, would know that in early June, The Mongrel Dogs That Teach was high-jacked by people of malicious intent who inserted “invisible” code into my text to direct people to infected sites and to sites offering badware. This resulted from my neglect of the infrastructure of the site, specifically, from failing to upgrade regularly. Let that be a lesson to you!

Anyway, the malefactors pulled off their dastardly deed using a glitch in WordPress (since fixed) that allows one user to modify the posts of another. So the creeps created a spurious account, leavened my site with their crap, and (as far as I know) moved on. Following advice I found on the Net, I deleted the fake users (institutiong user moderation for the future) and purged their comments, after upgrading the WordPress installation. This, I thought, solved the problem; but I was wrong.

Today, browsing to my own site, I was blocked by Firefox, which told me that Google has deemed the site unsafe. Further investigation made clear that many of my posts were still harboring the vile iframe and noscript tags that causes the problem. I dsicovered admin tools that simplified my search-and-destroy mission, removing the offenders from every post and comment.

Now I’ve submitted a request that Google check the site again and clear it. Let’s hope that works out.

OK, so one sign of not writing enough on your blog is having it highjacked and you don’t even notice. Bleh. Somewhere between May 27 and today (Jun 4), some nefarious party registered itself and inserted nasty code into one or more of my pages… possibly through comments. When I tried to visit today, ZoneAlarm piped up and warned me that “wp-stats-php.info” is a suspected phishing site and would be blocked… meaning I couldn’t see The Mongrel Dogs, either.

But the 21st century is amazing. I googled “wp-stats-php.info” and found a ton of pages by users with a similar problem, and indeed, some with solutions. Yay. I am particularly indebted to the following people and pages:

• Richard Palace
• WordPress forums
• StopBadWare
• And especially, Jason Morrison

For the curious, my solution was to back up everything (just in case), then nuke the files and restore from an April backup. Having learned my lesson, I also upgraded immediately to the latest version of WordPress (2.5.1) which apparently doesn’t suffer from this vulnerability.

Minor editorial: Although the blame for not updating regularly lies squarely with me, I really think the WordPress crew should come up with a simple, one-touch way to do that. Right now, backing up the database is a scary proposition for someone not a MySQL pilot. There used to be a neat script that did one-touch backups but for reasons that I cannot understand, it’s been deprecated and removed. *sigh*

In my never-ending quest to overload my WordPress installation with a billion gadgets, today I’m adding Fancy Pull Quote. Fancy pull quotes make any dumb monkey look like a Pulitzer Prize winner! But I’ve decided to run it head-to-head with JSPullQuotes, a javascript implementation, to see which I like more (= is more easily customized). Currently I like JSPullQuotes a teeny bit more because it doesn’t require HTML commenting. On the other hand, it’s harder to use for pulling “quotes” that don’t appear in the main text.

More testing, this time with the correct category.

You can just ignore this post — I’m trying a new feature.
Where should I put the subscribe message?

So… I’ve wanted a three-column theme for a while and for whatever reason, tonight’s the night I decided to get one. Mostly I want something that uses the real estate of my monitor more efficiently. I went with Anaconda and it seems pretty good. I’m still figuring out how to make it look like what I want. Also, this post is an attempt to check out “asides” to see what they are. And I’ve added a couple of countdown timers just for show.

Today I found a plugin called Lightstats that compiles some WordPress statistics.

Comments per post

Yesterday I spent more time than really justified in playing around with the look-and-feel of The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach. It began innocently enough: I finally reached my breaking point on the comment spam, receiving two blocks of 48 spams within an hour. (And yes, they came in discrete quanta of 48. Odd.) Considering the very low output of this blog, it seemed ludicrous to be getting spam at roughly a 100:1 ratio. So I tooled around the Net for a while and found Spam Karma 2 (excellent tool for WordPress, by the way), which automates the process and so far is doing a great job.

Then things kind of ran away from me…

Having spent more time than usual looking at and reloading the site, I became frustrated by the vast amount of blank space left on either side of the text in my default theme. I’m browsing from a 20″ monitor and yes, like a newbie, I like to browse with the window set to full screen. (My wanderings online yesterday yielded many pages by professional-type web designers who deprecate us weirdos who still leave the browser at full-screen. Apparently we don’t multi-task as well as the gods…) The high resolution of course means that normal fonts are tiny and, as anyone who knows me can tell you, my eyes are already atrocious. So I usually have to step up the size on Firefox. But — and here’s the bit that really annoys me — the theme I had allocated only the middle 60% of the screen and would not increase it. The larger font size caused the text to spill vertically, yielding shorter lines and requiring me to scroll more — still with 40% of the screen left unused!

I am fairly sure that I could fix this by editing the stylesheet but CSS still intimidates me a little and WordPress CSS more so. Worse, in hunting for some help, I came across the neat WordPress feature (new to me, at least) of “widgets“. These are tiny plugins that allow an obscene amount of customization and, let’s be honest, outright goofy functionality on the blog main page. I’m always a fan of oddball scripting so I had to find a new theme that accepted widgets (I went with “LogoFriendly“). Then I spent a vast amount of time hunting down the widgets I wanted.

One such was “ProgressBar“. I had, at first, misunderstood this to be a graphical countdown timer but in fact, it’s just a widget to display a “percentage complete” toolbar on the site. You have to set the level manually, which at first was a turnoff. But then I decided I’d take a page from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (and their infamous Doomsday Clock). I made a “Health of the Republic” bar which gives me a quick and graphical way to vent my frustration over the incipient necrosis of the body politic. It’s snarky and trite and made my whole night.

Putting up the bar meant putting up a page tracking its history. (I want this to be all historical.) That in turn reminded me that I haven’t actually designed www.adfinemfidelis.net yet, even though I planned over six months ago to move my personal pages from www.ubidubium.net to adfinemfidelis.net. Alas, I don’t really have the energy to do that yet, but I did design a graphic for the site. So, really, 90% of the work is done.

Oh, and I never solved the ludicrous dead-space issue (which afflicts LogoFriendly too, though to a lesser extent).

Welcome to The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach, my little experiment in blogging. This will be updated approximately every “whenever I feel like it” and will likely be about as erratic as I am.

If you’re interested, the experiment is, “Can I run a blog on education and not get myself fired post-haste?”
That’s about it for now.