I was interviewed at Pak Spectator a few days ago.
Click here to see it.
BTW, Wordpress 2.7 is awe-bloody-some!
Interviewed At The Pakistani Spectator
Friday, December 12th, 2008Wordpress 2.6 Upgrade Blues…
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008I have been having spam attacks recently that corrupted my rss feeds and rendered them useless for feed aggregators. I tried to solve this problem by reuploading all admin and include files but the spam attacks continued (too lazy to play with .htaccess for so many files). It was then that I decided to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.
Big mistake!!!
Well not actually a mistake as I succeeded in doing it but a lot of my (precious) time got wasted over the aftermath.
It started with me downloading my contents folder to save my themes, plugins and uploads. Then I uploaded all WP files except the contents folder to my server. I ran the upgrade script, went to my login page and, lo and behold, it refused to recognize me as a user, let alone administrator! 
Obviously, I went nuts. I tried resetting the password but it refused to log me in again. Then I tried to do it the hard way by editing my database directly. I made a script to find out the md5 code of any random character, put the code into my database and tried to log in. Still the same.
Heart-broken, I started searching frantically for a solution and what I found out was so damn annoying that there are no G-Rated words for it.
The solution was to simply “clear your saved history and files“!
I did it and the new WP 2.6 Login page appeared. But as I mentioned above, I had edited my database directly and my old password was no more, only some stupid character in md5 code (read: illegible) format.
But, thankfully, I had stored my old password code in a file so getting back up on my feet was no problem. 
Now who the heck is to blame for this episode: Wordpress or Mozilla Firefox?
Reconditioned Blog
Saturday, November 15th, 2008If you tried to visit my blog this morning, you may have faced problems. That’s because I was facing problems.
Well first of all, my blog’s been under attack from spambots for a very long time. They edit my scripts and insert spam code in them that redirects to some phishy website. Most of you may have experienced this. I have been changing my server file and folder permissions for a long time but they manage to edit my .htaccess file and rechange the permissions to suit themselves. The result is the return of spam within a few weeks, if not a couple of days. So I contacted my hosting to ask them how it was happening and they told me it was a vulnerability in my script, not from their side. Even my other sites that don’t use Wordpress have been spammed and one was blocked by Google! I let them know of this.
Finally today, they replied to me stating that my .htaccess file was corrupt. They provided me a link to download an anti-Malware program to see if there was Malware on my computer, hacking my data (I did find one infection). They deleted my .htaccess file too due to which most of my blogs pages could not be accessed as I use Permalinks (URL Rewrite) for my pages. So I decided that it was high time I did some serious work on my blog.
I updated my scripts, set extremely strict file permissions that don’t even allow me to read the contents of my server folders but after I rebuilt my sitemap. Now ‘SAWJ Blogs…’ is back at the top of Google results!
(No Saad, it wasn’t blacklisted! One of my other domains was, but I rarely used it so I have deleted it’s contents.)
Let me know if you guys still face problems with my blog. (I know, I would’ve had less troubles with a blogging-service-hosted blog but hell, I wouldn’t have learned so much then!)
And for the record, I’ll be disabling the Threaded Comments plugin from the next post. It means that you would not be able to understand the order of the comments on the previous posts as they will be hap-hazard and you won’t be able to make out “who replied to who”. Do recommend a better plugin if you can or give me the address to the Follow Up Comments Notification plugin.
Have Fun!
15.11.2008 Internet, Me, Web Development 115 Comments