Every once in a while you need a clean slate… 🙂  Moving blogs to bitpost.com news and blog…

Here is the guide that pointed me to this tool which was the key piece (even though it kept giving AJAX errors when I applied changes to more than 4 tables, ARrrr…)… upwards!

Hey all you bloggers and publishers. If, like me, you’ve been putting off updating your blogs and wikis to show up nicely on smartphones, fear not, there are DIRT SIMPLE FAST solutions available today to set up special skins for mobile browsers that are gorgeous. As of today, here are the instant solutions.

WordPress

• Right inside your admin panel in WordPress, click on the Plugins button in the left pane.
• Select Add New.
• Punch in WPTouch and hit “Search Plugins”.
• There it is, now install it!
• That’s it. Seriously. You can play with the settings if you want (like changing the logo), but you don’t need to. Wow!

Mediawiki

• This skin is the one you want, but it has a few issues.
• Here is a corrected version, use it to take your chance for it to work “out of the box” 🙂 Download and untar it from within your [mediawiki/skins] folder. The changes I made are listed at the end of this post.
• Now users can select the skin in their preferences, but we want automatic! Update your LocalSettings.php file to set $wgDefaultSkin as follows:

  if (preg_match("/iphone/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'wptouch';
  } elseif (preg_match("/android/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'wptouch';
  } elseif (preg_match("/webos/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'wptouch';
  } elseif (preg_match("/ipod/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'wptouch';
  } elseif (preg_match("/opera mini/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'wptouch';
  } else {
      $wgDefaultSkin = 'vector';
  }

• Go enjoy it!

Easy and beautiful!

(continued…)

I love my websites and servers and applications. I expose a lot of my toys on the internet, because it’s FUN and USEFUL. I try to apply the 80/20 rule in getting things done, doing 20% of the security I should to achieve an 80% benefit. I don’t have time to “do it right”, if that’s even possible. I know this is a terrible approach to network security, but it is my conscious choice. There is fun to be had.

The approach burns me on occassion, but I get by. I’ve been hacked twice in 10 years, not a bad record considering my approach. The second hack occurred recently. Some poor bastard in backwoods Russia or God-knows-where has been scanning and hacking WordPress sites with a backdoor approach to adding admin accounts. Once the admin account is set up, they inject redirection scripts into the php template code.

I have not taken the time to install all the WordPress updates the moment they come out – classic example of my slacker approach to security. So at some point in time, I got hacked. The sad part is that I did not even notice it until much later, when Firefox’s automatic malware detection kicked in and Google and StopBadware.org started denying me access to my own site.

Apparently the injected code had the capacity to install malware – not that I would know, being a linux user. The cleanup involved purging all the injected php code, which was obfuscated with “eval(base64)” wrappers, and removing the hacked WordPress admin accounts.

The fact that I was potentially adding malware to the computers of people visiting my websites is enough to make me physically ill. Some of that paranoia and obsession required to achieve a moderate level of security has surfaced. My WordPress and Mediawiki sites are too rich and chock full of functionality for me to personally do any real level of guarantee of security – I have to rely on the popularity of their code base and assume issues get caught quickly. But the least I can do is upgrade them whenever a new stable release is available. Generally speaking, this is what keeps me on the internet, and it is no longer an optional activity.

The only other flaw in my setup of which I am painfully aware is due to virtual hosting restrictions. I do a LOT with my one little IP and my one little server (including truly free truly legit SSL), but I cannot host more than one SSL virtual site on port 443. Just “the way things are”. I need to be diligent about redirecting secure traffic through the one configured SSL domain. But this is never easy.

The silver lining: the WordPress iPhone app now works! The pace of blogging should now improve from glacial to very infrequently. :>

Peace out.

What a horrible trial-and-error life web designers lead! After too much hair-pulling, this site now looks as it should on IE7. Issues:

• IE7 does not like div tags between li tags – so I reworked everything to oblige
• IE7 requires some hacking with padding and margin to get my rounded corners css to work

I hope I never have to touch it again (but I will).

This site now has pretty valid CSS and XHTML, and resizes pretty well too. Try it out with Ctrl+ to increase text size, Ctrl- to decrease. Change the resolution. Stretch it, pull it, bend it – better than Stretch Armstrong! (sorry, no green goo though…)

Added the following plugins to this blog:

• Recaptcha
• Register Plus

They seem to play well together. I’m using the first for comments and the second for registration. They both use reCAPTCHA, which I think I like. 😛 Took a few theme/style tweaks. I guess I’ll be stuck with this theme for a while. :>