Upgrade Wordpress or risk getting flagged as badware by Google
From its launch, StopBadware.org has raised questions of what happens when a legitimate site gets flagged as ‘badware’. When this happens, affected websites get a warning that “This site may harm your computer”, beneath the listing in Google’s search results pages. When users click a result, they are not taken to the website, but instead a strongly worded warning page - a traffic killer if there ever was one.
It seems that this month has seen a potentially large (but as yet unreported) number of hacked Wordpress blogs getting this exact problem.
This is due to a vulnerability in Wordpress versions earlier than 2.3.3 that allows hackers to inject code into your posts. Rather than going down the unsubtle route of sticking tons of affiliate viagra links into your posts, it seems that the latest hack is an <iframe> tag claiming to be stats code; invisible unless you view the page’s source code. According to the stopbadware blog, this code proceeds to attack blog visitors’ computers with the ‘JS_PSYME.XP’ virus.
If you’re affected by this, the fix is to upgrade Wordpress, and when the upgrade is complete, search for ‘iframe’ in the ‘Manage’ tab of your WP admin console. If you find any of the following code, delete it:
‘Make3D’ does what Fotowoosh promised a year ago
Via Techcrunch, Make3D is an awesome service that can create 3D images from standard 2D photos. Still very much in beta mode, and currently hosted on Stanford University’s servers, the service does what a Flash file on Fotowoosh has been tantalising beta testers with for a year.
It works best on pictures of landscapes, and with the Cortona browser plugin, you can fly around your images in an almost freaky Blade Runner style, noticing things you didn’t realise were there before. My attempt with a photo I took whilst on the Inca Trail is below:
Wordpress Auto-Installer
I’ve written a Wordpress auto-installer that takes all of the labour out of setting up a new Wordpress v2.3.3 installation if you’re running cPanel 10 on a Linux server. All you have to do is:
- Install the required Perl modules (see below)
- Place the folder ‘wordpress’ in the same folder as the script
- Run the script via the command line and watch it go!
It will create a database, database user, etc, and if you’re running it on a subdomain, it will change the Wordpress settings so that it works on subdomains out of the box. Then it will upload all of the files in the ‘wordpress’ directory mentioned above.
Of course this code comes with absolutely no warranty as to whether it works on your server, and you use it at your own risk… Read the rest of this entry »
Stop Javascript from disabling window resizing
One of the all time most irritating Javascript functions has to be the ‘resizable = 0‘ property that’s used within the ‘window.open()‘ function. This often results in content that doesn’t quite fit the windows that pop up - grrr.
Anyway, Firefox has an option that disables some window resizing, but not most of it - this has never worked for me. So the way to make all windows resizable is as follows:
- Enter about:config into the Firefox location bar
- Enter into the Filter bar dom.disable
- Find the property dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable
- Double click it so that the value is changed to true
Hoorah! No more annoying popups where you can’t see all of the content!
Optimise your coffee consumption
Via Lifehacker, the ‘Developing Intelligence’ blog offers some tips on how to optimise your coffee consumption throughout the day.
Topics include the “speed-accuracy tradeoff” that caffeine offers over your memory; it increases the accuracy of your memory recall, but at a slower speed than pre-caffeine consumption…
Fetching all ‘From’ email addresses from an IMAP email account
If you want to back-up certain elements of your email account, this is not always very easy to do. For example you may not use your address book much (or never), but want to keep a backup of all of the email addresses that have sent messages to you.
Thanks to Mail::IMAPClient, this is pretty easy to do - just use the code below and add in your IMAP server, username and password details where appropriate:
Microsoft Celebrity Search is cool
Never been a huge fan of Microsoft’s search services, but I have to say that a new beta product they’ve rolled out is totally awesome.
It’s called ‘xRank’ (which sounds like some kind of porn search engine), and it ranks celebrities according to their current ‘level of fame’, based on the number of searches for their names performed in MSN/Live search - for example:
http://search.live.com/xrank/results.aspx?q=brian+eno…
Great service, but yet again someone needs their ass kicked in the product naming department of Microsoft…