Category: Administrivia

I should have announced this here sooner. Following the demise of G+, my microblogging has moved to MeWe. Find me at https://mewe.com/profile/5a66494451ee975004c3cdf8 Why MeWe? Technically I would have preferred a Federation platform, but MeWe had an importer for my G+ content. It lost the video links, alas, but text and still links from G+ are… Continue reading My microblogging has moved to MeWe

I need a bit of hands-on time with someone who knows how to troubleshoot WordPress installations. I recently had to upgrade my WordPress installation due to an exploit that inserted a malicious URL in one of my widgets. Since then, my spam filter has not been operating correctly. I am not sure whether Akismet is… Continue reading Request for WordPress help

I created a Patreon page just before leaving for vacation on 2 Aug. The background to this is that while I’m now getting some regular bucks for working on NTPsec, it’s not a lot. Royalties from my books have been dwindling and my wife Cathy isn’t making all that much from legal contract gigs that… Continue reading I have a Patreon page

Yes, I’m aware of the spam on the blog front page. The management does not hawk dubious drugs. Daniel Franke and I just did an audit and re-secure of the blog last night, so this is a new attack. Looks like a different vector; previously the spam was edited into the posts and invisible, this… Continue reading Spam alert

I’ve settled on Brad Thomas’s “Admired” with the light white skin as the new theme for this blog. It’s a relatively new theme and is being actively maintained with a support forum. which relieves my main worry about my old Live Steam theme – it’s not going to fall out of sync with the WordPress… Continue reading I’ve settled on “Admired”

Regulars: If you’re seeing the blog’s main page with a blue bar across the top, directly below the title, then you’re probably seeing the “Admire” theme. It’s an improvement over TwentyEleven, and I’ve figured out how to disable comment nesting. Let me know what you think: is this an improvement over the old Live Steam… Continue reading Admire this?

I’m reverting to the old theme to see if I can fit some of the new features in it. I agree the new theme was too whitespace-heavy, and comment nesting was not working out as well as I’d hoped. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get rid of the huge right margin… Continue reading Reverting to the old theme…

Hold on to your hats, I’m going to be experimenting with some theme and sidebar changes for the blog. Don’t be surprised if it looks different than you’re used to…

I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views. I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.

This is a heads-up for all fans of this blog. You probably want to get on Google+ ASAP, because in the future some content I would have shipped as short posts here will be Google+ shared text instead. Essay-length stuff will remain here with pointers from Google+ updates. Likely I will lock comments on the… Continue reading Heads up: Google+ changes things

Hey ho, another day, another mandatory WordPress security update. There will be a brief outage. Possibly there might be a prolonged one. The management regrets any inconvenience. UPDATE: That’s done. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled flamage.

One of my regulars writes, re the recent spam-raping of the blog >I’m still trying to figure out what the attack was. All the comments were replaced by spam? No. What happened was that on Sunday night I caught a bot in the act of replacing real comments with spam, oldest first. It was working… Continue reading Why spamrape happens

(Part of this is a repost. The problem it described have been solved, at least until someone finds the next hole in WordPress. I have restored it to keep the record complete.) Sometime late Sunday night or Monday, I wrote: My blog is being raped by a spambot. I first noticed about a half an… Continue reading The Rape of the Blog

This blog was badly raped by a spambot on Saturday. Recovery from the problem required restoring from a backup made early that morning. Lost in the restore were two posts and about a dozen comments. It is possible I may be able to rescue some content by looking directly at an SQL dump, but I… Continue reading After the spamraping, there has been some loss

The amount of bot-spam being posted to this blog has gone up by an order of magnitude in the last week. I wouldn’t bother my readers about this, except that if one of your posts happens to trigger the spam filter, the odds that I will notice and rescue it have dropped significantly. It’s easier… Continue reading Spam inundation may result in lost posts

This blog is one of many that got hit late last week by a particularly nasty and invasive worm targeting WordPress sites. (No, it wasn’t a botched upgrade, as I saw at least one commenter speculate.) The first symptoms showed up either late Thursday or early Friday of last week, when links from the main… Continue reading This blog got wormed

I have deactivated IntenseDebate. Its maintainers tell me there is no way to disable pagination of comments, a feature several of my regulars justifiably complained about and I loathed. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

I may have to disable IntenseDebate. The interface for approving/deleting/spam-flagging posts seems broken since sometime yesterday; I suspect some sort of database problem at intensedebate.com, as my local Javascript hasn’t changed. If you have left a comment which has not appeared, have patience. I will try untangling the mess from my home machine Sunday night… Continue reading I may have to disable IntenseDebate