Hacked!

I maligned BlueHost too soon. Turns out someone hacked into some of my WordPress files and left all kinds of syntactically heinous code.

B&W is back now, as you can see. From past experience, I know that I can only rest easy after a few problem-free days have passed. The tech who figured it out has changed things (“permissions”?) to make my dearest Balls impregnable. (Huh. Wait. Impregnable balls — something is wrong with that.)

Why would anyone hack a blog, especially a relatively low traffic blog like B&W? I don’t get it.

Things are a little mellower today. I’m no longer on call, which means they can’t hurt me too badly.

D.

And this is fun why?

Okay, I’m twitting now. My handle is Azureus9, if you want to follow my twits.

Why am I doing this?

Discuss.

D.

My Bluehost. I think I’ll keep her.

(Okay, does anyone recognize the reference in the title? If you’re under, say, 42 years old, don’t even try.)

The tech at Bluehost figured out my Issues. First, to recap, I couldn’t log in to my admin panel. Whenever I would try, I would get to login.php (like usual), I would put in my username and password, click “login,” and then I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out.

Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked —

Eventually, I figured out that sheer stick-toitiveness was not enough. I had one other option open to my puny brain: change the password! I clicked on the link on the login.php screen and it told me that instructions would be sent to my email address. The email had a link to a page telling me “click on this link.” When I clicked on the link, I was given a screen telling me that instructions would be sent to my email address. The email had a link to a page —

Oh, now this was bulllshit. So I called the Bluehost tech support line, fully expecting them to tell me it was a WordPress issue so go to hell. But no! The guy figured it out. More on that in a minute.

Now, I know I’ve slammed Bluehost in the past for suspending me without warning just because of a few measly spams. I’ve even threatened moving on to some other host just to spite the Blue Group. Pat J.’s probably still hankering for me to shift to DreamHost (or whatever it’s called) so he’ll get some beaucoup Dreampoints. Sorry, Pat.

It was delightful watching this guy in action. He kept trying trick after trick. Was it a cache problem? No. A Firefox problem? No. We kept trying one thing after another. Had I been blacklisted by my own blog? No.

Finally, he figured it out: somehow, my blog had become convinced that I had an open admin panel out there Somewhere. If you’re logged in, you can’t log in! Such a nefarious tautology. So he logged me out, and now I can log in. And in the future, I MUST log out so that this will not happen again.

Because, needless to say, even though the tech guy figured out my problem, God only knows how I could fix it for myself. Databases. It had something to do with databases.

D.

I am curious PLATFORM

Just a quick question: is this theme formatted well on your browser? Internet Explorer screws it up — it shunts the right sidebar down to the bottom. How’s it looking on Macs, Opera, and so forth?

D.

Here’s yer fvc&!ng frogs

We’re getting very, very close to contentment here at Balls and Walnuts.

The current theme, as of this writing, is mistylook by Sadish Bala. So, far, it seems pretty slick to me. I’m going to play around with a few more of the options.

Like the frogs? The observers/participants on the sidelines do indeed seem to have a misty look . . .

D.

Atahualpa’s revenge

Two reasons I didn’t post yesterday:

1. I’m still not 100%. After doing three loads of laundry and doing all the shopping (Target, PetSmart, the local Italian deli, and the supermarket), I was wiped. Managed to make dinner but only because it wasn’t too complex — just a rib eye steak and Potatoes Lyonnaise for my family, cereal and a couple of eggs for me.

2. Atahualpa killed my blog.

Atahualpa looked like the perfect theme. The description brags, “Over 200 theme options on 25 admin pages, drop down / fly out menus, fluid, fixed or hybrid width, turn sidebars on /off per page type, auto image resizing, 4 extra widgets and MANY other features. For WP 2.2-2.7 and WPMU.”

200 options — I like that! It seemed the ideal theme for someone who wants to learn about themes, see how changes to the CSS leads to changes in appearance, optimize functionality, and restore the fucking frogs to their rightful position. And it worked, too, for all of about one hour, and then everything crashed. All I got were “time out” messages when I tried to go to my site. Not even a nastygram from Blue Host.

So for now, I’ve reinstalled Thematic, and I’m off in search of another theme. Grrr — I wish it would have crashed BEFORE I had spent over an hour creating a header that would have knocked your socks off. It was a veritable frog orgy. Optimized for Atahualpa, of course.

D.

New theme

It’s called Thematic, from Themeshaper. I’d really like to customize it, but I have a kindergartner’s understanding of CSS.

I’m going to see if this old dog can learn new tricks. First, though, I need to locate the stylesheets.

D.

I still can’t figure out

where all my links went. Word Press 2.7 ate my links!

Hope it got a whopping case of indigestion.

D.

That’s a lot of porn

Here’s the gory graphic:

Akismet kindly kept stats on my royal ass reaming.

Hmm. “Ass reaming” may in large part explain why porn spammers chose my site.

D.

Trans-cendant

Spam killed me.

More precisely, the uber-geniuses at BlewHost suspended me because I was the victim of a spam attack. Reminds me of the time I was five and I got into my dad’s razors (back when razors were double-sided, and you had to verrrrry carefully mount them into your razor holder thingie) and slashed up a finger, and my dad told my mom that she should clean me up, get a band aid on it, and bring me back for a spanking. Excuse me? I just learned my lesson, thank you very much. As I recall, I made my point as succinctly and clearly as a five-year-old under threat of spanking could, and I escaped corporal punishment.

But not this time. Not only am I slammed by porn-spammers, but then the shvanzwads at Blewhost suspend me without warning, and it takes me THREE calls before I finally get someone who can tell me what to do.

The first two guys told me I would have to delete all my comments and then disable the blog to new comments. (Um, hey guys? You do know what a blog is, right?) One of the two convinced me to eliminate most of my plug-ins.

The last guy figured out the problem and guided me to the proper spot in cPanel. Five thousand deleted files later, my blog is up and running.

These porn-spams were interesting. Most linked to a site with transsexual-labia in the URL, and the commenter’s names all had ‘trans’ in them. Here, I saved several:

Illinois department of trans

Trans Link Golden Gate Transit

and best of all

Trans Canada

I would like to hurt these spammers. I would like to send 1000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 10,000 Mormons to their doors. I would like to spam them with ads for the latest Amy Grant CD. I would like for them to become targets of our national legislature’s top moral watchdogs, Senator Larry “I am not gay” Craig and Senator David “Diaper Boy” Vitter.

But I’ll be content if I can reinstall my plug-ins.

D.