The most recent of these to get added to my list is Donncha O’Caoimh’s http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

Of course when I installed it at the same time as installing the 3.2.1 release of wordpress the hash files weren’t available for 3.2.1. This lead me to lots of False positives. Yesterday then when I scanned I for some reason thought I was seeing the same thing. I mean upd.php and config.php seem like two perfectly normal files don’t they? Well hell no after asking a rather silly question over on Google Plus I realised the error of my ways and went about fixing things.

Exploit Scanner works on the basis that all your core files should have the same hash as a clean version. ( A hash is a value that gets created and mostly two different things can’t have the same hash )

Click to enlarge

The md5 Hashes for the two files are as follows

• exploit-scanner.php (1.0.5): ac8d7f3574a7470a245a2067e9c79072
• hashes-3.2.1.php: a660a35382f648c8735414a7d3531970

So if your websites version of these doesn’t match it’s fair to assume someone has edited the files on your site. You can always find these values on the exploit scanner plugin page. It’s well worth installing.

The Exploit scanner immediately told me about the errors. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a manual process as you still need to see what’s wrong and make sure the files aren’t valid. So backing up is a good idea first. I also ended up removing a few unused plugins and all the old themes I had on the site. It doesn’t have hash values for any plugins or themes you’re using so you may need to manually scan these and check if they have been altered. One way I did this was visually check the date of creation / modification of the files in my ftp client.

Anyways exploit scanner is about to become the first plugin that gets installed on all new wordpress installs ( and even a few older ones ) and I’m debating creating a rather simple script to show the last edited / created time for files as I’d find that one handy as well. The files were uploaded to my site on the 6th august for example. I know I wasn’t doing much there then so apart from an image or two and my cache things shouldn’t have been changed recently.

I don’t have that many plugins installed

YSlow / Adblock and a few others you can see below

So why not throw about:memory into the URL bar and you get to see some interesting stuff.

Seemed a bit high to me. I killed the browser and started it again and suddenly we’re down to

Wonder if I removed all the plugins if things would stabilize a bit but then it’s pretty pointless to use FF if it’s missing all the plugins I use.

Move to chrome? no thanks I’m fine in FF and can put up with the issues for now at any rate.

I don’t have time to go messing about and seeing why it isn’t working at the moment so the quick solution is editing the jquery.lightbox.min.js file

Find the bit show_linkback:true in there and change it to show_linkback:false

ATTENTION DON’T UPGRADE BEFORE MAKING A COPY OF LION AS IT DELETES ITSELF

If you’d like to make a copy of Lion you’ll need to download it with the App Store as normal BUT don’t upgrade just yet why not make a backup of it first?

Take a look over at http://lifehacker.com/5823096/how-to-burn-your-own-lion-install-dvd-or-flash-drive

Of course I didn’t know this before and won’t be downloading it again though I’d like to have a copy of it.

In general I resize images before I upload them to WordPress and as a result I disable the click the image link. However I noticed no nice lightbox (click image and it pops up rather than taking you to a page with just the image) effect as so sent up a call on twitter if anyone knew a quick plugin that’ll work with existing content and hey presto twitter.com/thelinden ( Barry Walsh ) gets back to me in seconds mentioning ShadowBox JS. God I really love twitter sometimes can save you ages looking up things and  making up a forum post and so on.

Cheers Barry and you can see the results on my previous post its automagic (Just needed to select JQuery in the plugin preference and it auto picks up linked images)

So I ended up playing with the converting of a black and white photo to colour (color for any american english people out there) in photoshop yesterday,

I’ve actually thought about doing it for ages but saw a link to a tutorial on it which turned out to be a dead link. Anyways I needed a decent Black and White photo (to start with anyways I’ve plans to convert a few old photos once I get the knack of things) I did a quick search and who could be more perfect to do than Google Image search for Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got colour and black and white photos so you’ve go something to base things on (also some really high res images which is nice)

Selected my photo .. and basically means selecting the various areas you want with the lasso tool (I used the polygonal lasso tool for it’s clicky goodness) add a slight feather to the selected area copy and paste as a new layer. Then up to Layers and Adjustment layer -> Hue/Saturation

Then make sure to tick use previous layer to create clipping mask

And hey presto .. it’s slightly pain staking cutting out the bits but so cool to start seeing the results once you start adjusting the Hue / Saturation levels ( make sure to tick colorize or you may be wondering why nothing is happening)

And so you start to see some results … my first looking something like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe … Second version appearing a bit more like a technicolor version but I’m preferring it.

And finally adding a vignette and a gradient mask onto the image and I got the result I wanted.

Hair seems to be have been the trickiest part of this for me and yes I’ve left it rough in a few places hope you like the tips (though maybe they could be a bit clearer)

And of course once you’ve got all the areas mapped out it’s quite handy to tweak any colours to your hearts content

Edit: Should add a video tutorial on this is available at Black and White to Colour Video obviously goes into more detail about extracting things ended up pretty much following the first few steps and go the inspiration for photo character from it as well

No doubt everyone knows by this stage about the new Facebook Pages upgrade. It’s cool yadda yadda I made a blog post on it over on Blacknight’s Blog the other day. That’s not where I’m going with this blog post though.

Friday I was making up a new micro site for Be My Valentine .ME and I noticed that the Facebook Like code I was putting in wasn’t showing up. In actual fact it was giving me a big blob of white up the top. ARGH!!! of course I tested in another browser and it was the same.

Not a major thing but driving me up the wall. Today something clicked … It wasn’t appearing on my blog either

And then something else clicked and I checked what I was doing in Facebook. Of course I was using Facebook as a page not as myself. Switching over to myself and hey presto.

No the world hasn’t come to an end you can still have your Facebook likes. This may not be an issue for a lot of people but was driving me up the wall. (I should probably read more Facebook development blogs I’m thinking)

UPDATE: 16 Feb 2011 … Star Date … no seriously another small issue I’m noticing is clicking onto one of your friends (who have privacy details set) when logged in as a page will give up a “XYZ only shares some profile information with everyone.“. It feels like they’ve gone and simply switched “Pages” into “Users” and turned off messaging and friend feeds for these page “users”.

Looking at the picture of the man and the woman you could be forgiven for thinking the post was maybe going to be about Valentines and kinky bondage of some sorts. Read the poem however and hopefully it will become a bit clearer.

When I started out in webdesign “professionally” (I’ll use that term loosely as I started without any qualifications in webdesign) around 10+ years ago I was young and very much naive. I … I … I did things for money I’m not proud of … yes I did websites for 20quid and a 6pack of red bull ( a reference to my post on what to charge for webdesign ). I was young I wanted to make a name for myself I wanted to build a portfolio and I really didn’t understand how the world worked. You’re told things by people and because they have so much more experience you think they must be true.

• I’ll tell all my friends you did my website (WOW you mean I get to do more cheap websites for your friends)
• It’ll look great on your portfolio ( A couple of hundred in my wallet wouldn’t hurt either you know )
• If this works out there’s the potential for a lot more work

I think the last one here is key. What exactly do they mean by that. More work at a crap rate is generally what it means. We just need this next bit of work done and we’ll get the money onto you. Can you sort us out with this it’s hurting our business.

I’ve personally learned this just doesn’t work out. People generally don’t respect you and you end up getting screwed over. I’d love for it to be different it’s generally not. While the sites you end up doing here may end up looking good on your portfolio so would potentially doing some websites for charity or something similar and probably pay just as well. ( See http://24theweb.com/ as an example of what I’m on about but it doesn’t have to be a competition and you could approach a charity yourself … sometimes they’ll have money / grants available who knows. )

Flash forward to the present day. The Irish / World economy is … well … not in a happy place to put it nicely. What do I see … I see all these people who in the past have been huge advocates of the advice you never do work for free seeking out interns. So what’s the pay like? Well as far as I can tell it’s pretty **** and it’s not really pay. It’s a stipend 400 or 500 quid a month which lets face it if you’ve got rent to pay isn’t a hell of a lot. Now if they were looking for a student I might be thinking ok it’s placement it’s not always guaranteed to be well paid and if it’s part of their course they have placement then so be it suck it up get graded for the work/project and so be it (in my year a lot of our class ended up in fairly decent summer jobs with companies). These companies however are looking to recruit fresh graduates out of college for the offer of a life time. 6 Months work … 3 grand over the course of this time WOW … and we might just hire you at the end? erm hang on this really seems two faced.

It reminds me a bit like all these business people I’ve seen lauding the advantages of outsourcing their website development to elance and so on as yes it can be much more cost effective and then expecting people to buy their Irish product cus it’s an Irish product and supporting their Irish job? erm… a bit hypocritical.

Anyways just a rant I needed to get out of my system … while I know times are tough they are tough for everyone not just your business so if looking into taking on an intern please think about paying them something to make it at least worth their while. You’ll no doubt tell me of the great advantage having the job on their CV will be for them and how much time and effort you’ll have to put into training them up but half the time it just seems to me you’re out to make a quick buck from your free worker.

I would however love to hear from any Interns and actual positive experiences they’ve had.

Those who know me probably think I’m some kinda cat obsessed maniac of some sort and I guess you might be slightly right. 3 years ago give or take a few months my wife wanted a cat and we got Yoda (stage name Squishy). I was never a big fan of cats growing up I have to be honest so it came as a rather major surprise to like the little guy so much. 3 years on we’ve clocked a lot of miles and done a lot of work together (working from home and himself being an indoor cat means we’ve spent much of those 3 years together).

Squishy has his own facebook page now with 300+ followers which I find highly amusing but that’ll be another blog post another day and that isn’t exactly where I’m going with this post.

One of the things I do for Blacknight is try to come up with some interesting graphics / imagery for their blog posts / newsletters / campaigns. For these I’ve used pictures of Squishy as well as other stock imagery of cats / dogs and so on.

An example of one of the graphics would be:

But this got me thinking. I have a strong dislike/fear of spiders (arachnophobia) so obviously I wouldn’t like to see them used on a blog post. I know a few people have a dislike of cats and dogs (I know I was shocked too).

So I ended up running a little poll a few weeks back to see just what peoples reactions are. I mentioned it on Twitter / facebook and maybe one or two other locations and I ended up getting just shy of 90 votes which I was quite happy about. (Thanks everyone who took the time to vote)

Pretty crazy stats … 14% are cat people vrs 53% being doggy people. Both was included as an option as well and taking that into account (30% liking both) that’ll make 44% of people being cat people vrs 83% being doggy people.

Of course this is a pretty small set of people in the poll (probably mostly my peer group as well I would guess) but still 83% vrs 44% means the next adverts I’ll be running may be more dog orientated (if I do end up using an animal).

So there you have it … if you’re a creative and thinking of using cats or dogs in any advertising you’re going to be doing maybe think twice. Do you dislike one or the other ? Would seeing a cat / dog in an advert make you smile or turn you off the ad?

Like (<-- had to start the post with that) a lot of web people I've a pretty full todo list. It doesn't seem to be shrinking at all. Thankfully however it doesn't seem to be increasing exponentially at least not to my understanding of maths anyways ... one of the things I've had on my todo list for a while has been to create a Facebook Landing Page for Blacknight. I’ve toyed with various ideas on and off over the last few weeks and had a pretty cool one made and then Michele points me at an extremely simple welcome page on facebook today and I just had to completely backtrack.

I generally don’t do that much “social media” stuff apart from interacting (oh wait isn’t that what it’s all about) … but I’ve never marketed myself in any way as a social media guru (unless of course you count Donkey Fluff). So it is rather nice to get to play around with things. A while back I created the Town Hall Theatre Facebook page … I hadn’t been asked to but it really is something that can be setup in two minutes (to actively man it is going to take a lot of work I’ll admit) and well I wanted to make sure they got their facebook username. 1300 fans later give or take and it is doing ok … it’s the kind of page that should maybe have 4 or 5 thousand fans I guess for galway (popular around 80k) maybe more. Anyways for minimum effort their Facebook page is up and doing rather nicely. The Town Hall Theatre gang have gotten on board as well and a few of them man it from time to time and I’m going to guess it will become a bigger and bigger line of communication for them over the next while similar to a lot of the theatre groups around Ireland. All in all I think of that as a nice little social media success with limited effort.

Back to the Future or the present at any rate and Blacknight’s landing page. We’ve come up with something rather simple. We’ll see how it works out over the next little while a woman pointing to the Like button … hopefully a clear enough message. Like us … it’s the goal of the page we want people to come back and interact. Limit the amount of text … don’t confuse people with way too much info … and we’ve included a few screen shots of a few of the Blacknight sites some people may recognise. Hey presto it is live. We’ll just have to see how it goes over the next little while and potentially tweak it (but as you know there are countless factors involved … how often we link to it … are people on holidays … times we tweet things online and so on big list)

On a side note … I opted to use a semi generic image / no face on it as half the time people start to ask oh who is she / he and hell that isn’t what this is about … it’s about pointing to the “Like” button so what do you think? Obvious enough? not working for you?

Here is the landing page www.facebook.com/blacknight (of course if you’ve already liked blacknight you’ll need to go to http://www.facebook.com/blacknight?v=app_6009294086

As always I love getting feedback … yes sometimes I’ll be gutted by the responses but meh democracy in action says the majority rules or something like that