Wordpress on Evan Hoffman

Super quick wordpress exploit stopper

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:27:38 +0000

I got an email yesterday from my host (DigitalOcean) that I was running a phishing website. So, I’m not, but I quickly guessed what happened: my Wordpress got hacked. This is just one of the risks of running silly little PHP apps. I logged in, deleted the themes directories, reinstalled clean ones, and ensured this doesn’t happen again by doing the following:

useradd apache_ro
chown -R apache_ro:apache_ro $WP/wp-content/themes

Now apache can’t write to those directories. This means you can’t update Wordpress via the web UI, but I’m ok with that.

Digital Ocean - First Impressions

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:59:06 +0000

For the past few years I’ve been hosting this site on an old desktop in my basement on my FiOS connection. This was one of the things I really liked when I switched from Cablevision to Verizon - they don’t block port 80 inbound, so I didn’t have to pay for separate hosting. My “server” was an old AMD desktop with 1 gig ram and a sata drive. It was ok; my site was slow but I was ok with that. I configured Nginx to cache the static assets which sped most things up to “ok” levels but it was never fast.

Blog rename again

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:00:25 +0000

I hate calling this site “Evan Hoffman’s Blog,” but it seems that when I Googled my own name most of the results were about this guy. So let me just clarify… that’s not me. I enjoyed having the title be obscure lyrics from songs I love but drastic times call for drastic measures. And let me tell you… renaming a blog is serious business.

Using Nginx as a caching proxy in front of Wordpress

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:43:28 +0000

Why you may want to use Nginx as a caching reverse-proxy in front of Apache for Wordpress, and config examples for doing so.

Installed Relevanssi so search won't be so useless.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:07:53 +0000

I installed the Relevanssi plugin because the native Wordpress search seemed almost useless. So far it seems to be vastly superior. Native search frequently returned zero results when there were relevant posts. So, enjoy.

Chaos theory and Google's crawler

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:30:38 +0000

I’ve been moderately perplexed by the recent spike in traffic on basically unrelated keywords. Apparently this site is currently the #5 result for “fedora 15 beta download” despite my having never written about Fedora 15. In an attempt to funnel people to a useful page I created the previous post with links to the FC 15 ISOs. I feel bad if people come here looking for an answer that’s not to be found.

Traffic spike

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:08:53 +0000

Somehow this site became the top Google result for two different searches, “Shogun2.dll appcrash” and “fedora 14 gnome3”. My theory is that Google’s indexing the referring keywords listed in the widget on the right, causing a snowball effect. But the rise in traffic this year has been dramatic, especially for a site really about nothing.

How does paid blogging work?

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:44:43 +0000

I’ve been hearing for years about paid bloggers. If people are getting paid to write their crap down in an ad-supported industry, it seemed like it might make sense to throw some ads up on this very site to see what happens. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for a few months now and the short answer is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s what the earnings look like since 1/1/2009 (my Adsense account is much older than this site; I put the banner ads up around Fall of 2009):

5,472 ms

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:53:46 +0000

I signed up with Pingdom to monitor my website. They have a free service if you just want to monitor a single site, and since I only have one site, this is perfect. Since this server gets knocked offline all the time (thanks LIPA) I figured this was a prudent step. However, Pingdom also offers response time stats, and the stats are not good. Average response time is around 4200 ms, and with the first test taking 5,472 ms to respond.

We gon' party tonight

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:58:33 +0000

I use Akismet to filter out spam comments here, and I’ve seen a few different strategies the spammers employ. There’s the “Cool post! You should Digg it” (in both English and Spanish - tengo que Digg), there’s the “this post helped me on my class project,” there’s the pure jibberish - “xajdjhesbjsb sjhsjhrhjshwru skjskjrijsjs.” But this is a new one I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks:

Stupid things like this crack me up, not sure why.

We gon' party tonight

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:58:33 +0000

Stupid things like this crack me up, not sure why.

Forcing Wordpress administration over SSL

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:46:05 +0000

I never like typing a password into a non-SSL site, no matter how trivial it is. In order to give my own site this ability I simply used mod_rewrite to force requests to Wordpress’s admin pages to go over SSL.

The .htaccess file for the site looks like this:

BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /evan/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /evan/index.php [L]

Sped up Wordpress by adding 1 index.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:35:41 +0000

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

Why is my title in smallcaps now?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:48:56 +0000

~~Wordpress is doing something weird now. Yesterday the head of the site was not in all caps, and today it is.~~

Hmm.

Ok, I figured it out. I guess I must have installed some new font on this computer - “Trajan Pro” - and the header was showing in that font. I deleted it from the stylesheet and now it defaults to Lucida Sans Unicode, which is what I wanted.

Time for Wordpress

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:15:30 +0000

Everybody else is doing it…

I guess I’ll try converting my old posts to this thing and ditch the old page.