The Perceptus Back Story » blog

SPAM Registrations to a Blog?

leonard — Thu, 26 May 2011 05:36:11 +0000

This blog started getting hundreds of automated new user registrations per day, starting a few days ago. I’m not entirely sure what the point of that would be, nor, do I have any idea why now, after several years of this blogs existence, these are showing up now.

Anyway, skipping to the point of this post: If a spammer used your email address to create an account on this blog, we’re sorry. No one at Perceptus had anything to do with it.

We’re playing around with the well reviewed SABRE plugin for WordPress to try and stop this annoyance. Fingers crossed.

Finally, the Perceptus Back Story Blog Gets a Personality

leonard — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:10:02 +0000

Look above! The default WordPress blue Kubrick header graphic is gone.

It was finally time to make this blog a little personalized, a little bit custom. We actually get a couple hundred hits a day on our corporate blog – much to our disbelief.

The new header graphic? That cute little inukshuk was one of hundreds of impromptu inukshuks built during the best Olympics ever along the south shore of False Creek in Vancouver earlier this year.

Some technical notes:

We’re using a child theme of WordPress’s default theme, this way, we should have minimal problems updating the WordPress software in the future. This page was useful: http://op111.net/53
For some reason the image size was wonky – our image is 760×200 pixels, but websites gave different specifications – maybe it depends on the version of WP?
We stole the curved border from the Kubrick header image, then knocked out the middle “blue”, and saved it as a PNG with a transparent middle hole.
The inukshuk photo was flipped, cropped, darkened, fuzzed, and generally mishandled using the GIMP image editor.
The images were all combined in Inkscape.

If the blog traffic continues to grow, maybe we’ll do some real customizations next year.

Automatic Upgrade Feature of WordPress Without FTP

leonard — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 07:12:50 +0000

I was intrigued by the automatic update feature of recent (2.7+?) versions of WordPress because I hate upgrades as much as the next guy. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for all 3 WordPress installs for which I am responsible.

There’s a new security issue for WordPress, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to get the update feature to work. When I attempted the update in the WordPress Admin section, it requested my FTP login settings. Well, I don’t use FTP for maintaining these blogs.

Fortunately, it turns out that WordPress will only require FTP permissions if the file permissions are configured in a compatible manner.

This post cleared it up:

http://robspencer.net/auto-update-wordpress-without-ftp/

The gist is to set the owner of the WordPress files to the same user as the process that runs Apache. Running a basic chown command did the trick!

Now I just have to research to make sure that this makes sense from a security standpoint…