Jacob has a higher-end gaming PC. Not top of the line, but certainly higher than the mid-range. Great graphics card, decent memory and speed, and a nice curved large monitor.
He comes down to see me yesterday afternoon and says, “Umm…my monitor stopped working.” Huh? Yep, he rebooted, did all the basic stuff, nothing. No signal to the monitor.
At the time, I was working my real job, so no time for much in the way of tech support. I gave him three possibilities:
1. Full shut down, see if the PC has somehow lost its setup info;
2. Try the monitor with a different source;
3. Try a different monitor.
He comes back later to say that the existing monitor works with another laptop, no problem, and the PC itself doesn’t work on other monitors. Excellent, we’ve narrowed it down to the PC. Right???? RIGHT???? Monitor works, PC doesn’t.
Now, there were some confounding variables to add to the mix. He’d been running a new game, and the refresh rate was dead slow. He had tried playing with graphics settings, downloaded a tool from AMD, and after that, nope.
I was initially worried he had fallen for some sort of scam pop-up, but it was indeed all legit. And nothing sounded like it should have screwed up too much, but maybe he lost his graphics drivers. My brain couldn’t decide if the PC would still send a proper video signal if the drivers weren’t on it, but I was wondering if maybe the graphics card went pffft.
I popped over to Canada Computers, where we bought it, and they weren’t busy so I said, “Hey, I might have the easiest fix ever. I think he just blew off the drivers.” Which the guy told me wouldn’t matter. It would still send the basic signal, even if only BIOS info. Huh.
He reached over to his computer for checking things in, unplugged the video feed and plugged it into the PC, added power, and voila, Jacob’s login came up. So, the PC **was** working. Just not with Jacob’s monitor. Or any monitor at the house. Huh?
We chatted about a few other things, but nothing that would give me a lead anywhere. But it was working.
So brought it all back home, plugged in again, nada. No signal to his monitor. We did have a small problem with Windows not being still registered, but apparently unrelated. Huh.
Jacob went off to have a bath, I started noodling. I literally couldn’t think of anything. Then it occurred to me that while we had shut the PC down to “nothing”, we had NOT reset the monitor, and it IS a smarter-than-average monitor. It has some internal memory, auto config stuff, etc. And since it plugs directly into the powerbar, not the PC, it is always “on” at least somewhat.
What if I shut it down too to fully off? I turned off the power bar and let everything go to zero. Nothing on, nothing running, etc., and let it stay off for about 5 minutes.
Then, I turned it all back on, started the PC…and got Jacob’s login on the screen, no problem. After his bath, Jacob reenabled the proper graphics drivers, tested all his normal games, and they all work. The “problem” one still didn’t, but we’ll deal with that on the weekend. The rest is running fine.
I’d love to say I’m a god for figuring out how to reset it, but well, all I really did was turn it off completely before turning it back on. Exactly what we tried multiple times, but as I said, the monitor was staying on and remembering that it didn’t like the previous signal from the PC and thus continuing to block it.
I can’t say I was looking to solve a hardware problem last night. But all’s well that fixes itself.
In a previous post (New featured images – Astronomy), I mentioned that I’m updating all of my featured images on my website by category. For “computers”, I have just over 100 posts in that category, although that is a bit misleading. I have tended to use it as a bit of a catch-all category.
For example, the main topic in computers is not really about computers at all — it’s about my website. But to be honest, having separate categories about my website (content and mechanics), how I do things and the tools I use (WordPress, plugins, themes), the tools I use at home (desktop apps, graphic editors), and even how I organize myself (photo backups, etc.), didn’t really seem to make a lot of sense to me. It is a VERY wide category, admittedly, but they do seem to lump together. And until recently, I was “forcing” myself to have “one category, one image” for my theming. With this update, I’m giving myself more flexibility.
Yet even though they are lumped, I feel the same as I do with astronomy. I would like to “nuance” the images I use a bit. Plus, I have a MUCH bigger problem. The main graphic I use now for the category is one of a frog typing. It looks like this:
And since my site is PolyWogg.ca, and my nickname is PolyWogg, and polliwogs are baby frogs, I love the idea of a frog using a computer. It is a perfect graphic for me. Except I want to use it for my writing category, not my “computer” category. I have to confess, I like it so much, I have occasionally used it for both. Like THAT’S not confusing to anyone, including me. If it was slightly better resolution and quality, I’d be tempted to make it my overall logo.
Speaking of which, some people suggest that if you are writing about your “website”, you should use your logo or a modified version of your header as your featured image (a bit of a meta thing, intellectually — a blog on your blog about your blog). That would give me a bunch of choices, including my original frog image that is as close as I come to having a real logo, but I view that more as my personal branding logo, not just a website logo.
It isn’t about computers, it’s about me. And so I’m saving that for my truly “personal” posts. Therefore, by process of elimination, I should use a smaller version of my header. If only I could decide on WHICH header I was using!
Possible headers
Over the past 15+ years, I have had approximately ten headers. The first was a modified form of the big frog logo. My friend Liam designed my first website, and he integrated the image into my core splash page and again into my combination header/menu options across the top.
My second and third options were provided by the Weaver theme and sub-themes that I was using. I liked the idea of having a nicely tied-in image (colour-wise) across the top of my site. But neither lasted long. They looked nice, sure, but there was nothing about those images that resonated with me. I played with having my frog again (option 4), except using it as a logo to the left rather than a banner, and it worked for a while.
My fifth option was a picture I took in Gaspesie of a waterfall. I loved the way the water was hitting the ground, and so I went with this image for a short while. I’m proud of the photo, it resonates with me because I took the picture, but it doesn’t really “say” anything. It’s just a cool photo.
My sixth option was a counter-punch to that one. It was taken in southern Nova Scotia, at a B&B we stayed in for a night. I love the reds in the trees, it has water which resonates with me from my youth, and it has bullrushes (oddly, while “bull rushes” is the official name, the Kawartha region seems to have used the term “bowrushes”, which is what I heard growing up), perfectly suitable for me as a frog. What’s not to love? The colours are a bit strong. And again, I was there only once. Does it look okay? Sure. But it’s not like the location means anything to me. We were just passing through. More resonance than the waterfall image, sure, but not enough to make it my header image long-term.
Partly in response to the previous image (notice a trend?), I wanted something that would have more links to me, my site, my “theme”, etc. Most people would just go to Shutterstock, find a suitable photo, or the best photo even, fit it within the site, tweak colours, etc., and BAM! One header image. And I suppose if I was running a commercial site, I’d probably do the same thing. Except it’s not a commercial site. It’s MY site. Everything that goes on the site comes from me. Every post, every page. With the recent exception of two guest blogs from my wife, I have created all 1400 posts. So I want the site to reflect that “personal” touch, and it starts with the header.
So after the previous images using my own photos, I realized I really liked that aspect. A photo that I would take, unique to me, would head the site. I wanted to maintain the PolyWogg motif, something not so dark as the reds in the Nova Scotia picture, maybe more swamplike for the tadpole idea. And suddenly I knew where that existed. Some place with some personal resonance. The Bruce Pit. My family and I go walking there every spring and fall, and I frequently take photos near the pond. I confess that while my main interest in those walks is getting a good photo of a red-winged blackbird (more on that later), I like the pond.
So early one spring, we went for a quick hike. I tried some shots like the Nova Scotia one — farther back, vista / landscape colours — but I wasn’t feeling it. I headed closer to the water. I got up close and personal with some lilypads, and I found some pink water lilies to go with them. I thought about trying to get a shot of an actual frog in the water, but that seemed a step too far in the motif to me. I tried a bunch of shots, different angles, different PoV, different depths, chose a few when I got home, and played a bit with cropping. I’d love to say I hit it fast, and fell in love with a single photo. I didn’t. I found one that worked well, with some cropping, and so I used that for quite a while too. My seventh header.
I had upgraded my camera to a DSLR and was getting better results with my photos, and I took one of a sunset at my inlaws’ cottage on Balsam Lake. Nice, good lake photo, has some merit. A little less “froggy” but I liked it enough to add it to the rotation as my eight header. I tried it for a couple of months, but it didn’t stick.
Then my mother died. That doesn’t sound like something that would trigger a change in my website’s header, but it did, incidentally at least. After her funeral, I went for a drive. Just wanted to be alone. And I drove out to the lake where I grew up. Sure, we lived in Peterborough, but from 24th of May to Thanksgiving, we were always out at Chemong Lake. We had a sweet deal on a low-cost campground site, great location, on the water. It was awesome. And of course, right in front of the trailer was a quiet secluded bay with a swamp at one end. A lot like the Nova Scotia pond pic. With bullfrogs, red-winged blackbirds, bullrushes, water. Yeah, that’s why I like all that stuff. It defined much of who I am as a person. It’s also part of my nickname — I got it from my family (mostly my sister Sharon). Paul – Paulie – PolyWogg, not a stretch.
And so it wasn’t surprising to anyone that I went for a drive and that’s where I ended up. Yet I wasn’t quite ready to go directly there. Instead, I drove over near the Curve Lake reserve. I have never ever driven over there before, but I guess I wanted to see how much of the area I could see from that shore (it’s across the lake from our campground area). And the lake was weirdly calm. Not a ripple. Something you NEVER see during a late afternoon. In 20 years out at the lake, I never saw it that calm except first thing in the morning, or perhaps late at night. But late afternoon? Never. I snapped a photo.
And while I like the photo, and it does mean something to me, let’s be honest. It was never a serious contender for a long-term header. It lasted about a week as my ninth header.
I drove over to the campground area, but of course, I should have mentioned that it is long-gone, replaced by a small sub-division of expensive lake homes. But the coastline doesn’t change. The bay is still there. The swamp is gone, the bay’s been dredged out, but oddly enough, some of the trees are still there. Even a hill that was behind our campsite is still mostly there, I thought they would have flattened that considerably. But near the site is a road’s end boat launch that used to double as our swimming hole. The county used to drop sand there every spring, so you had sand out about 30 feet or so, about 20 feet wide. I spent a significant part of my childhood at that exact spot.
You can’t see the campsite area until you’re in the water, mostly because there is a huge tree on the edge of the property that hangs over the water. It’s still there, getting bigger every year, and it was like seeing an old neighbour to wave “hello” to in the old ‘hood. You can see it over at https://PolyWogg.ca.
Sunset, lake, emotional resonance out the wazoo. Yeah, it was my tenth choice as a header and it lasted for quite some time. I even thought that it might become my “forever” header. But over time, the grief faded, and the resonance lessened a tad. And while I love the image, I feel it is too dark for the site. Not dark emotionally, not sombre, just visually. And so, I have reverted. Back to my seventh header with the lily pads.
Feature image for “the website”
So, after all those discussions of header choices, it is really just context to say, which of those do I use on a smaller scale to represent my “website”. If I whittle them down, there are really only four choices, and the first three fall by the wayside pretty fast:
The tree frog — nope, using that for my “personal” image;
Quiet Chemong Lake (Header 10) — nope, I’ve moved on from that, and it isn’t a great photo for cropping to 150x150px anyway;
My website icon — while this shows in the tab above as the small symbol for a URL page, it doesn’t look that great when you increase the size to 150×150, unless I was going more for Ninja Turtle with someone stepping on their stomach.
No, none of those really work. Which means I’m left with a cropped version of the current header of lily pads and water lilies, with two sub-versions … one is pulled back a bit, one is cropped to the pink water lilies.
While I like the content of the first one with the pads, the pink in the second one is more visually impactful. The second one it is!
Other “computer” images
After that, the rest is relatively straight-forward. Most of the images are new additions, rather than grouping everything under the “frog typing” image… I have added ones for hardware (simple PC), problems (man sad at computer), testing and learning (boy concentrating), smooth sailing (man at ergo desk and computer), and video games (one of the PacMan ghosts, multi-coloured).
And that’s a wrap! I have my new images figured out for the “computers” category. Two categories down, twenty-four more to go. At least a bunch of the other ones are relatively easy.
I have almost 1400 posts and pages, and with a redesign that I’ve recently been working on, i.e., changing many things behind the scenes in layout and workflow, I need to go back and fix a bunch of featured images for sizes. So at the same time, since I’ll be using the Featured Images in a slightly different way along with other graphics in my site, I’ll take advantage of the update to also consider new images.
For astronomy posts, most of which up until now have been about astronomy and telescopes and imaging, oh my, I’ve tended to use a whimsical graphic for all of it.
It has a transparent background, PNG format, and I like the light nature of it. It reflects my approach to astronomy, generally informal, non-scientific, heavy focus on observing over imaging or logging. In short? Fun.
But my astronomy posts are not all about “fun”. Some of them are a bit more serious about the hobby, and how to record observations, etc. More of the “what did I see” than “what did I experience” type post. And so while it is still coded in the website as an astronomy category, it strikes me as a bit different. To that end, I found this image which shows a logbook:
Also PNG format with a transparent background, it is still a bit light. I’ll easily use it for my observations / logs.
But as time marches on, I also find myself getting a bit into light imaging. I have all the imaging tools I need to keep me busy for a very long time — an adapter to attach a point-and-shoot camera, the adapters to attach my DSLR, and even a NexImage 5 webcam. All perfectly fine tools for my type of scope (a Schmidt-Cassegrain tube on an alt-az mount), even though the scope and mount are not ideal for astrophotography. Instead, I’m more likely to use my smartphone with my scope, and I have a couple of adapters to use. But that too then gives me a slightly different blog post, one with images of actual targets. As such, I’ve uploaded a third image.
While still a graphic rather than a photo, I like the idea that it shows different types of targets — stars, planets, the moon, comets, and deep space. So I’ll likely use that one for my imaging posts.
Which then leaves me with a question. When I do my official PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy, which of the three do I use? I could use:
the informal whimsical one showing the boy enjoying the stars;
the more formal one that includes a logbook; or,
the one that emphasizes the targets.
I’m pretty sure I’ll go with the whimsical one, as that is more the tone I’m going for — newbies who are looking at getting into astronomy and who are willing to learn from someone who is just a little ahead of them on the knowledge curve. But “pretty sure” and “certain” are a gulf apart, and I welcome any views anyone has to shift the needle.
Of course, from time to time, I might want other images too. So I have a NextGen album with lots of other images in it from various clipart collections that I can use. Stay tuned!
I’m sure my wife saw the post title and started social distancing just for that. “Not again!” was likely her thought. It’s true, I do play with some stuff on the site, often figuring out new ways to do something, and since I’m anal-retentive, I hate the thought of something that leaving previous versions if, say, I find a better way to do book reviews that I would implement starting now.
Simple content areas
Most of my content is relatively straightforward — a blog post here, a blog post there. For each, they are pretty text-heavy even if the popular website wisdom is more graphics and video. That’s not me, I’m a writer, I write words. But there are a few areas where I feel the choices for how to display the text are not quite so clear; for the simple areas, it is relatively, umm, simple.
For astronomy, I share my own pics of course, but I’m also writing an astronomy guide. So having a simplified layout that is easy for anyone to read is important to me. Mostly so far it is only a table of contents and a series of early pages or blog posts. I can do them as either (post or page), really, but most are done as pages.
For my challenges (reading, baking/cooking), they’re relatively simple static pages.
For materials related to government, much of it is simply one-off posts, no real structure required. But then I have two other areas…the first is PS Transitions FP, a report from a conference that a group of students from Carleton organized in 2002, and for which I was the webmaster. It’s entirely static, but it does have some tabbing in it, as well as a photo gallery. I’ve kept the content there for over 18 years, but the methodology for doing so has had to be altered a little bit when plugins expired, or setups on my site changed.
The other area is my HR guide, and it has been a challenge more for organizing than content, at least in terms of the website portion. I have multiple versions of some of the content, with a LOT of comments on pages that I now consider archival. I hesitate to delete them and lose all those comments, but I don’t like having the old versions of the guide there when I’ve written later and better versions. I recently found a plugin that will let me move comments from an old post to my latest post on the same topic, and I’ll likely consolidate it all when I get my latest version of the guide finished. My wife is acting as my editor, so I’m hopeful it will be my best version yet. And then I’ll likely delete all the other content. The thought makes me queasy, to be honest. All those words, used extensively by people, but I’m going to delete entire posts and pages? I haven’t worked through that mentally yet. I might find a way to preserve it somewhere else on the site.
Under personal, I have posts about family and goals, all relatively straight-forward. But the ones for humour and quotes give me pause. I like the idea of sharing both through social media as memes. And then including them on my website. Sounds simple, right? Except if I do it as a meme, i.e. a graphic, then the graphic doesn’t get indexed on my site. Index bots don’t read the “text” within the graphic, it is just the graphic. So if I add a long joke, or even a short quote, and someone was to search anywhere for it, my site wouldn’t show up in the search engine because technically that text doesn’t appear on my site. Yet, by the same token, if I post it as text, it doesn’t look as sharp as a meme, suitable for sharing. Someone suggested including both, but that seems redundant. However, I might have a new way to at least create a searchable list of the description of the meme at least. A bit manual to create at first, but ongoing would be simple to update for future posts.
The more difficult areas to format
The real challenge has always been my reviews. Before I even had a website, I wrote book and movie reviews and just shared them along with jokes to a subscription-based newsletter list. It was free, but you had to “ask” to be on it. I had book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, and an active trivia game at the time. Most of it was in a spreadsheet that handled all my formatting in ASCII format so I could paste into an email and just pressed SEND. It worked, I liked it, and when I created my first PolyWogg website, I wanted to put my reviews there.
Of late, though, I have mostly focused on book reviews. I generally have liked the format for them (plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, bottom line, rating), and yet I confess it took me several tries to get them looking the way I wanted. One of the early challenges was whether or not I include a “disclosure” phrase in the review on my own website. You’re supposed to declare any conflict-of-interest elements if you post reviews on a lot of commercial sites, and since I share them on those sites too, it seemed simple to also include them on mine. But over time, I realized I didn’t really care. For almost none of them do I have any conflict. I don’t have that many cases where I got a free book / advanced reader copy to read. So the disclosure was bulky and just said that I had no link to the author. Kind of meaningless in the long-run. I cut it.
Then Amazon started playing with how they handle referral links. I didn’t have a lot of links on my site, and so I wasn’t getting any referral money. I think I got about a dollar over five years. But I did have the account, and the main point of having it was so I could link to the Amazon website and hotlink in pictures of the book covers. Yet Amazon booted me from the active referral program along with 1000s of other affiliates who hadn’t earned any commissions in the previous year. They culled the list, so to speak, and I would have cut me too. But that called into question my hotlinking, which also required me to run two extra plugins. Could I get the images some other way? Yep, Good Reads grants permission to those doing reviews to link to the images on their own site. Yes! So I went through probably 150 or so book reviews, reformatting a few things as I went (like cutting disclosure paragraphs) and updating all the images. Tedious, but they were all “fixed” to match the new approach. That was about six months ago.
The part that was “left” was my index of book reviews. I had tried some indexing tools, some table plugins, a few other things, and none of them really worked the way I wanted them to do. Because I had different types of info that I wanted to be able to group by:
Alphabetically by title (obvious);
Alphabetically by author;
The raw review number (i.e., mostly chronologically for me for the order in which I write the reviews);
The date of my review (where #3 failed is some of my reviews are old and I’ve updated them and included them, but that means putting in a 1998 review in between two 2015 reviews, for example, so #3 and #4 are not exactly the same sort);
The year the book was published;
Series and order, to give me the ability to group books in the same series; and,
My rating.
But without the proper tool to display all of that, I organize it manually. I still use a flat-file database in a spreadsheet, Excel currently, although it started off in Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, and in the spreadsheet, I have a field that formats the info so I can simply paste it into my website. For example, I mix and match sub-fields into a single string that says:
TITLE by AUTHOR (BR#####; published {date}; reviewed {date}; series {order}; rating)
I then simply paste that into one page, add a hotlink to the URL for the review post, and then copy that to six other index pages. I have tended to do it in batches of twenty-five book reviews at a time, so I would write 25 reviews and post them over the course of a number of months, and when I got to the 25th, I would then paste all 25 strings into a web-page, add the URLs, and then paste them into the other six pages too. Time-consuming, and doing 25 together made it a bit more efficient on workflows, but it was a workflow blockage too. Plus, once in awhile, I’d mess up some link or a copy and paste, and then a year later, I would happen to notice that the link from one of the indices was not, in fact, linking to the right page. I’d messed it up, and when I beta-tested it, I had apparently missed the errors. REALLY annoying. Another downside to coding some things manually.
As I said, though, I had tried out a bunch of options to put it into various auto-sorting tools, but it never worked well.
An accidental revolution
In addition to my book reviews, I also do movie reviews, music reviews (although mainly only one year so far), and TV reviews. For the TV reviews, it is INCREDIBLY slow to do a review of a full season of TV for me. Which is odd, because the individual episodes are ALREADY reviewed. As I watch TV, I keep track of individual episodes and when I finish the episode, I use a similar spreadsheet to automate a quick TWEET that says:
Sooo, I have always wanted to embed those reviews in my website, but didn’t have a good way to do that, at least not quickly. I tried a manual approach:
Created a table in a reusable post template;
Added a line for the Tweet;
Added a line for a picture from the episode (I was saving them for a while);
Added some areas to talk about the overall season;
Added an area to rate the whole season;
But then I was stuck. That is a LOT of copy and pasting to get it to look right. I tried just pasting from Excel spreadsheets, but the paste is painful — it adds codes to EVERY cell, so if you want to adjust layout later, the whole table is a mess of codes. So I went looking for a way to embed an Excel Spreadsheet into a website easily. Just so I could paste, for example, a whole season’s worth of tweet/reviews at once.
And I found the very popular plugin for WordPress called TablePress. It would allow me to import spreadsheets directly or even to paste them raw. Gave it a try, and BAM, it worked right out of the box. Great, I had a way to paste the whole season at once into a page.
But then I noticed some other features. It would let me search the table too, applying the terms like a filter. Not really needed in a table of only 20-25 rows, but interesting. Oh, and you can sort columns too. Again, I don’t really need that with the episodes.
Or more accurately, I don’t need that function for THIS table. But what about my book review indices? Holy Hannah, I could have ONE table instead of 7 and EVERY FIELD is sortable? Plus I can paste directly from Excel? Holy fudgicles!
Welcome to the revolution
I only had 8 reviews of TV seasons, all for the show Castle that finished a few years ago. Again, as I said, too time-consuming to paste in every episode line by line, particularly if I was also pasting in photos. Meh. Instead, I’ve cut it down to an overview, episodes that I liked, those that were watchable, those that I didn’t like, a table of all the episodes, an overall review of the season, and some links to the index of other reviews.
With each column sortable. I copy the rows and columns from Excel where I already have the info, paste it all into the back end, add one line to my page, and BAM!, instant table. I started thinking, okay, this is good, I’ll do a table for each season, no problem. But then I thought again. Every table will be identical in format. And Castle has 8 seasons, that’s 8 tables to keep in the database with different names, I’ll need a good naming convention, etc. Hmm…but what if I could merge ALL of the Castle episodes into one table and just list those that correspond to Season 1. Is that doable? Turns out it is. TablePress has a premium extension called row filtering. So now I have pasted ALL of the info for each episode for eight seasons of Castle into the same table, and now instead of saying just “show Castle table”, I also say “filter to S01”. Still all one line.
Now I could get really aggressive, and paste all my shows into one database. Dozens of shows, hundreds of seasons, maybe even thousands of episodes and then filter on “Castle” and “S01”. Yet it would generate a HUGE table in the database. If it corrupts, I’m toast, I’ll lose everything, plus it would be loading the whole table each time it ran a filter. For TV episodes at least, I’ll keep it to one table per show. But once I’ve pasted one season in, the rest can go like gangbusters. A huge workflow saving, and it generates the same way every time.
And it got me thinking about how to do the book reviews.
As I mentioned earlier, I had 7 pages of book review indices generated relatively manually. Now they could be all in one page. Great! Except that all of my existing book review pages have a small table at the end of each that has links to each of the seven pages. All nicely formatted; all no longer needed. In 180 book reviews. The ones I updated 6 months ago to fix the problem with showing the pictures of the book covers. Dang it.
Editing Book Reviews
It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, maybe an hour or two of dedicated processing to open the page, go to the bottom, paste a new line that only links to the main index, and then delete the table for the rest. Easily doable. There likely is a way to do this in the block editor to prevent ever having this need again (i.e. perhaps I could edit the block next time and delete or update all of them at once), but I am not a block-editor kind of guy. I vastly prefer the simple classic editor. So that’s what I’ve done. But I went through my layout in detail asking myself if there is ANYTHING else I might want to change as I go. My ratings show as pictures of a frog reading on a lilypad, and if it is four out of five, it shows four green ones and one grey one, for instance. On all of my other reviews, TV / Movies / Music, I’m switching my ratings from an actual graphic file over to a simple icon / emoji of a smiling frog. So four green frogs and one grey circle, for 4/5. It looks simpler, shows up cleaner in tweets and FB, kind of cute. I like the branding. But for my book reviews, I like the graphic of the frog reading. So I am committing to that staying. I’ll use the frog emoji in tables, like above, but for the rest, it is graphics.
While I was playing with this, I also adjusted my movie reviews, even though for that too there are only a handful. Too hard to do the workflow, or so I thought. Now that I have an easily updatable table, it’s not that bad.
My other big tweak
A few months ago, I started the process of switching all of my photos from a separate Piwigo install on my website into a WordPress-based NextGen Gallery that embeds all the photos into the site. The integration is great, but it is a LOT of work to move 13K photos from one server area to another. I’m fixing a whole bunch of stuff on the back end as I go, including how filenames and captions, plus face tagging, are done, and I’m using Mylio as by desktop photo processor along with its built-in facial recognition. That has a small impact on my movie and TV reviews as I do include some photos for those (like the show’s title screen and a pic or two from an episode somewhere in the season). It’s working well, but I’m a bit stalled on the “big” move. Still a LONG way to go on the regular personal photos, not to mention astronomy photos later. Yikes.
Conclusion
And that’s where I am. TablePress as a major change, plus its extension for filtering + I’ve reformatted the entire approach to reviews + I’m using a new gallery plugin on the backend. But I’m really happy with the approach, for the first time in a long time. I feel like there aren’t any niggling elements on any of the review contents, or the others really, where I don’t have the approach I want. No “unresolved” issues like manually having to do multiple index pages rather than having the system generate it for me.
The WordPress security plugin, Wordfence, published a blog entry describing how one of its techs working on cracking malware goes about doing the various steps in a recent day, analysing and developing responses to specific threats.
While the post seems at first to be highly technical, it’s quite readable by the informed layperson, and quite interesting to see. It also dispels the cryptocurrency baitclick headline to note it could have been running anything off the site, it just happened to be doing CCs.
One of our sources of threat data at Defiant is cleaning hacked websites. In this case, Ivan, a member of our SST team had cleaned a hacked site and handed me the forensic data for analysis. The site had been hacked for months before the owner discovered that it had been compromised.
My normal routine is to start by verifying the files we already detect to check if there is any new information inside any of them. Usually there is not, and this infection did not yield any surprises in the files that Wordfence already detected.
What did surprise me is that the server had a large number of malicious files we have not seen before. The server had been infected for a long time, which may have left the attacker feeling confident enough to upload more valuable code.
For us, a server with code we have not seen before is a treasure trove, because it immediately allows us to add new detection capability to the Wordfence malware scanner. If an attacker is caught in this situation, they generally have a bad day, because many of their files that may have previously been undetected by malware scanners will now be detected by our scan.
The first thing that made this attacker different from others is that, instead of using a standard javascript code obfuscator that just scrambles the code, they were using a finite wordlist to replace variable and function names in the code. When you look at the code, the variable and function names just seem like gibberish.
I immediately searched for other similar files out of the remaining samples and found several, then proceeded to write new signatures to detect those files. That accomplished, I moved on to the next file in the list. That was a basic PHP file that selectively redirects regular users, not search engines, to a malicious website. This is a standard thing we see, so I wrote a signature to detect this updated malware variant and moved on.
