Starting on Black Friday and going solid through Cyber Monday (after which it slowed only a little), my blog has been getting hit by a distributed brute-force password attack. All weekend, I would get pings that WordPress had blocked yet another IP address, and I couldn’t help but be of two minds. On the one hand, I had to laugh a little – over two hundred IP addresses had been blocked, and I don’t believe they would be able to brute force a 150 bit password with four guesses each. On the other hand, it’s not the IP addresses that are blocked that you have to worry about; it’s the ones that weren’t and succeeded, or, worse, exploited some other vulnerability. Was the brute force password attempts just a distraction?
This gives rise to the question, “are my security measures enough?” Since I was thinking about them anyway, I went ahead and took the time to upgrade a few things that were lacking, and took a hard look at some of the other things I could do. Continue reading Hacking My Blog→
It’s been a while since I’ve had a unified look-and-feel to my website. The last time I went through unifying all of my pages, the web was a different place – CSS was the go to technology to make the look and feel of your website work and javascript was used really only if you had something more complicated. At the time, web design was more focused on delivering content than it was in delivering design, so you could get away with something simple that also happened to look decent.
Now, I won’t claim that my old site design was good for its time, but it was a simple implementation that achieved my goal of being able to deliver multiple different types of content: a blog (PivotX), a wiki (Dokuwiki), my web apps, and my static pages. As a comparison, my old design had less than a hundred lines of CSS and a handful of layout elements. My new wordpress theme has over a thousand lines of CSS, and the relevant layout hierarchies are over four layers deep. Continue reading Website Unification→
This year, my New Year’s Resolution was to get WordPress up and running, and replacing PivotX as my primary blogging software. Tada! I did this yesterday, and now I can wash my hands of doing WordPress installations for now. If you want to know why “WordPress installations” is plural, read on…
