Scribblings and Dribblings

Imagine my consternation this morning when I opened my blog page to discover I had been hacked by some group claiming to be Turkish Islamic Terrorists. My wordpress database was gone, or so I thought.

Apparently, there is a back door that WordPress admins should be aware of. In the wp-config.php file, there are four special lines of code that need to have unique data in them, or the wordpress database itself can be open to attack. I’ve no clue how this actually works, yet. But the good folks at Fatcow.com, my web hosting provider, got me back online quickly, and provided a terrific link to another blog that had the info I needed to protect myself from this permanently. That entry is at idratherbewriting.

Good luck to all you blog admins out there, and thanks to the support staff at Fatcow.

So, as you may have noticed, the blog portion of my website is starting to look more like my home pages. I’m only starting to crack the code of how WordPress uses style sheets to format the content, and I haven’t even begun to experiment with queries, but this is a pretty good first step.

One odd thing I noticed while working with the style sheet (style.css) in the theme is that while the styles for the header, body, and menu frames of the page are defined as “.style-name”, the styles for the footer are defined in the “#style-name” format, which affects the manner in which the style is called, depending on wether the style sheet is included in the header of the page, or if a call is made as a class inside a tag. As soon as I figure out more about the reasoning behind this, I’ll post a little more info.

This is the first of what I hope to be many blog entries. As of this morning, I have finally (after much hair-pulling with ftp) installed WordPress weblog software on the site.  I’m very excited about this, but also anxious. As Uncle Ben Parker said to Peter, “With great power comes great responsibility…”