After upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress, I seem to have lost the ability to open single page posts—so if you’ve noticed commenting is down… I’ve noticed it and will get to it when I get back on Monday.

Update: It’s a known bug in Wordpress 2.6. They are going to fix it in the next release, but in the meantime, I found a fix here.

My very good friend, Louise, wrote Derek Powazek (founder of JPG Mag, husband to Heather Champ of Flickr fame and Leta’s Internet Godfather) to ask him if he’s ever regretted his transparency on the web.

Derek’s response: Never tell a story like it’s not about you. In answering her question, he reminds us why it is we keep sites like this. It gives me encouragement to write more about myself, rather than just link-posting which is what I’ve found myself doing a lot lately.

Accordion Guy, Joey deVilla, shares a story about a recent Craiglist wedding. His wedding music choice put a smile on my face.

I wonder how many opportunities like this we pass up everyday?

(via)

Previously: Blogging Saves Lives and Accordian Guy’s Blog Lands Him in Trouble with Moving Bullies.

As sad as this is to admit, it appears there is a folder or 5 on my site that have been sending out some kind of pharmaceutical spam. I guess this is just a lesson that when working with plugins that I’m not too sure about, I need to be extra careful.

The files in question have also written special permissions to themselves making it difficult to just erase them. I’ve contacted my hosting provider and hopefully I will have things sorted out soon.

Some of the names of the noxious files in question include:

• bucaon.php
• bucion.php
• caon.php
• chca.php
• chcion.php
• chva.php
• chva2.php
• hoon.php
• leon.php
• orfi.php
• puph.php

• adon.php
• bual.php
• bualon.php
• buph.php
• orphon.php
• orsoon.php
• orxa.php
• soon.php
• ulon.php
• weon.php

• buamon.php
• bufi.php
• buhy.php
• chfi.php
• chhy.php
• chso.php
• orci.php
• orhy.php
• puxa.php
• tron.php

• buhyon.php
• buleon.php
• butr.php
• chal.php
• chle.php
• orcaon.php
• orcion.php
• orva.php
• orvi.php
• pron.php

The interesting thing I found when searching for information about my situation, there appears to be a lot of other sites that also have these malicious php files on their servers and I assume they have no idea about it either—including, and this surprised me the most, many Universities’ sites.

If anyone has any more light they can shed on this, please let me know.

Update: At my request, my hosting provider has blown away the affected directories.

One of the dangers of upgrading too quickly when using open source software is that sometimes bugs aren’t noticed until wide spread usage allows for many more people to put it to the test.

Bugs haven’t been too much trouble lately, but a couple of days ago it was discovered that at least some of the downloads of WordPress 2.1.1 had an exploit written into them by a malicious PHP scripter.

This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

More details from Wordpress.

On Sunday I’m taking off for a few days in the California sun. No, I’m not off to MacWorld, but I am going to San Francisco to take part in a Social Media Club round table discussion.

Chris Heuer (SMC Co-Founder) will lead a roundtable discussion on blogs, podcasting and all the cool things we want to do and would like to see happen in 2007. SMC is working to connect Social Media groups all over the world, so it’s a great way to take a part in universal efforts to spread the Social Media love.

I’m really looking forward to it, for one thing, my skin is getting a little pasty white up here in the Great White North—but also it will be a great opportunity to make some interesting new friends south of the border. Maybe it’ll even inspire me to start my own podcast.

When I worked in Malaysia for six weeks last year, one of the projects I worked on was creating station ID storyboards for Channel V International. The purpose of these identification “advertisements” is mostly to strengthen their brand by reminding people who is providing the content they are watching.

Many television stations now add watermarks, usually their logo, on the feed at all times so that there is always that reminder of where the channel comes from. It also serves as a protection against others from stealing their content and profiting from their work.

I discovered today that there are websites that harvest posts from my site via XML feeds and place them beside their own advertisements. These sites are called sploggers (spam bloggers). I have no real way of watermarking my posts, so instead I’m just writing this post to say, if you are reading this post from anywhere other than your feed reader or directly from the http://jeffmilner.com website, then you are helping these sites profit by stealing the work of myself and others like me.

But for everyone else, thanks for reading.

A fascinating first hand experience of what it’s like to be an astronaut. Anousheh Ansari posts to her website from space.

Update: She called Google.

The relatives are headed home and my hard drive has been replaced. I’m going back to Lethbridge tonight and getting back into my blogging routine and finishing up the odd jobs that I have been putting off.

In the meantime, to satisfy your New Media hunger, please enjoy this Stop Motion collection and this short film about Stop Motion that I came across in an email awhile ago.

(Thanks Gary)

After years of neglect… Finally an upgrade at Blogger worth noting.

Some of the upgrades include:

• a tie-in to your Google Account
• dynamic pages
• separate comment feeds
• new layouts
• an apparent merger with Google’s Page Creator for WYSIWYG editing
• integration of feeds
• public/private access control
• tag-based labels for categories

Take Blogger’s New Features tour. If they would have done this about 6 months sooner, I wouldn’t have switched to WordPress.

And as a special treat for those of you that like to blog (or have friends that do), here is Sprites - I Started A Blog Nobody Read.

Within any collaborative effort, participants do their part giving so that there might be some kind of benefit reaped out of the collective work of the project. Derek Powazek proposes that perhaps the participants need not even be aware of their contributions in order for a system to form benefitting the perverbial greater good. Read about it in his post, Design for Selfishness.

As I read it, I started to think that as powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to pull the web into one easily accessible medium, a dissection at different levels of the internet can be very revealing. For example, on any given community driven web page the creator may have big plans for the users input of finely crafted content but may or may not be actually offering anything for it. As Powazek points out there has to be a reason for the user to contribute, “If you’re making a product that’s asking users to do something—anything—that is going to add value to your company, ask yourself why anyone would bother.” There are plenty of not so good reasons that get passed off all the time: “Because it’s cool!”, “Because they contribute to Wikipedia/Slashdot/Whatever, and we’re just like that!”, or “Because we enable them to use their voice.”

But he goes on to explain that there are some good answers too:

Because we solve a problem they have. Because we give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Because we enable a kind of communication that’s unlike anything else. Because we make their lives more convenient. Because we give them, or save them, money. Because we enable them to do more with less. Because they told us they wanted to.

The whole scenario reminds me of the concept presented in Richard Dawkins famous book, “The Selfish Gene”. The book’s thesis is that in any living creature the genes that get passed on are the ones whose mutations serve their own implicit interests, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level.

Let me use tagging photos as an example (I know this is the same one Powazek used, but it’s the best one). Within Flickr.com users have the ability to put tags on their photos. This helps them to find their own photos quickly and easily when they search by tag, but it also benefits the flickr community at large because they are able to search everyone’s photos by their tags.

The same is true within the context of the blogosphere as a whole. Here individuals write about specific topics and whatever their motivation the result is we are provided with a vast expanse of searchable content.

Thinking about all the posts and topics I’ve written about, I hope you, the good readers of this site, find something useful here.

MyDeathSpace.com is a collection of links and information about MySpace account holders that have died. I’m not sure why they limited it to MySpace users only, since there are plenty of people that blog and don’t use MySpace, but that’s beside the point.

Only three things are certain in life. MySpace, Taxes, and Death.

If you have a MySpace account and you die, this is where you will end up.

MyDeathSpace.com memorializes deceased MySpace users and picks up where a regular obituary leaves off.

Click the MySpace Deaths link at the top to view the latest MySpace Deaths!

After upgrading to WordPress 2.0.1 my post feed started showing only comments and not posts. After some fiddling (and perhaps some breaking) of my site, I found out that upgrading to the newest version of WordPress (2.0.2), then posting a Page and deleting it, fixes the “RSS with comments only” problem.

If you’re running WordPress 2.0.1, you might want to download the newest version.

(Thanks Timo)

A few weeks ago I told you about Judith, the woman who lost her camera in a National Park in Hawaii that was found but not returned.

In a follow-up to that story, apparently the family has come around and restored balance to the universe by returning her camera. Here are Judith’s details of the case.

As an aside, The National Post ran an interesting story about this lost camera incident.

One of my favorite non-fiction writers, Malcolm Gladwell, (author of The Tipping Point, and Blink) has a new website: gladwell.typepad.com.