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Top 10 Posts of 2023
Category: meta
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Insert Title Here
I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s Scripting.com blog lately and it’s made me jealous of his blogging software. Because he was blogging before he invented RSS he’s never felt the compulsion to title each of his posts. It’s a lot more like tweeting than blogging when everything doesn’t have to fall neatly under a title.
I guess WordPress will technically let me post without a title, but it’s not the same as his stream of consciousness posts that build from the start of the day to the end, as well, he’s got a separate link-blog stream which I also think is pretty nifty.
That’s it, that’s just what’s been bothering me and every time I have gone to create a new post lately I keep thinking about how I wish I didn’t have to be so formal. Maybe getting it out there will clear my writer’s block.
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Top 10 Posts of 2022
Today marks 20 years since writing my first blog post. That first post wasn’t much — my brother and I shared a blogger blog and I think we were basically our own audience at that time. I’ve since changed over to this solo WordPress blog and I’ve even added some pre-dated posts with content from before this blog existed but either way today marks 20 years since this whole endeavour started.
And on this 20th anniversary of blog posts, as many other blogs came and went, I can look back and say I’m glad I kept at it.
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Top 10 Posts of 2021
(Previously 2020)
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Top 10 Posts of 2020
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…And We’re Back
After almost two weeks of downtime the website is back up. Apparently my host was hit with some kind of major hacking attack and lost a lot of webpages. Luckily, they were eventually able to restore everything (except for lost advertising revenue).
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.
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One Red Paperclip
One Red Paperclip is a site about one man’s successful attempt at trading one red paperclip for something bigger and better until, 14 trades later, he had a house. File under, “why didn’t I think of that?”
Coincidentally, because of the One Red Paperclip guy’s challenge to CBC’s The Hour, the show went to Yahk, BC and on the way they did a couple of shows in Calgary. It was one of those Calgary episodes that I was on.
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This is jeffmilner.com
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.