Theme updated, horray!

I took some time to update gonad.org’s WordPress theme, Vistered Little, to the newest version.  There was an evil security flaw in the version I had been using, though I’m nearly a year behind in noticing this.

My idea of “taking some time” is grepping through some php and css, and haphazardly pasting bits here and there.  It appears I did this without breaking anything, and even allowed everything that was previously working to continue doing so (as far as I can tell).  Quite an accomplishment.

I shall fiddle with the wallpaper images later!

Edit:

D’err.. I think the shoutbox is broken for registered users (which means mostly me!!)!  I’ll fix tomorrow :[

No, I won’t sit still ’til I’m upside down in the back of your eyes

So, yeah.. I was going to bed, but then I had this great idea to upgrade WordPress and all my freakin’ plugins. So I did. It was relatively painless but time consuming.

It seems WordPress now has tagging and other useful features I haven’t yet noticed! Exciting times, let me tell you.

Lastly, have some Hellsing Ultimate OVA 4 ending:

Generally, I don’t really care much for Nazis… but in marching catboy form? Yeah, I can dig it.

You march around that globe, Schrodinger. World domination is a-okay by me! *thumbs up*

Image uploader, reborneth!

I finally took the time to do this:

Long story short, someone exploited the uploading script I was previously using for my image uploading site. A backdoor was installed, giving them full reign over my account on the server which this site is hosted. Luckily, I caught this before anything malicious could happen, but needless to say, I was not pleased at the event.

While running this site for the past few years, I have enjoyed watching it grow, and have had a good time tinkering with it (mostly behind the scenes, many times banning the seemingly endless supply of Brazillian porn forums.. hmm).

Right before disabling the old uploading script, the site had peaked in usage with 8.4 MILLION requests (which includes each time an image is requested from a remote site, etc) with over 60,000 page views in one month. This may sound like small bananas compared to many sites, especially the multitude of hosting sites availible these days, but watching MY site (the site with nothing but a textbox for a filename and an upload button) get to there, from nothing, was exciting.

After the exploit, I honestly wasn’t planning to fix the site any time soon. When I came across Uploader only a few minutes ago, though, I was inspired to get things rolling again.

You do have to register an account to upload now, but registration is open to anyone. Please give it a shot.

Enjoy the uploading

-Justin

The old address (http://gonad.org/upload) now redirects to the new http://upload.gonad.org. Sleep now.

More shoutbox shenanigans

I previously updated my shoutbox to add some spam blocking functionality. Although this worked well for manually banning spammer IPs (and synchronizing spammer IP lists from other blogs using the same shoutbox), spam still came in by the dozen now and then, sporting more and more IPs each time. I just banned 25 or 30 IPs today.

Pierre was nice enough to leave a comment about his updated version of Jalenack’s shoutbox, which combines some of the IP blocking functionality of JohnPuPu, plus many other spam-fighting and bug-fix updates, and a few new features.

I’m trying it out now. So far, so good!

Yo, peep dis!

I installed this nice little Gravatars plugin, and added avatars to comments, posts, and the author pages (here’s mine, for example).

You (yes, all two of you.. maybe three) can get you own avatar by signing up at Gravatar.com, using the same email address you use for your gonad.org account. Alternatively, you can manually specify an image on your profile page. As of right now, you can’t directly upload an image as your avatar, but that’s for another day’s tinkering. (If you’re clever, you could use the post editor upload function to upload an image to be used as your avatar, I suppose..)

I’ve been inspired by the “Top WordPress Plugins” list, so I’ll be adding more fun plugins soon. :D

PS: Typos be damned!

HACK ATTACK! O SHI–

So, someone exploited my image uploading script (formerly here). They installed some HAX0R TOOLZ to steal my INTERNET TUBES. Seriously though, check out this interface they left behind:

So, basically they could launch Russian missles from gonad.org.. and here I thought the shoutbox spammers were bad people.

OH WELLS.

Playing with themes

If you notice the look of the site sporatically and drastically changing, I’m just playing around.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

Edit:

Geez, this theme is so pretty. I almost want to keept it. I made a poll on the sidebar. Vote!

Marpet edit:

hehehehe, sorry, i had to add a flare of gayness

Justin edit:

I love this clip.

This is HILARIOUS

My ghosts like to travel

Ok, the shoutbox is back again. I found some updated code to add an IP blocking list to Jalenack’s shoutbox. You can even publish a feed containing your blocked spammer IPs, so other people can synchronize their lists with yours, or you can synchronize your list with theirs.

The server gonad.org is hosted on blocks using file() to open URLs, so I had to change:

$lines = file($feeds[$i]);

to:

$cmd = "wget ".$feeds[$i]." -q -O -";
$lines = explode( "\n", s h e l l _ e x e c( $cmd ));

in jal_shout_spam_sync().

If you’re wondering why s h e l l _ e x e c() is spaced out like that, read the end of this. Google saved me from ripping my hair out.

Sleep.

BUH!

Never has my shoutbox been spammed so hellishly.

For the moment, you can only post in it if you’re registered and logged in.  CRIPES!  Even that doesn’t stop ‘em!  I guess I’ll fix it tomorrow.

I have no shoutbox.  The spam ruined it for EVERYONE!

I’ll just have to add some additional spam protection to it, when I find myself extremely bored.

Feeding my YouTube posting addiction..

I added a new sub-catagory to “Fake Content” for videos.. called “Videos.” It seemed appropraite due to.. having.. videos.