a-l-i-n-e.com

I’m still around and I haven’t forgotten this blog. I log in from time to time but I still couldn’t bring myself to write anything. I didn’t think that work life could be so tiring. Like I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I spend about 3 hrs just travelling to and from work. The good news is that I am finally getting a netbook this weekend at the PC Show. i’m still not sure which netbook I’ll be buying but I know that at least I will start to blog more often now. =)
Back to my topic…..
I was still using Wordpress 2.7 and didn’t bother to update to the latest versions all this while. On Sunday, I got an email saying Password Lost and Changed for user: Dr.s4udi . My user name is not Dr.s4udi . As soon as I read that email, I tried to log in but couldn’t . Even the password retrieval wasn’t working due to the email address was also changed to another one. The good thing is that I could still log in my cpanel and went to my database to see what changes have been made.
Here is what I saw in phpMyadmin under wp_users table:

By now, I have already changed the user name, email address and the hashed password to my own but I still wonder how the hacker managed to do that. I have updated my blog to the latest wordpress 2.9.2 version now and just made a new backup of everything.
I have to activate a few plugins and make a few changes before everything will be running smoothly but I will keep that for another day. Going to bed soon.

If you have previously subscribed to my blog and have been getting email updates from me, please subscribe again using the feedburner email subscription link instead! The old subscription will no longer work by next week. I’m switching to feedburner. thanks.

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edited to add:
sorry for not replying to the comments. I haven’t been very well. Will reply soon.

xoxo

aline

I’ve been very busy during these past few days and my blog was also down. It didn’t really bother me because I was too busy to blog. Many thanks to those people who emailed me about my blog being down.
I just woke up (crazy party last night..) and the first thing I do is check my email. What do I see? A spam comment… This means that my blog is up once again! I’ll be updating later in the evening.

This morning, my sidebar was looking like this:

%BEG_OF_TITLE%Recent Comments%END_OF_TITLE% ?? Where did the Recent Comments title go??

I have no idea why it became like that. To solve this problem, go to
Setting- > Recent Comments–>Update Recent Comments Option .
The sidebar is back to normal now.
Wordpress 2.7 is finally out! hmm , should I upgrade to Wordpress 2.7? I’ve been looking at the recent posts in the wordpress forum and it seems that some people are having problems upgrading.

I upgraded my wordpress 2.3.3 to 2.6.3 yesterday. I love the new wordpress and I’m really looking forward to wordpress 2.7 which is supposed to be released in November. It’s the first time that I’ve gone so long without upgrading. The spam comments have accumulated and I haven’t deleted them yet. Right now, my wordpress dashboard is telling me that I have 8,503 comments awaiting moderation. Almost all of these are spam and I have to delete them. However, it might just happen that 1 or 2 of those comments are not spam so I’ll have a quick look at each page before I delete and hopefully it won’t take me too long to clear this mess.
I deleted everything. Deleting from the Comments page would take hours because I can only delete 20 comments at a time. I hence deleted directly from the database. It didn’t take long.

After my previous upgrade to wordpress 2.2.1, I didn’t upgrade my wordpress again.
This was what I saw each time I tried to access my blog or blog admin page during the past few days:

500 Internal Server Error

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@a-l-i-n-e.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.5 Server at www.a-l-i-n-e.com Port 80

I didn’t do anything at first because I was quite busy with my thesis but when I saw James online a few days later, I told him about the error. He told me that he would look into the matter and when I got back home yesterday, I saw the message he left for me on MSN.

(Quoted from our MSN conversation)
James said:
Regarding your WordPress installation, please have it upgraded. It stopped working because we upgraded to PHP5.

Indeed, after upgrading to the latest wordpress (version 2.3.2), my blog is now working fine. There are a few changes which I want to make here but I’ll leave that for next week when I’m done with my exams.

What did I learn from this?
Always upgrade when there’s a new version out.

I haven’t logged in my website cpanel since quite a while now. Here’s what I saw in my ‘Disk Space Usage’ page,

I don’t use that email address at all and therefore I was quite surprised to see that the mail folder took up the most space. I went to have a look. All the mails were junk mails. Arghhhhhh
I deleted everything.

wow, it’s been so long already?
I’m beginning to hate the wordress maintenance mode plugin. It’s just too easy to activate it and then put off updating for months. I think I activated the plugin in order to update to the wordpress 2.2 but then because many people were having trouble with that upgrade, I decided to wait for version 2.2.1 to come out instead and now, it’s finally out. The current theme is only temporary. I’m quite busy with my exams right now.

So how I am doing… ? I was so happily typing the above words that I actually forgot about my food poisoning. I’ve been quite miserable for one and a half weeks. No more seafood for me for a long time! I have to be very careful about what I eat until I recover completely. I need to get better by Friday 29th because it’s a BIG day for me. More about that later.