Inspired by a burst of intellectual energy (if not a physical one), and by this post, I went through and did the various work still to be done:

1. Disallowed crawling by search engines of the blog’s ~/wp-* directories.
2. The search.php issue is no longer of concern in the theme I use.
3. Made lots of blank home pages in ~/wp-content/plugins directory.
4. Removed “<?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” from my theme’s header.php file.
5. Considering limiting access to wp-admin directories to IP addresses, but need to figure work-based IP addresses.
6. Implemented Login Lockdown plugin (after inspecting the source code).
7. I already keep up on the version.
8. I already take regular backups.
9. Already use SSH and SFTP.
10. Set .htaccess to block access to wp-config.php.

P.S. Just put a line in my blog’s home directory’s .htaccess file:

Options -Indexes

To make the reCAPTCHA stuff more explicable, I finally figured out one place to put text that helps explain it.

In line 46 of recaptcha-wordpress-2.7/recaptcha.php, I replaced:

<div id="recaptcha-submit-btn-area"></div>

with:

<div id="recaptcha-submit-btn-area"><font size="2">Please enter the two words you see above in the blank text box and click submit to submit your comment.</font></div>

I’ve been moving files around at work and encrypting the ones that make sense to do so.

From Cryptonomicon, I understand that “radio games” roughly translates to “funkspiel” in German (partly because the radio on German submarines used to be called the “funkmaat”). I’ve been creating sized-just-right crypted logical drives/files with TrueCrypt, putting various big-ass compressed archive files in them and then mothballing them forever on reliable network-based storage in case my laptop goes tits up (note to my gender-balance obsessed friends - I say this in full awareness that I possess moobs, so I figure “tits up” is a gender neutral phrase).

What makes it even sillier is that the reliable storage in question is auto-compressed and TrueCrypt drives do not work in NTFS compressed files land (i.e. if the *.tc file itself is compressed), so when I copy the volumes over to the network storage, they automatically do not work while they’re sitting there but are easily reactivated by copying them back to or setting them back to being non-compressed. But since I plan to revive by copying them over first to non-compressed storage that’s all good too.

Anyway, there must be a funkspiel equivalent for cryptography.

With Dreamhost’s Goodies page, there were absolutely no problems, and I needn’t have worried about my plugins or themes or theme customizations following me (unlike last time).

I also upgraded my various plugins to current version. Easy peasy (though those took some SFTP and SSH action).

With even more hacking, I implemented the image overlay thing the Cutline authors did on their blog. This floats another image on top of the randomly changing header.

I also tweaked the vertical spacing in various header elements to make things look right. The only thing that’s really a hack is the Cutline guys’ deal where they hyperlink the floating image by hyperlinking random text associated with a particular region of the floating image, but they hide the actual text by left indenting it by -9999 pixels. Which took a little tinkering to figure out.

But I think I’m happy now with what I’ve got. Everything’s actually working and nothing looks like ass.

So maybe I should go to sleep so I can get up early tomorrow to clean the cat boxes and take out the trash.

I successfully implemented the “Totally Random Header Images for Cutline” feature, with a little hacking. I made my header images largely out of my own photos and completely out of freely available images, and I changed the cycling pool from 5 to 9. Almost everything went swimmingly, except that despite the fact that Cutline’s header images are 896×163 pixels, the sizing in the updated header.php the Cutline folks provided resize the images to 773×140 pixels… for no apparent reason. So I fixed that too.

However, even though I wanted to make a “Post” link that shows only if the user is one with author permissions, I didn’t get that to work at all. But that’s okay. I was just tinkering.

Okay, here’s where I catalog all the changes I made to get Cutline where I wanted it to be.

[Read more →]

Need to find the/enable the archives.

The Permalink to my Google Reader shared links is weirdly offset.

Other minor things wrong. But anyway. Cutline is a theme I found out about from an old co-worker/friend I rarely talk to named Greg Meyer. I think the theme is quite lovely and suited to my purposes (I got tired of very narrow column widths on my widescreen laptop). I shall tweak it and fix it up tomorrow. Now is bedtime.

At least I got the tags back, though I think I want to edit the way the “tag cloud” is presented. Tally ho.

Looks like it’s something that the recent upgrade did. Since I plan to install a new theme and it’s not something I can do from work today (on the internal network, using FTP and telnet isn’t allowed, and connecting to the external wireless is awkward), I’ll punt that until later. For now all “tags” will in fact be the Wordpress categories I use to control how the crossposting code works, and the tag cloud is missing. I’ll get them back after I install the new theme.

Via Dreamhost One-Click installs interface.