Jun 28

Help! My WordPress Website has Bieber Fever!

Bieber 4ever!

My website has Bieber Fever!

“Help, my WordPress website is randomly redirecting to a Justin Bieber video!”

Have no fear, citizens of Netropolis! Your website has contracted a case of Bieber Fever, but we can cure it in a few simple steps. But first…. how was Bieber Fever passed to your site? Did The Bieb bless it with his presence? Was your WordPress site hacked by a malevolent fangirl?

Fortunately, its something a lot simpler than either of those things. It seems that some script authors with a sense of humor have caused pirated versions of their scripts to randomly redirect to a video of Justin Bieber falling flat on his face. I must admit if I wrote software I might do the same thing! How do you fix this?

How to cure Bieber Fever on your WordPress site:

There are two methods. The first assumes that you have shell access to your web hosting account.

At a command prompt paste in the following command:

 grep "http://spamcheckr.com/l.php" * -Rl

That will search all of your WordPress files for that URL of http://spamcheckr.com/l.php and show you which files contain it. Go ahead and click the link… if you dare. You don’t want to get Bieber Fever now!

Here were the results for an infected site:

wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/includes/settings.php

By this, we can tell that the gravityforms plugin is responsible for the Fever of Bieber. The solution? Remove the plugin and replace it with a legit (paid for, or at least, straight from its author) version.

We mentioned another possibility for figuring this out. You’ll need to download all of your WordPress wp-content/plugins folder to your local computer, and then use a program such as Notepad++ to search within the files for the offending URL of http://spamcheckr.com/l.php. It’ll show you which file contains that URL, and you’ll know which plugin is responsible.

So there you have it. Bieber Fever cured, and we didn’t even have to resort to bloodletting. Enjoy!

Jun 25

4 months and 4 days: Back in the saddle

HELLLLLOOOOoooooooOOOOooo!!!Hi there. So uh… yeah. Did you miss me? Hello, Internet. Over here! Yes. Hi.

So what the heck happened? Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I was being a good blogger and posting frequently… sort of.. and one day I checked my stats and Google decided that my site wasn’t very interesting. My search traffic dropped to almost nothing. A lot of This Sites traffic comes from searches, and so readership dropped too. I was heartbroken, really.

I talked it over with a guy I work with who knows a thing or two about SEO and he recommended some changes. I implemented about 2 of them (there were a lot) and this is what happened.

 

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It was like SEO CPR. The biggest one was changing to YOAST SEO plugin for WordPress. The rest… well more on that in another post.

 

So now that my site is breathing again you’re bound to hear from me more often. Coming up Very Soon, we’ll talk about what do do if your WordPress website gets a case of Beiber Fever.

Feb 21

Book Review: “I am AWAKE” by Fisher Samuels

I am AWAKE by Fisher Samuels“I am AWAKE” —- “John Watson, PhD student, husband and father to be, struggles to keep his research and career goals on track as he discovers strange anomalies in his artificial intelligence system. As his fledgling expert system grows capable of autonomously navigating, understanding and interacting with the Internet, his dreams begin to unravel when the system becomes targeted by malicious hackers, greedy corporations and someone inside the university. John and his expecting wife Sarah must protect their future as his research professor, Dr. Max Jeffries, threatens to pull the plug on a decade of work when the system begins behaving in ways that John can’t quite fully explain. “

Its fair to say that I am probably right smack in the middle of the target audience of the book “I am AWAKE.” I’m a dyed in the wool geek in his late 30’s, and IT professional since my teens. One thing I’m not though is a programmer. The book spoke about programming very lightly, “coding” as it is called among programmers. But it’s very light on technical details, which I was quite glad for. If I wanted those, I’d be picking up a different kind of book, most likely with a camel or llama on the front. While a bit more technical than your average mystery thriller, the areas it touched on were not overwhelming, and to be blunt if someone didn’t understand them, they would be able to infer their meaning from context. The most important parts of the story were non-technical in nature for the most part. Even contextual idea of the subject would be enough to allow someone to keep going and still enjoy the story. And enjoy the story I did!

John Watson is very likable and easy going. He is also a consummate geek; so much so that I encouraged my wife to read the book because it so well describes what it’s like! I felt an immediate camaraderie with the character, and was able to relate to his emotions and fears easily. The story had some very good twists, turns, and delights. The end came, and I was quite satisfied with how it all turned out. I am very much looking forward to Mr. Samuels’ next book!

Check out this book at Amazon